Welcome to the Sparrows' Nest Library and Archive

Based in Nottingham (UK), we look after tens of thousands of books, journals, pamphlets, zines, leaflets, posters and other items documenting the anarchist movement in the UK and beyond, as well as local radical history. Browse our catalogue, access digitised records in our free Digital Library and get in touch to arrange a visit.
Advanced search (Alternatively, you can access parts of our Digital Library at the Internet Archive.)
Digital Library only

You may have noticed that we have massively expanded our catalogue and especially the Digital Library over the last couple of years. As we have now digitised large collections of long running papers, journals, magazines etc. we will start putting together articles dedicated to individual publications and subjects, shining a spotlight on some of these materials.

We hope this will be helpful to people accessing resources on our website. In a number of cases, Direct Action being a good example, the way databases like to process and display data does not help people much navigating a long list of titles and links, especially when it comes to these kind of publications, the ones that ran for many years, produced by different groups under similar but not quite the same titles, etc.

You can of course still access all the resources via a normal catalogue search, but as more and more results will pop up as we expand our Digital Library, we hope shining a spotlight on some of the highlights in our collections will help you using them.

We put together a list of the digitised copies of the first and second series of Anarchy as our first “Spotlight on: ...” feature. Although you can also find Anarchy (at least the first series) elsewhere, for a bunch of technical reasons this was a good test case for us to experiment with the idea. We will soon add "Spotlight on: ..." features for some of the materials you cannot anywhere else on that there internet.

Please feel free to offer suggestions on what information to include in these features and how to best display the information to make it as easy as possible for you to dive into the materials.

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