Digital Library

To access the catalogue and to search for digitised documents, please use our Search function.

In order to make the materials held at the Sparrows’ Nest easily accessible, we have been digitising materials since the early 2010s. Please note that the digitised materials are but the tip of the iceberg, materials continue to keep coming in much faster than we can catalogue (let alone scan!) them, so if you cannot find what you are looking for, please get in touch, we may well have a copy.

We continue to add materials to our Digital Library and will also update our collection in the Internet Archive. To make sure you are being kept up to date, please get in touch to be added to our (low traffic) mailing list.

We are always happy for users' suggestions which documents to digitise next, so if you have any proposals, please contact us.

Of course, we can only do what we do because people donate their stuff to us. So if you have any materials or if know anyone who has any documents which might be of interest, please do not chuck them out, but get in touch with us!

Content and trigger warning

Most materials in our collections offer awesome and inspiring content, but you may encounter historical materials which are not anarchist/left-libertarian/anti-authoritarian. Furthermore some materials contain triggering content which is racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, nationalistic, anti-Semitic, ableist, ageist, or otherwise not representative of the movement. Also be aware that some of the materials contain sexually explicit content and/or depictions and descriptions of physical and psychological abuse, sexual violence, etc. If you wish to access information but do not want to take the risk of being exposed to potentially triggering and/or traumatising content, please do not hesitate to get in touch, we will be happy to assist you as much as possible.

Freedom is an anarchist newspaper published by Freedom Press since 1886. Please see below a list of all issues of Freedom that have already been uploaded to our Digital Library.

We are currently (late 2023) in the process of digitising our complete collections of Freedom. Please watch this space as there is more to come over the next few months.

The quality of the scans is as good as we can achieve with our current equipment/software. There were some challenges resulting in some warped and/or skewiff pages that could not be avoided, but all should be very comfortably readable. All issues feature good quality OCR. Any problems, dead links etc, please get in touch.

This time we want to put the spotlight on records documenting the campaigns against the Poll Tax in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

 

In 1984, the organisation then known as the Anarchist Communist Federation began to publish a magazine entitled Virus, which ran for 13 issues before being continued as Organise! from 1989.

This time we are putting our spotlight on some of the many independent local newspapers, bulletins, etc. that were produced in Nottingham over the last five decades.

Given the recent 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, we decided to put our spotlight on some of the many documents in our collections documenting LGBTQ+ history in Nottingham.

  1. Spotlight on: Anarchy Journals (First and Second Series)