Institute of Network Cultures, ISBN 978-9083328287, English, 155 pages, 2024, The Netherlands

There is a lively and vibrant underground scene around the world of people digitising publications and other analogue material, and sharing the files in different ways. This scene is made by the famous shadow libraries, maintained by the efforts of a handful of people, but also unofficially by librarians, supporting the retrieval and sharing of knowledge (which is supposed to be their mission) on various levels. These ‘custodians’ are targeting specific, usually small, collections, often from a recent past, which have served a particular community by preserving its cultural inventions, events, and discourses. In Archiving Activism in the Digital Age we can find a mix between technical and strategical discourses, and pragmatically explained international case studies, in more or less each chapter, with a specific focus on initiatives in more problematic areas of the world. The independency of the single efforts and the ability to share knowledge, techniques and materials, make this scene remarkable. The communities behind these projects, sometimes with a bridge to the official librarian world, concretise the reality of the ‘autonomous’ archives, and the inspiring possibility to network them altogether, with the challenge of doing it off the major internet players’ platforms, should be embraced as much and as soon as possible.