[1] According to anarchist librarian Chuck Munson, the library was begun as Spunk Press in 1992.
[2] The founding contributors – Ian Heavens, Jack Jansen, Andrew Flood, Iain McKay and Practical Anarchy editors Munson and Mikael Cardell – originally met via an online forum, namely Jansen's Anarchy Discussion email list.
[4] By 1995, it was already the largest anarchist archive of published material catalogued on computer networks, though it faced a media assault accusing it of collaborating with terrorists such as the Red Army Faction, of providing instructions for bomb-making and of coordinating the “disruption of schools, looting of shops and attacks on multinational firms.”[5][6] The Library remained largely inactive during the first decade of the 2000's, with the home page last being updated in March 2002.
[7] The Rough Guide to the Internet described the Library as being "organized neatly and with reassuring authority".
[4] Chris Atton, writing in Alternative Media (2002) hailed the site as an "advertisement for socially responsible anarchism with a significant intellectual pedigree", remarking that "[i]n a world where anarchism is still largely derided or maligned by the mass media, that is an important function" and drawing a comparison to Infoshop.org.