The RFAC Project.

The Job...

RFAC is engaged in making available online texts that are useful to the development and intellectual consolidation of organisations in the international socialist tradition. Making useful readings available for reading and discussion groups, for the education of members is an important and basic task.

The availability of many classic texts has been patchy in recent years, and has only slightly improved by the Haymarket Books reprinting of books, such as Volume 1 of Cliff's Lenin (available here) and Revolutionary Rehearsals. While much material is still available from Bookmarks, prices have risen substantially, aided by the terrible exchange rate between countries like Australia and Britain.

All of this suggests a serious effort to make important texts from the international socialist tradition available online.

Australian material in the IS tradition has always been restricted by the limited print runs that have always been done. Much literature that has been produced is forgotten and in some cases virtually lost. As much of this is useful, both from the point of view of providing new revolutionaries with a Marxist education, and from the point of view of understanding the history and origins of the contemporary IS-style organisations, an effort to archive it and make it more widely available is also justified.

So the core RFAC project is to make available online (in more or less priority order):

1. Readings for current reading groups and educationals.
2. Other material requested by active revolutionaries.
3. The entire content of the Socialist Review (Aus.)
4. The literature produced by Australian IS-style organisations.
5. Other IS literature that is not available online.

The Technical Side

The bulk of the documents we aim to archive are only available in hard-copy. That is, they are available only as books, pamphlets or photocopies. This means that transcribing the texts into some digital format is one of the principal tasks. While this can be accomplished by hand (by painstakingly retyping the document) it is more efficient to use scanners and OCR software. This relies on computer algorithms to translate images of the pages that are scanned in to an editable document (such as a text or Microsoft Word document).

Either way, these "raw scanned" documents then need to be edited for errors in the OCR process, proof read, have the footnotes checked over and re-entered, be reformatted using our template, and then put online.

At present the site is a mishmash of different formats, but documents are mainly available in Microsoft Word format (principally to preserve formatting and therefore make printing easier). Over time we aim to make all texts stored on-site available in HTML, Word and PDF format. This means that there is further work in transferring the documents currently available in Word into HTML and PDF.

We need Volunteers...

To be able to make any systematic attempt at satisfying our objectives, we need volunteers to do scanning/OCR work, editing, and making documents available in multiple formats.

If you support the objectives, have a scanner or some time, please contact us and volunteer.