Volunteering & Bounties
Anna’s Archive relies on volunteers like you. We welcome all commitment levels, and have two main categories of help we’re looking for:
- Light volunteering work: if you can only spare a few hours here and there, there are still plenty of ways you can help out. We reward consistent volunteers with 🤝 memberships to Anna’s Archive.
- Heavy volunteering work (USD$50-USD$5,000 bounties): if you’re able to dedicate lots of time and/or resources to our mission, we’d love to work more closely with you. Eventually you can join the inner team. Though we have a tight budget, we’re able to award 💰 monetary bounties for the most intense work.
If you’re unable to volunteer your time, you can still help us a lot by donating money, seeding our torrents, uploading books, or telling your friends about Anna’s Archive.
Companies: we offer high-speed direct access to our collections in exchange for enterprise-level donation or exchange for new collections (e.g. new scans, OCR’ed datasets, enriching our data). Contact us if this is you. See also our LLM page.
Light volunteering §
If you have a few hours to spare, you can help out in a number of ways. Be sure to join the volunteers chat on Telegram. We now also have a synced Matrix channel at #annas:archivecommunication.org.
As a token of appreciation, we typically give out 6 months of “Lucky Librarian” for basic milestones, and more for continued volunteering work. All milestones require high quality work — sloppy work hurts us more than it helps and we’ll reject it. Please email us when you reach a milestone.
| Task | Milestone |
|---|---|
| Spreading the word of Anna’s Archive. For example, by recommending books on AA, linking to our blog posts, or generally directing people to our website. | 30 links or screenshots. These should show you letting someone know about Anna’s Archive, and them thanking you. |
| Improve metadata by linking with Open Library. | 30 links of records you improved. |
| Translating the website. | Fully translate a language (if it wasn’t close to completion already.) |
| Improve the Wikipedia page for Anna’s Archive in your language. Include information from AA’s Wikipedia page in other languages, and from our website and blog. Add references to AA on other relevant pages. | Link to edit history showing you made significant contributions. |
| Fulfilling book (or paper, etc) requests on the Z-Library or the Library Genesis forums. We don’t have our own book request system, but we mirror those libraries, so making them better makes Anna’s Archive better too. | 10 links or screenshots of requests you fulfilled. |
| Small tasks posted on our volunteers chat on Telegram. Usually for membership, sometimes for small bounties. | Depends on the task. |
Bounties §
We’re always looking for people with solid programming or offensive security skills to get involved. You can make a serious dent in preserving humanity’s legacy.
As a thank you, we give away membership for solid contributions. As a huge thank you, we give away monetary bounties for particularly important and difficult tasks. This shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement for a job, but it is an extra incentive and can help with incurred costs.
Most of our code is open source, and we’ll ask that of your code as well when awarding the bounty. There are some exceptions which we can discuss on an individual basis.
Bounties are awarded to the first person to complete a task. Feel free to comment on a bounty ticket to let others know you’re working on something, so others can hold off or contact you to team up. But be aware that others are still free to work on it also and try to beat you to it. However, we do not award bounties for sloppy work. If two high quality submissions are made close to each other (within a day or two), we might choose to award bounties to both, at our discretion, for example 100% for the fist submission and 50% for the second submission (so 150% total).
For the larger bounties (especially scraping bounties), please contact us when you’ve completed ~5% of it, and you’re confident that your method will scale to the full milestone. You will have to share your method with us so we can give feedback. Also, this way we can decide what to do if there are multiple people getting close to a bounty, such as potentially awarding it to multiple people, encouraging people to team up, etc.
WARNING: the high-bounty tasks are difficult — it might be wise to start with easier ones.
Go to our Gitlab issues list and sort by “Label priority”. This shows roughly the order of tasks we care about. Tasks without explicit bounties are still eligible for membership, especially those marked “Accepted” and “Anna’s favorite”. You might want to start with a “Starter project”.