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ibiblio celebrates 12 years in October
Oct. 6, 2004 — ibiblio, the public's library and digital archive, celebrates its 12th birthday in the month of October.
ibiblio, a collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Center for the Public Domain, has been a vehicle for knowledge sharing since 1992, first as an original Sun Microsystems SunSITE, then as Metalab, finally resting on the ibiblio name in 2000. ibiblio is a free and vibrant exchange of ideas among a large community of contributors who share their knowledge across disciplines. It is one of the major distribution hubs for Linux software and has been a significant supporter of Linux development efforts since its inception.
During the month of October, the main ibiblio page will feature links to some of the longest-lived collections including Project Gutenberg, the Web Museum and many others.
As ibiblio enters its second decade of service to the internet community, it continues to be one of the strongest voices advocating for freedom and openness on the Net. The evolving Internet has created new opportunities to share knowledge, and ibiblio has continually supported those efforts by hosting open source software initiatives and by providing space for non-commercial web sites, which further scholarship and utilize technology in innovative and unique ways.
Imagine being able to walk into your local library and view on demand and without charge music and poetry archives, works by African-American authors, sports statistics, Italian literature, large text database projects, software archives and much more. ibiblio is the place where this happens. The average municipal public library receives a few hundred visitors a week. ibiblio.org averages 10 million information requests per day, and the contributor-maintained collections are continually expanding.
People in China studying American poetry or folk music can access ibiblio.org and find a vast collection of poems or songs. They can listen to the performances of musical artists, read their biographies, download their sheet music and submit their own research papers to the collection. A veteran of World War II from anywhere in the world can access and contribute to the Pearl Harbor archives. Most significantly, patrons can submit their own contributions to the ongoing international dialog of shared knowledge. Building on the open source software development model, ibiblio encourages users to help shape the way information is managed and accessed in the 21st century.
Contact: webmaster@ibiblio.org