ARCHIVES: Unofficial archives of Presidential materials includes the
speech Bill Clinton gave at the 1992 Democratic Convention. Here is a
picture of him at the convention with his daughter, Chelsea.
ELVIS LIVES: The Unofficial Elvis site links to a film about Elvis, John Paul II and Princess Diana.
FREE BURMA: 'A slogan, a hope, a certain number of Web pages ... .'
THE SOUTH: Ibiblio has
electronic texts of many Southern-themed books, such as this about a
World War I aviator from North Carolina.
PLANTS: There are links to plant-related sites, including information about herbs and more than 4,000 photographs.
Director Paul Jones, right, leads a weekly meeting of the eight-person
ibiblio staff -- most are students -- in the group's offices in Manning
Hall at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
STAFF PHOTO BY HARRY LYNCH
DOCTOR FUN: The longest-running comic on the Web has been on ibiblio
since 1993. The strip is popular, but not commercial. Going commercial
gets you booted off ibiblio.
KEY EVENTS
1992: Sun Microsystems
and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill team up to launch
SunSite, the predecessor to ibiblio. Project Gutenberg, publisher of
electronic books, is launched.
1993: SunSite chosen as a depository for speeches, press briefings and other material from the Clinton administration
1994: Doctor Fun
cartoon; Free Burma human-rights site, and the Original Unofficial
Elvis Presley Web Site come to SunSite. WXYC Radio launches a live
Internet simulcast of its programming, one of the first in the world.
1995: North Carolina Multimedia Exhibition of Musicians and Entertainers launches on SunSite.
1996: Documenting the American South starts as a small effort to make some slave narratives available to the public.
1998: SunSite becomes
MetaLab -- in part because Sun quits its commitment to fund SunSite
going forward and in part to position the site to better take advantage
of support and donations from other technology companies.
2000: MetaLab becomes
ibiblio.org -- the name change comes with a grant from a nonprofit put
together by the founders of Red Hat.
2001: The White House
2001 project concludes and is posted as a site to ease the transition
between the Clinton and Bush administrations.
2002: Ibiblio turns 10 .
2003: The journey continues. See www.ibiblio.org for the latest.
By CHRISTINA DYRNESS, Staff Writer
CHAPEL HILL -- Surfing the ibiblio Web site is like having a
conversation with an eccentric intellectual with good intentions to
enlighten but little tact or organization.
Kudzu,
beekeeping, Tibet, astrobiology, poetry, folk music, Dutch vocabulary
words and, excuse me, what exactly is Pet Laundry? On top of
general-interest topics, ibiblio hosts a huge collection for the truly
tech-minded: resources and sites related to Linux, where dozens of
versions of the open-source computer operating system (from Red Hat to
VoodooLinux) can be downloaded by anyone with a modem.
In short, for average citizens and the tech-savvy alike, there is simply too much information to be absorbed in one sitting.
Welcome
to the Internet's oldest online archive and one of the largest. Housed
at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's campus, ibiblio (www.ibiblio.org)
fashions itself as the Internet's public library. It is free to visitors
and users of its hosting services -- thanks to backing from the
university, technology companies and private grants -- and exists
solely for the purpose of putting information into the public domain.
Last
year, the eclectic, electric morass celebrated 10 years online, raising
the question: What's next? The answer is more of the same -- and then
some.
"It's
really pushing the edge of where the libraries are going to be," says
JoAnn G. Marshall, dean of UNC's school of information and
library
science. "It's a contributor-run library. Instead of one kind of
library, we're going to have many different kinds of libraries, and
they're going to be created by the creators."
Fans of free information are fans of ibiblio.
"We
have the same philosophy," says Glenn Otis Brown, executive director of
Creative Commons, an ibiblio-hosted, California-based effort to add
flexibility to copyright law so that more information can be available
in the public domain. "There are so many people who rely on them as a
place to come for various kinds of materials."
It
would be impossible to explain ibiblio without talking to its founder
and fearless leader Paul Jones, whose meandering conversational style
and poster-studded, tchotchke-strewn office reflect ibiblio's spirit.
When someone comments on the eclectic nature of ibiblio, he's likely to
say, "That's kind of the point."
Jones'
home base, and that of the student-heavy ibiblio staff, is crammed into
a small office suite in UNC's Manning Hall, the home of the School of
Information and Library Science, which helps sponsor ibiblio along with
the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Jones is on the
faculties of both schools.
On
a recent morning, he gathered his flock -- the human brains of the
operation -- in the midst of the wall-less cubicles and desks studded
with flat-screen monitors and laptops. The brute strength of ibiblio is
yards away in the basement of Phillips Hall, where 10 servers take
advantage of the same access and 24-hour support and security that
protect the university's main computer networks.
The
meeting bounces around the room as the eight-person ibiblio staff --
most are students who pass through the office between classes -- catch
one another up on projects they're working on. The meeting is laced
with inside jokes and quick side discussions about technical topics
such as statistics and databases. When they get together, it becomes
clear that behind ibiblio's virtual public library facade is a
playground for geekdom.
Jones
opens by announcing something exciting: Ibiblio is angling to get a
treasure trove of new data from an open-source software foundation --
tens of gigabytes of data from code logs to e-mail lists.
"It's
fairly raw," Jones tells his people, who have rolled closer on office
chairs, some still tapping away on laptops. "But it would be cool to
figure out what their data tells us."
In
other words, a huge, new digital archive to study, organize and make
available to others. For a place that has spent the past decade doing
just that, it is, in Jones' words, "a gold mine."
Which brings up an important point. Ibiblio is all about free information, but it's also very much about free software.
Ibiblio
got its start in 1992 as SunSite. A press release that October
announces the official launch of SunSite, a joint project of UNC and
Sun Microsystems Computer, that "will act as a central repository for a
collection of public-domain software, shareware and other electronic
material such as research articles and electronic images."
Erik
Troan managed the Linux archive -- organizing submissions of
programming code and messages from hackers around the world -- from
1992 until 1995. "You have to remember that these were the days before
Web browsers were very popular," Troan says. "The Internet was a
different culture then."
Without
Web pages to bounce around on, Linux enthusiasts communicated solely
through e-mail lists and used ftp -- literally "file transfer protocol"
-- servers to move files around. SunSite was one of the first dedicated
ftp servers for public use.
"So
if the electronic mailing list was the community, SunSite was the book
shelf," says Troan, who is director of product marketing at
Raleigh-based Red Hat, the world's largest distributor of the Linux
operating system. It was "where you could get the latest code and play
with it."
Eric
S. Raymond, a respected voice in the Linux community and author of "The
New Hacker's Dictionary" ($24.95, MIT Press), took over management of
the archives for a time after Troan, one of Red Hat's first employees,
got too busy at work.
Raymond
suggests that although ibiblio was in the beginning a virtual center
for the open-source community, it since has ceded its position as the
keeper of the culture to other Web sites that have sprung up in recent
years.
"I
don't think it's as important as it once was. Sites with richer
metadata and more active content, such as SourceForge and Freshmeat and
Savannah, have become the center of the action," Raymond says. But
Raymond calls ibiblio a valuable archive. "I still submit my stuff
there as a hedge against the possibility that the newer sites might go
belly-up."
Jones
is quick to point out that ibiblio regularly partners with many of the
sites Raymond mentions but says that ibiblio's main goal with open
source has always been to offer access to the software and an archive
of its development.
And
ibiblio is hardly a boring backwater of the Web. Access data shows that
about 5 million visitors poke into its various corners every day,
whether to download a file, listen to one of five radio stations or
look at the latest installment of Doctor Fun -- a Far Side-esque
one-panel cartoon that pokes irreverent fun at topics that include
world politics and Bjork's swan dress.
Doctor
Fun says it has the distinction of being the longest-running comic on
the Web. David Farley, who draws the cartoon in Chicago where he
manages a tech-support group, says he moved Doctor Fun to ibiblio in
1993 and now gets close to 50,000 hits on his site a day.
Farley
once had a contract to make Doctor Fun commercial through United Media,
but the contract fell through, and he says he is happy sticking with
ibiblio.
But
the evolution of some popular ibiblio sites goes differently. If they
become commercial in any way -- selling T-shirts, posting banner ads,
taking a sponsorship from a corporation -- they get booted from the
system.
Ibiblio was the original home of the Internet Movie Database (now at www.imdb.com), the Internet Underground Music Archive (now www.iuma.com) and something called the Church of the SubGenius (now www.subgenius.com).
"Usually,
it started out as their hobby. They started doing some interesting work
and got people coming to their site," Jones explains. "Then they sold
some ads on there, or a couple of T-shirts. And we tell them, 'We don't
do that.' "
Ibiblio's
guidelines are pretty straightforward. Web sites with material of
interest to the public will be hosted for free as long as there is
nothing commercial about them. Thus, the Unofficial Elvis site, built
by Andrea Berman while she was procrastinating on her master's thesis
in 1994, coexists with the WebMuseum, built by Nicolas Picoh of France
who decided that same year that the Internet needed more artistic
content.
They
both share space with the Documenting the American South database, a
sprawling depository of slave narratives and Southern literature
assembled by the Academic Affairs library at UNC and launched in 1996.
In other words, from wacky to scholarly, ibiblio has hosted, and will
continue to host, it all.
When
the ibiblio name was unfurled in 2000 (at that time the site was going
by the name MetaLab), it came with a grant of $4 million from the
Center for the Public Domain that would help fuel an ambitious growth
plan. Started by Red Hat co-founders Bob Young and Marc Ewing in 1999,
the CPD called it quits in 2002. Ibiblio got half the money it was
promised.
These
days, ibiblio gets by on about $200,000 from UNC -- covering salaries
and office products -- and the remainder of the CPD grant, which Jones
says will last an additional four or five years. By then, Jones hopes
to set up an endowment that would generate the $250,000 a year in funds
he needs -- most of it goes to pay for bandwidth to handle the activity
ibiblio generates online -- beyond what the university provides.
Beyond
the money, Jones counts on technology grants from companies such as
IBM, which in 2000 committed to give $250,000 worth of equipment to
ibiblio. Jones says ibiblio collaborates with IBM on some research that
might be applied to future IBM products.
"We
share some research stuff with IBM. They're interested in self-healing
software, and we don't fail all that much," Jones says.
That's
what Jones likes about the IBM relationship: the research. That, and he
gets people such as David "Dr. Dave" Bradley, the IBM engineer famous
for inventing the PC-reboot Ctrl-Alt-Delete command, to come have lunch
with his "ibiblioans."
Jones
would like to see ibiblio share a lot more of its expertise with the
outside world, especially academia, in the future. For example, a paper
that uses ibiblio statistics to debunk a theory that older sites are
automatically more popular on the Web because they're more frequently
linked to will be presented by Miles Efron and Donald Sizemore, two
ibiblio staffers, at a conference on digital libraries in May.
Beyond
a learning bent, ibiblio will continue to grow as a digital library run
by its contributors armed with technology tools -- some honed over 10
years, some yet to be developed -- that allow them to put their
information out there in new ways for everyone to see.
UNC's Marshall doesn't apologize for ibiblio's eclectic nature, nor does she think it will ever really change.
"It's
experimental. It will never be a beautifully organized package,"
Marshall said. "Creative things are pretty messy, and they are always
going to be changing."
