What longings after freedom took possession of his breast, and how his misery augmented, in proportion as he grew reflective and intelligent,--thus demonstrating that a happy slave is an extinct man!

Frederick Douglass, 1845
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass from Project Gutenberg.

     Happy birthday to us! We don't get many opportunities to pat ourselves on the back, so we like to take a little trip down memory lane once a year to jog our own memories and remind everybody of what the internet was like back in 1992. Some of these sites look a little funny to our 2003 sensibilities, but they were all significant events in the development of ibiblio and of the internet in general, and we're proud to host them.

• World Music Central-An interactive site dedicated to music of the world in all its forms.
• The Internet Encyclopedia-A project to create a universal open content encyclopedia written in American English.
• The Common Sense Foundation-The Common Sense Foundation is a North Carolina non-partisan public policy organization with the primary goal of ensuring that state government and the political process attend to the interrelated economic, political, social, and cultural needs of those who are systematically denied access to power.
• Librarian.net-An informational site hosted by the editor of Revolting Librarians Redux.

• The Open Source Cookbook-Recipes by (and for) the Linux geek in you.
• North Carolina Independent Media Center-The NC-IMC is an non-corporate, anti-authoritarian collective of North Carolina independent media makers and media outlets, and serves as the local organizing unit of the global Indymedia network.
• Etree.org-A jamband-oriented community network which facilitates the trading of audio files and musical information.
• Fela Kuti-An excellent multimedia site dedicated to the late Nigerian composer and activist.

• Excavating Occaneechi Town: Archaeology of an Eighteenth-Century Indian Village-An attempt to recreate the complexity of an archeological dig on the web.
• Open Book Project-Encourages and coordinates collaboration among students and teachers for the development of high quality, freely distributable textbooks and educational materials on a wide range of topics, including electrical circuitry and computer science.
• Online Burma Library-Classified and annotated links to more than 5000 full text documents on Burma/Myanmar.
• Open Photo- An experiment in digital photography, open-source programming and licensing.
• Degree Confluence-An excellent example of distributed knowledge sharing. The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location.

• metaLab becomes ibiblio
• Goldband Records-This is a multi-format collection of materials from the Goldband Recording Corporation, maintained by the Southern Folklife Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

• Shree Ram Sharnam -One of the best examples of the sites hosted by ibiblio dealing with spiritual issues.

• SunSITE becomes metaLab - a history

• Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy-ibiblio has long been supportive of international organizations, and this is one of the best examples. TCHRD is the first Tibetan non-governmental organization (NGO) to be formed with the goal of protecting and promoting human rights of the Tibetan people. His Holiness the XIVth Dalai Lama of Tibet is the patron of TCHRD.
• HyperWar-A collection of military history primarily related to the Second World War, but also including American history of the 17th thru 21st centuries.
• Roger McGuinn's FolkDen-One of the most respected figures in rock history, Mr. McGuinn offers up a new interpretation of a classic folk song once a month, with the archive of material approaching 100 songs.

• Documenting the American South-DAS is one of the most significant electronic collections of sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the 20th century. It is sponsored by the Academic Affairs Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
• Cafe au Lait -Noted author Elliotte Rusty Harold maintains this richly informative Java site, as well as another site devoted to XML.

• Henriette's Herbal Homepage-The definitive web resource for all things herbal.
• Philm Freax Digital Archives-An amazing collection of the photographic work of Phil Franks, including his rocknroll work from the late 1960's.
• UNC Press-The web site of the award-winning University of North Carolina press.

• WebMuseum-A virtual art museum. Still one of our most popular collections!
• Dr Fun-Doctor Fun first appeared on the Internet in 1993, and has the distinction of being the first web cartoon.
• Virtual Shtetl-Jewish language, education and cultural resources, online since 1994.
• WXYC-The highly acclaimed University of North Carolina radio station was the first in the world to offer a live Internet simulcast of an on-air signal when they did it on November 7, 1994. You can still hear them stream here at ibiblio.

• The Clinton White House Archives-One of the more significant collections from an extensive archive of United States political materials from the Clinton era.
• Expo-An early cross-disciplinary online exhibit featuring information gathered from the Library of C ongress, including sections dedicated to the the Vatican, Soviet Archives, paleontology, the Dead Sea Scrolls and more.

• The proposal to create SunSITE (which became Metalab which became ibiblio!)-The note from UNC to Sun Microsystems in January of 1992 that started it all.
• Linux archive-Our current gateway to the Linux software distributions, which we began hosting back in the day.
• Project Gutenberg -Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, hosted at ibiblio for over a decade.
• Presidential Archives-The National Public Telecomputing Network had been looking at ways in which this "new" medium of telecomputing could be used to enhance the democratic process, and the presidential archives were one node of their experimental network. These files are the full-text of all the major position papers, speeches, press releases, and other documents which defined and illuminated the major candidates for President of the United States in the 1992 election.
  Click for more details on the presidential archives project.