The EServer is an open access electronic publishing cooperative, founded in 1990,[1] which publishes writings in the arts and humanities free of charge to Internet readers. In 2006, it was rated by Alexa as the most popular arts and humanities website in the world.[2] As of 2005, the EServer published more than 32,000 works.[1] In December 2006 it hosted approximately 66,000 readers per day (two million per month).[3]
Martha L. Brogan and Daphnée Rentfrow wrote in 2005 that it has "more than 200 active members, including editors of an eclectic mix of 45 discrete 'collections' (Web sites), which 'publish' more than 32,000 works."[1]Duke University Library rates the EServer among the "best overall directories for literary information on the Web."[4]
Scope of collection
The EServer publishes written works in the arts and humanities, largely (but not exclusively) those from the Western cultural tradition. In addition to literature such as poetry, novels, drama and short stories, the EServer publishes seven scholarly journals. Most releases are in English, but there are also significant numbers in many other languages. Whenever possible, EServer publications are released in open standards, such as XHTML.
eXtensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) is part of the family of XML markup languages. It mirrors or extends versions of the widely used HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the language in which Web pages are formulated.
History
The EServer, 1996
The EServer was founded in 1990, when a group of graduate students set up their office computer in "Trailer H" on the Carnegie Mellon University campus network to permit them to collaborate with one another. In 1991, with the addition of more disk space, it became an Internet network server designed to provide public access (via FTP, telnet and Gopher to literary research, criticism, novels, and writings from various humanities disciplines.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools, the university became the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, the Carnegie Institute of Technology merged with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research to form Carnegie Mellon University. With its main campus located 3 miles (5 km) from Downtown Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon has grown into an international university with over a dozen degree-granting locations in six continents, including campuses in Qatar and Silicon Valley, and more than 20 research partnerships.
Telnet is an application protocol used on the Internet or local area network to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection. User data is interspersed in-band with Telnet control information in an 8-bit byte oriented data connection over the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP).
The Gopher protocol is a communications protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.
The site, originally called the English Server, was dedicated to publishing works in the arts and humanities free of charge to Internet readers. It was developed to assist leisure reading in particular, following a study by Geoffrey Sauer (the site's director) into the rapid and significant increase of books in the United States post-1979 and a consequent decrease in leisure readings among young Americans. By 1992 it was an extremely popular Gopher and FTP site, and by 1993 had a significant World Wide Web presence.
Geoffrey Sauer is an American new media theorist who researches technologies including open source software and collaborative multimedia development in the context of the history of publishing. He is the director of the open-access electronic text archive the EServer, an electronic text archive, which was, according to Alexa, the most popular website in the arts and humanities in 2007. He is the director of the Studio for New Media at Iowa State University, as well as an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Professional Communication in the Department of English at ISU.
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators, which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet. The resources of the WWW may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser.
Its original Internet domain name was "english-server.hss.cmu.edu", which later became "english-www.hss.cmu.edu", then "english.hss.cmu.edu", then "eng.hss.cmu.edu". In the years since, the name was shortened to "eserver.org", and it is usually referred to as "EServer."
Ideals
Contemporary publishing tend to place highest value on works that sell to broad markets. Quick turnover, high-visibility marketing campaigns for bestsellers, and corporate "superstore" bookstores have all made it less common for unique and older texts to be published. Geoffrey Sauer has argued that the costs this marketing adds to all books discourage people from leisure reading as a common practice. Publishers, he argues, then tend to encourage authors to write books with strong appeal to the current, undermining (if unknowingly) writings with longer-term implications.[5]
Criticism
The EServer was described in 2005 as linking to works of varied origin and quality.[1] It was described in July 2006 as having some broken links and some out-of-date collections.[6]
Copyright for the texts and collections published on the EServer are held by their authors, with rare exception for works commissioned by the EServer itself. Some of the texts are published under Creative Commons licenses, though many are distributed under an older model, which preserves the copyright in the author but permits reading and linking but not redistribution, except under specific limited conditions.
arXiv is a repository of electronic preprints approved for posting after moderation, but not full peer review. It consists of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, astronomy, electrical engineering, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, mathematical finance and economics, which can be accessed online. In many fields of mathematics and physics, almost all scientific papers are self-archived on the arXiv repository. Begun on August 14, 1991, arXiv.org passed the half-million-article milestone on October 3, 2008, and had hit a million by the end of 2014. By October 2016 the submission rate had grown to more than 10,000 per month.
Brewster Kahle is an American computer engineer, Internet entrepreneur, internet activist, advocate of universal access to all knowledge, and digital librarian. Kahle founded the Internet Archive and Alexa. In 2012 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
ibiblio is a "collection of collections," and hosts a diverse range of publicly available information and open source content, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics, and cultural studies. As an "Internet librarianship," ibiblio is a digital library and archive project. It is run by the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with partners including the Center for the Public Domain, IBM, and SourceForge. It also offers streaming audio radio stations. In November 1994 it started the first internet radio stream by rebroadcasting WXYC, the UNC student-run radio station. It also takes credit for the first non-commercial IPv6 / Internet2 radio stream. Unless otherwise specified, all material on ibiblio is assumed to be in the public domain.
Alexa Internet, Inc. is an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) combines an online encyclopedia of philosophy with peer-reviewed publication of original papers in philosophy, freely accessible to Internet users. It is maintained by Stanford University. Each entry is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from many academic institutions worldwide. Authors contributing to the encyclopedia give Stanford University the permission to publish the articles, but retain the copyright to those articles.
The Free Dictionary is an American online dictionary and encyclopedia that gathers information from a variety of sources.
John Mark Ockerbloom is a digital library architect and planner in the library science field. Formerly at Carnegie Mellon University, from which he earned a PhD in computer science, he now works for the University of Pennsylvania. He is the editor of The Online Books Page, which lists over two million books including project Gutenberg titles, all of which are freely available for reading online or by download.
The Religious Tract Society, founded 1799, 56 Paternoster Row and 65 St. Paul's Chuchyard and 164 Piccadilly, was the original name of a major British publisher of tracts of Christian literature intended initially for evangelism, and including literature aimed at children, women, and the poor.
Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. It has been funded in part by grants from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Open Library provides online access to many public domain and out-of-print books.
The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) is a nonprofit organization "established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature".
Bad Subjects is a research collaborative that operates generally out of California as part of the open access electronic publishing cooperative EServer.org. Together, the collaborative creates and publishes an online zine of cultural and political criticism to promote public education about the political implications of everyday life. It was founded at UC Berkeley in September 1992 as a collection of leftist critiques of popular culture written by college students and published as a Gopher service. Bad Subjects may be the longest continuously-running publication on the internet.
Henry Holt and Company is an American book publishing company based in New York City. One of the oldest publishers in the United States, it was founded in 1866 by Henry Holt and Frederick Leypoldt. Currently, the company publishes in the fields of American and international fiction, biography, history and politics, science, psychology, and health, as well as books for children's literature. In the US, it operates under Macmillan Publishers.
An Collins is an English poet, and the otherwise unknown author credited with the authorship of Divine Songs and Meditacions, a collection of poems and prose meditations published in 1653.
A classic is a book accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy, for example through an imprimatur such as being listed in a list of great books, or through a reader's personal opinion. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature from all traditions, such as the Chinese classics or the Indian Vedas.
Bucknell University Press (BUP) was founded in 1968 as part of a consortium operated by Associated University Presses and is currently partnered with Rowman & Littlefield. Since then it has published more than 1,000 titles in the humanities and social and biological sciences. The first title was published in 1969.
Geoffrey Galt Harpham is an American academic who until recently served as President and Director of the National Humanities Center. One of the characteristics of his tenure was the encouragement of dialogue between the humanities on the one hand and the natural and social sciences on the other. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University and also a Life Member of Clare Hall at the University of Cambridge. He is in addition a member of the Board of Visitors of Ralston College.
Charles J. Henry is President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), located in Washington, D. C. Prior to that he served as Vice Provost and University Librarian at Rice University, where he also served as Vice President and Chief Information Officer for several years.
Wendy Arons is an American dramaturg, drama professor, and critic who specializes in ecodrama and German translation. She is currently a Professor of Dramatic Literature in the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. She has written and edited many pieces for journals and is the author of the book "Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing: The Impossible Act" (2006).
The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arxiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
