I do not say freedom is the greatest of ALL goods: the best things come from within--they are such things as creative art, and love, and thought. Such things can be helped or hindered by political conditions, but not actually produced by them; and freedom is, both in itself and in its relation to these other goods the best thing that political and economic conditions can secure.

Bertrand Russell, 1918
Proposed Roads to Freedom 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. Our birthday this year has been made special because our partner Documenting the American South Project, has been awarded a 2005 National Leadership grant of over $500,000 by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

• VideoBloggers-A vlogosphere content aggregator and a participating project of the Open Vlog Consortium which offers free video hosting and blog publishing.
• Neoherbal-A website highlighting medicinal, culinary and aromatic herbs.
• Carolina Soul-The online home for discographies of 45-rpm soul recordings made in the Carolinas in the 1960s through 1980s.
• Guide to Japanese grammar-A guide to learning Japanese grammar licensed under the Creative Commons License.

• Groklaw-Groklaw is an open source legal research project maintained by Pamela Jones, a paralegal who tracks the SCO vs. IBM litigation. The site investigates SCO's litigations against IBM and Linux and provides legal research and which helps to clear the cloud of misinformation and confusion surrounding the case. The site contains commentary and links to all relevant court and SEC filings.
• A Box in My Mind: Deciphering the Enigma of Peru-A multimedia project on Peru and recipient of the John Hope Franklin Award.
• -The Poetry Project The mission of the Poetry Project is to compile biographical information on the most important contemporary poets in the world.
• Khawa Karpo-Tibet Culture Centre-Khawa Karpo Tibet Culture Centre (KTC) is a non-profit organization founded in 2003 by a group of Tibetans. It is home to the Tibet Express- a leading Tibetian fornightly newspaper.

• 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.
• 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 to that point

• 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.

• 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.