EServer.org
The EServer is an online publishing cooperative, founded in 1990, where 227 writers, artists, editors and scholars gather to publish works as open archives, available free of charge to readers. It hosts almost 35,000 works in 49 edited collections, each of which is run relatively autonomously, following only a set of common open content policies. The site is rated by Alexa.com as the most popular arts and humanities website[1] and today hosts approximately 66,000 readers per day (over two million per month).[2]
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.
History
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 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.
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."
Scope of Collection
Some of the notable scholarly journals hosted by the EServer include Bad Subjects, Cultronix, Cultural Logic, Early Modern Culture, The David Mamet Review, The Orange Journal, and Reconstruction.
Other significant resources organized by areas of interest include: The Antislavery Literature Project, The Drama Collection, The Electronic Labyrinth, Feminism and Women's Studies, Fiction, Poetry, Rhetoric and Composition, The Technical Communication Library, and The Thoreau Reader, among others.
A complete list of the forty-nine collections hosted by the EServer includes:
- About the EServer (complete documentation for joining/using the system)
- The Academy (miscellaneous resources for students and faculty)
- Antislavery Literature (the origins of multicultural literature in the U.S.)
- Art/Architecture (links to art, architecture, and aesthetic theory)
- Bad Subjects (political education for everyday life)
- Books (book-length nonfiction and miscellaneous literatures)
- Calls for Papers (calls for conference papers and journal articles)
- Course Management (websites for courses taught by EServer editors)
- Cultronix (a journal of contemporary art and cultural theory)
- Cultural Logic (an electronic journal of marxist theory and practice)
- Cultural Theory (readings in cultural studies and critical theory)
- Cyber Tech/Culture (discussing links between technology and culture)
- Drama (a collection of plays, modern works and classics)
- Early Modern Culture (works and discussions in Renaissance studies)
- Education (resources for both students and teachers)
- Eighteenth Century (a site for eighteenth-century cultural history)
- Electronic Labyrinth (a study of the implications of hypertext for writers)
- Feminism (select resources in feminism and women's studies)
- Fiction (novels and short fiction, classics and new works)
- Film & Television (works in film, television and other media studies)
- Gender/Sexuality (some resources on gender, sex and sexuality)
- Government (materials in government, law, and their social implications)
- Historic Preservation (the Ames, Iowa Historic Preservation Commission)
- History (works and links in history and historiography)
- Internet (resources about the internet: guides, essays and articles)
- Journals (links to academic journals and popular magazines)
- Languages (resources in language studies and theory)
- Lectures on Demand (audio and video recordings of scholarly presentations)
- Literary Events (events for any date from literature and the arts)
- The Mamet Review (the journal of the David Mamet Society)
- Marx & Engels (a collection of writings in economic and social theory)
- Marxist Literary Group (an organization to promote research in social/literary theory)
- Multimedia (a small collection of artwork, audio, graphics and video)
- Music (a vast collection of works in music and music theory)
- Nano Science/Tech (studying public representation of nanoscale science/technology)
- Orange Journal (a graduate student journal for technical communication)
- Philosophy (writings by modern and classical philosophers)
- Poetry (original and classic verse, literary and poetic theory)
- Race (materials on race and ethnicity in the U.S)
- Recipes (vegetarian recipes, and links to good related sites)
- Reconstruction (an online interdisciplinary culture studies community)
- Reference (select reference materials useful for research)
- Rhetoric (scholarly and pedagogical resources for rhetoricians)
- Software (freeware and shareware for your computer)
- Sparks (a publisher of fiction, poetry, music, art and spoken word)
- Sudden (original poetry that reflects imagination and intelligence)
- Tech Comm Library (a web portal for tech, sci and professional communication)
- Thoreau Reader (the works of American philosopher Henry D. Thoreau)
- Zine375 (writings about contemporary American life)
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. (Sauer 2000) The EServer attempts to provide an alternative niche for quality work, particularly writings in the arts and humanities. Now based at Iowa State University, it offers short and longer written works, hypertext and streaming audio and video recordings.
Copyright issues
Copyright for the texts and collections published on the EServer are held by their authors. The EServer does not charge its readers for access to our texts, and although contributions are always welcome, our site exists because of the volunteer labor of our writers, editors and administrative board. EServer equipment is maintained by grants and donations.
Notes
- ^ Alexa (December 2006). "Alexa:Sites in Humanities". Retrieved 2006-12-12.
- ^ EServer.org (December 2006). "EServer Recent Readership Data". Retrieved 2006-12-12.
Sauer, Geoffrey. "Community, Courseware and Intellectual Property Law." In Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action, and the Virtual University. Chris Werry and Miranda Mowbray, eds. New York: Prentice Hall, 2001.