Marx/Engels WWW Archive -- REMOVED (06/16/1995)
e-mail to IWW news


Date: 16 Jun 1995 11:58:15
From: zodiac@gold.interlog.com
To: Recipients of conference (iww-news@igc.apc.org)
Subject: Marx/Engels WWW Archive -- REMOVED

Hi...

This is a note, for those who notice the M/E Archive, both gopher and WWW
version, is now gone. It has been disabled, at least temporarily, by the
computer administrators at the University of Colorado.

The M/E Library has been around for coming on two years or so. It was given
life through the generosity of some elements at the University of Colorado,
allowing me to store in a handy place all the ascii texts of M/E works I was
uploading to netnews and lists. It is entirely the product of volunteer
effort. No Colorado money has ever gone into it -- except in providing some
disk space and bandwidth, for people to access it.

And people have accessed it. I have received email from people around the
world -- North America, South America, Europe, Russia, North Africa and
Australia. Students have found it valuable to be able to get copies of M/E
texts that are more obscure than Capital; and scholars and working people can
import these texts into word processes and do comprehensive searches of
subjects/words.

Recently, Fortune magazine mentioned the site -- in a slightly derogatory
manner, which is not unexpected. However, this has apparently brought the
site to the attention of various Colorado University elites. The site is now
down -- if only temporarily. Apparently Karl Marx is still a dangerous
man.  He's not politically correct in Republican states, at least.

To prevent anything like this ever happening again, I am interested in
setting up the archive in various mirror sites around the world.  Ideally, at
least one site in Europe, one in Australasia, and one in North America. That
way it takes the load off a single system and means it can never be censored
unilaterally.

I'd appreciate hearing from people with the resources to house such a thing.
One site would act as the "main site" at which M/E archivists would work,
while the mirror sites would simply run update programs every two weeks or
so. The site, since becoming WWWeb-ized, is naturally larger -- pix take up
space and bandwidth.

Thanks for listening.

Piping Marx & Engels into cyberspace,
Zodiac.