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DAVID HART'S WEBPAGE

“A REPORT ON CREATING AN ONLINE LIBRARY OF LIBERTY”
(21 April, 2000)

By David M. Hart

[Created: 21 April, 2000]
[Revised: 4 November, 2024]

This is part of a collection of Papers by David M. Hart

Introduction

Because this Report is 25 years old some of the links to websites are no longer current.

Table of Contents

 

 

I. A VISION OF WHAT WE WANT TO CREATE↩

It is my view that we should be aiming to create the classical liberal equivalent of the "Perseus Project" for the Classics, namely a "one stop shop" for anyone interested in liberty. What I am calling the "Liberty Online Project" would provide a comprehensive collection of texts for researchers and general readers, educational resources for faculty and students, and a means of communication to keep our friends informed of Liberty Fund activities and to encourage discussion of the texts and the ideas. Thus, it would combine the functions of a bookshop, a research library, and a newsletter. But it would be much more than this. The technology of the WWW makes it possible to combine these functions in a way which was not possible before and which is much more than the sum of its parts. All this is a result of the connectivity of the WWW - vast amounts of information can be stored on a computer (10,000s of books and images) which is connected to 100s of millions of other computers all over the world, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The possibilities for the dissemination of information (and ideas) to a huge world-wide audience are staggering. In my view, the Liberty Fund should be taking advantage of these new possibilities to carry out its mission.

As the commercial, academic and publishing world is becoming increasingly "wired" and as the content is becoming increasingly digital, a comprehensive website would provide an excellent opportunity for the Liberty Fund to increase its profile among its target audience of academics, intellectuals, students, and the broader public interested in the idea of liberty. A major web presence would enable the Liberty Fund to become the preferred destination for online inquiries via search engines for key words such as "liberty", "limited government", "constitutionalism", "private property", and the "free market". It is therefore important that those who format the online liberty texts do it in a way which facilitates the cataloguing of the website by various search engines.

One important aim of the Liberty Online Project should be to locate in one central place as many "texts" which deal with liberty as is technically and financially possible. At present, there is a growing and impressive number of e-texts about liberty already on the WWW. Academic and national libraries are rapidly digitising their holdings, among which are may important liberty classics. However these texts are scattered all over the world and are often hard to find (who would have thought the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris would have an electronic version of the 1737 4th edition of  Trenchard and Gordon's Cato's Letters and the 1698 edition of Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government available online in English?). The Liberty Online Project would provide a service to scholars and general readers by collecting as much material about liberty as possible and concentrating it in one place so that it can be read, searched, or downloaded with greater ease and convenience.

Having an online library of e-texts would also enable the Liberty Fund to continue its tradition of providing the best books about liberty, in the best design and layout possible, at a very reasonable cost. Over the past 5 years computer software has been developed which enables electronic facsimiles of the original text to be created (Adobe's Acrobat software). HTML, the language of web documents, has evolved to the point where online publishers can format an online text so it looks nearly as attractive as a printed book, and where they have some confidence that web browsers will replicate this design when viewing the text online (this has been made possible by style sheets). Once the initial cost of scanning the printed text or converting it to HTML has been made, the cost of storage and distribution of the text is very low.

Furthermore, technological advances in data storage mean that the Liberty Fund server could store 1,000s of books online. This means that not only could the entire back catalogue be put online but even more titles could be made available (the complete works of key authors could be added, as well as some of the lesser known or minor works of the classical liberal and conservative tradition). The fact that the Internet never sleeps means that these texts would never be out or stock or out of print and that they would be accessible at any time and by anybody who has a connection to the WWW. It is also possible now to fit a sizable library of texts on a single personal computer's hard drive or on a single CD-ROM. This opens up new opportunities for the distribution of texts. For example, individuals could browse and search the texts online, or they could download the text or texts they want from the Liberty Fund website, or they could order a copy of them on a CD-ROM, or they could order copies of the printed books (if they prefer to read them that way). Perhaps a selection of the most important liberty classics could be distributed free on CD-ROM to school and university libraries across the country or the English speaking world. The CD-ROM would contain links to the Liberty Fund website so that interested readers could delve more deeply into the subject.

Computer technology also means that scholars can use online texts differently from the way they use ordinary printed texts. A search engine on the Liberty Fund site allows readers to search the online text in very powerful ways. With printed texts, the reader finds their way around the text by using the table of contents, the index and by flipping through the pages. Online texts can be searched very quickly by key word, author's name, or title of book. When a key word is located, the number of occurrences of that key word are given, along with the surrounding text (about a paragraph or so), and a link back to the whole text. These searches are powerful and quick and dramatically improve the usefulness of the texts to readers. When searches can be conducted across a number of works by a particular author, or when uses of a word are compared between different authors, the online library begins to acquire very significant scholarly uses.

The flexibility of online texts means that they can be put to new and interesting uses. One such use would be to package groups of texts or extracts of texts into "anthologies" or "readers" which would of considerable use to faculty, students and the public who are interested in studying the history of political or economic thought, for example. The Liberty Fund website could contain a number of short outlines, bibliographies, or introductions to various topics, along with links to key extracts of the texts. This would provide an introduction to the topic for independent study or for use in college courses. Readers could then return, if they wished, to the Liberty Fund website to read the entire texts from which the extracts were taken.

The Liberty Fund website could also have an interactive component where visitors to the site could discuss what they have read, recommend other works to read, comment upon the implications of the ideas expressed in the texts, and so on. More formally organised online colloquia could be hosted where a well-known scholar or intellectual could present their views for discussion and debate online. More extensive use of email could be used to keep friends of the Liberty Fund informed of activities, especially the publication of new books (whether in printed or online format).

The possibilities for the dissemination and discussion of ideas about liberty opened up by the WWW are considerable and very exciting to contemplate. The Liberty Fund should expand its presence on the WWW in order to take advantage of the communication revolution which is currently transforming schools, the academy, business and publishing.

II. THE WWW IS HAVING A PROFOUND IMPACT ON SCHOLARSHIP, EDUCATION AND PUBLISHING↩

1. The Wiring of College Campuses

If the Liberty Fund wishes to speak to the new and up-coming generation of intellectuals and academics, it needs to use the means they use to communicate with each other, viz. the WWW. The wiring of college campuses which resulted in the creation of the WWW has gone through a number of stages. The first stage began over 10 years ago when college campuses were wired creating a world-wide community of scholars linked by communication via email. The second stage began about 6 or 7 years ago when the WWW appeared. The latter has changed the way colleges are administered, the way they market themselves, the way research is communicated and, perhaps most importantly, the way teaching and learning is conducted. In just a few short years the WWW is being used increasingly for the delivery of course material, to host online discussion groups, and for communication between faculty and students. [1] The next stage of the WWW revolution is currently taking place with the installation of higher bandwidth cables which makes new forms of communication possible. The WWW will no longer be made up of text and stationary images. It will in the near future contain video and voice combined in ways we cannot yet determine. Over the period of the second stage of the WWW a new generation of young people, whom Don Tapsott calls the "net generation", has come of age and is currently attending college. [2] This generation regards as normal the communication made possible by the WWW. They will expect and demand this kind of connectivity and ease of communication everywhere in the future.

2. The Emergence of Digital Libraries and Museums

The Liberty Fund needs to keep abreast of the changes which academic libraries and national museums are already adopting. Over the past 4 or 5 years we have seen university libraries and national museums begin the process of redefining themselves for the digital age. They now regard themselves as hybrid repositories of printed and electronic material. [3] They have come to this conclusion about their future role as a result of a number of factors. Firstly, there is a pressing need to preserve the crumbling paper on which most 19th century books were published. There is also the problem of preserving easily damaged medieval manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells which has been scanned and is now available to scholars on CD-ROM. Digitising these texts is a way of preserving the texts for future generations of readers and scholars. Secondly, putting texts online is a way of coping with the spiralling costs of printed journals and monographs which many libraries are not able to purchase in the numbers they used to. Online access is a way of stretching their dollar further. Thirdly, e-texts allow libraries to serve their users better in numerous ways. They can provide material for remote access students (studying part-time or as part of a distance learning program), they can offer more complete collections of material to their readers by linking their resources to that of other libraries, they can provide easier access for multiple users, and they can provide researchers with searchable texts.

A number of "big name" university and national libraries have undertaken pioneering initiatives in the creation and management of digital texts, including the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (the Gallica Project), the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, Yale University (Open Book Project, and the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School), the University of Pennsylvania (in cooperation with Oxford University Press), Cornell, University of Virginia's Crossroads Project, UC Berkeley, and the Electronic Libraries Program (eLib). Most recently, a joint web venture, called Fathom.com, was announced by Columbia University, the New York Public Library, the British Library, the Smithsonian, the London School of Economics, and Cambridge University Press. The aim is to pool their resources for the provision of online information to scholars as well as the general public.

3. The Development of E-Publishing (academic and commercial)

The Liberty Fund needs to keep abreast of the changes which academic and commercial publishers are already adopting. Ever since its creation, the WWW has had a strong tradition of providing free and voluntary e-texts online and this activity is expanding rapidly. The grand daddy of them all is Project Gutenberg (there is also a German language version) which offers a huge number of "plain vanilla" online texts with little or no formatting. The aim is to provide online and free of charge the classics of literature, politics, history, and science to any interested person. A number of academic institutions and private groups now also provide attractively presented and very interesting e-texts:  there is a general collection of texts at The Online Books Page hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, Project Bartleby at Columbia University specialises in 19th century British and American literature and political thought, there is the attempt to put online the complete works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels at the Marxist Internet Archive, classic texts in the history of economic thought are available at the Macmaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, and then there is the very ambitious but incomplete Liberty Library of Constitutional Classics.

The digitisation of texts is not confined to the academic and private realm. Many large commercial publishers are investigating the possibilities of publishing and distributing  books by electronic means. How the market will react to e-texts and e-books (which can download and display e-texts in a portable form) is not clear. Nor is it yet clear what hardware and software will emerge as the standard for e-books. The technology is changing too rapidly and Microsoft has only recently entered the market. What attracts publishers (and readers) to these developments is the very attractive promise that in the future no book will ever be "out of print" (it will just be sitting somewhere on someone's hard drive) and that the costs of publishing will drop considerably. The future of publishing and indeed of "the book" itself is likely to be a hybrid world where printed and electronic texts exist side-by-side. Some readers will want to have access to books in both forms - a printed version for ease of reading, and a electronic version for searching and storing. [4]

4. The Pros and Cons of E-Texts

There are numerous pros and cons to the creation of the Liberty Online Project, central to which will be a sizable body of texts in electronic form. Let us discuss first the pros of such a scheme. There are a number of advantages which e-texts have over printed texts. Once the initial cost of putting them online has been paid, the costs of storage and distribution are much lower than with printed books. Because the texts are stored online there is no need for large inventories of stock to be kept in warehouses. Because they can be distributed online there is no cost of postage. The vast capacity of modern computer disk drives means that it is possible to have a much larger collection of material in the "catalogue". The online texts can be enriched with other features, such as images, music, voice, links to other texts, online annotations and commentaries, introductory guides and bibliographies, thus "adding value" to the plain e-text. As the Liberty Fund's website gradually becomes the leading source of liberty texts on the WWW, more and more institutions and individuals will link their web pages to the Liberty Online Project thus bringing more people into contact with the texts and the ideas. The potential audience the Liberty Online Project could reach is already enormous and growing exponentially.

The two main varieties of e-text have their own strengths and weaknesses and the Liberty Online Project should contain as many of both as it can (ideally one version for each text if possible). The HTML version of a text is valuable because it can be searched by key word by a search engine and it takes less space on the hard disk. The PDF version ("portable document format") is valuable because it provides an exact copy (a facsimile) of the original text. This is useful to scholars who wish to view a text in its original language, or to see how the first edition of a text appeared, or to quote from a modern authoritative edition. The drawback of PDF documents is the size of the files compared to HTML versions of the same text. I believe the Liberty Fund should aim to have both versions of a given text if its library of liberty texts is to be both authoritative and useful to scholars and general readers.

The major "con" against any plan to create the Liberty Online Project is that there will be considerable costs in getting it established. Staff will have to be employed to plan and design the website. Technical staff will be needed (whether in house or contracted out) to maintain the website and the computer, to scan and edit and format the e-texts. It will cost money to acquire digital publishing rights to the editions of the texts we want. Academics will need to be paid to "add value" to the raw and underdeveloped e-texts by creating the interpretative and introductory framework which they will need. Staff will need to spend time responding to emails from interested "readers" and running any interactive discussion groups or colloquia which may be offered online.

The Liberty Fund is one of the few institutions which has the financial and intellectual resources to create such an online library of liberty texts.

5. Caveat

A caveat is in order at this point. I do not believe that E-texts will ever replace the printed book for a number of reasons. Books are still compact, portable, cheap, and easy to read. Not all printed texts will be converted to digital form, although most new books will probably published in both paper and electronic form for the foreseeable future. However, an increasing number of new books will only be printed in electronic form. Libraries will want to have both versions of text in many instances, they will want a digital copy for archival and preservation purposes and printed copies for the use of students and faculty. The future of publishing will be a mixture of traditional printed books and online material. Thus, I believe the Liberty Fund must maintain its current book publishing program. The Liberty Online Project is not designed to replace the publishing of paper-based books. In fact the existence of the texts in electronic form may actually increase the sales of the printed version in many cases. The University of Pennsylvania and Oxford University Press are currently experimenting with a program of placing all Oxford's new history monographs in digital form on the University of Pennsylvania's library computer. The project will track the use of the digital texts by scholars and students and to assess its impact on the sale of printed books. An earlier, less comprehensive study suggested that the existence of electronic versions of a text actually increased sales of the printed texts by some 20%.

III. THE STRUCTURE OF AN ONLINE LIBRARY OF LIBERTY↩

1. Overview

The Classical Liberal Tradition needs to have an active and powerful voice on the rapidly expanding WWW. The Liberty Fund has the intellectual and financial resources to create that voice and its aim should be nothing less than to create the leading repository of liberty-related resources on the WWW. A model to consider for the Liberty Fund is the extraordinary collection of classical Greek and Roman texts and scholarly material at the Perseus Project at Tufts University. It is different from most other digitisation projects because it does not just put up free standing e-texts but surrounds them with supporting, explanatory material such as an atlas, dictionaries, an encyclopedia and other reference material. Something similar is done at the Gallica Project at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. But here the focus is more on putting material online than providing interpretative or supporting material for the online texts. Thus, although the Gallica Project has to date put online some 15 million pages of e-texts (mainly in PDF format but also some HTML) there are only a couple of dozen quite short introductory and explanatory guides to support this massive number of e-texts. I think the Liberty Online Project should have a better balance of e-texts and supporting guides - more closely modeled on the Perseus Project than the Gallica Project.

The great value to scholars of both the Gallica Project and the Persueus Project is the depth and breadth of their collections. Both are comprehensive in their coverage of their selected subject areas (late 18th and 19th century political thought and literature in the case of Gallica; the ancient Greek and Roman world in the case of Perseus). Both are unparalleled in their collections and are thus very attractive to scholars to visit. The breadth comes from the range of topics covered. The depth comes from the range of texts which are included in the collection. One finds both the work of major thinkers and writers (Tocqueville for Gallica, Aristotle for Perseus) as well as the works of lesser know, even obscure writers. Given the size of the collections it is very important to have a good search engine to facilitate the finding of material. Perseus has the more comprehensive search engine and the best links to other topics and this reflects the more focused intention of the creators of the project. Gallica just has the standard library search facilities without the hyperlinks which makes Perseus so useful to students of the classics.

I believe a comprehensive Digital Library of Liberty should have great breadth and depth in its collection, with a comprehensive and fast search engine capable of finding material throughout the entire website, and with hyperlinks making connections between items in the collection and assisting navigation of the site. In summary, it should have the following components:

  • republished classics of the classical liberal and conservative tradition, particularly including a number of Projects of Major Scholarly Importance (such as the collected works of major thinkers like Adam Smith)
  • a comprehensive and fast search engine
  • cultural material which expresses liberal values - art, music, literature, film
  • multimedia content, such as interviews with or lectures by scholars and intellectuals
  • introductory and interpretative material which adds value to the e-texts in the library
  • online teaching and research aids to encourage the use of the website
  • online feedback and interaction to make discussion of these texts and ideas alive and hyperlinks which make it possible to navigate the site and to make use and sense of the collection

The Liberty Fund has an opportunity to expand its publishing programme into an exciting new area which will make its material accessible to a much wider audience via the WWW.

2. An Expanded Liberty Classics Program

The Liberty Fund should take advantage of the WWW and the new media to expand its notion of what a "LibertyClassic" is and to provide scholars with the most useful forms of those texts. The core of the Liberty Online Project will be online, electronic versions of classic texts of the classical liberal and conservative tradition, thus continuing and building upon the tradition established by the Liberty Fund with its printed LibertyClassics series. The WWW now makes it possible to greatly expand the number of titles "in print" at any given time given the low cost of storing and distributing e-texts. For example, we should be looking to include more texts by the authors represented in the catalogue. It should be our aim to have as many "complete works" of the most important authors as possible, using the complete works of Adam Smith as an example to follow. There are also numerous minor figures in the classical liberal and conservative traditions whose work deserves to be included in a Liberty Online Project, if only to show the extraordinary variety of thinking about individual liberty which has occurred over the centuries. Another set of authors whose work should be placed online are those who wrote before there was any self-conscious "tradition" of liberty to which they could belong - I'm thinking here of the many authors in the Western tradition whose names are inscribed on the walls of the Goodrich room in Wabash College.

Another possibility is to have multiple versions of the same text. Scholars often make use of more than one version of a text. They like to see the original text, they examine later revised editions of the text, and they use modern, critical editions of the text. The WWW now adds another version of the text which scholars will find useful, i.e. an online, searchable version of the text. So, for some of the most important texts in the Liberty Fund catalogue (such as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations), there should be a facsimile edition (in PDF format) of the first edition or the authoritative revised edition which appeared during the author's lifetime. There should be an HTML edition of the standard, critical modern edition of the text with full scholarly apparatus (such as the Glasgow edition of Adam Smith). Having both versions of the text online would be a great boon to scholars and would make the Liberty Online Project an important resource for academics worldwide to use in their research.

Much the same could be said for the need to have some non-English language material included in the Liberty Online Project. For example, scholars interested in Alexis de Tocqueville would like to have access to a facsimile of the first French edition, to a facsimile of the first English translation (to see how it influenced contemporary British and American thinkers), and a searchable HTML version of the modern critical English-language edition.

Another opportunity opened up by the WWW is to put online collections of texts which constitute a "debate". As valuable as it is to publish the key text in a debate (such as Burke's Reflections on the French Revolutiuon), it is even more valuable to scholars to have the collection of responses which that text triggered (Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft). Debates which might be considered for inclusion in the Liberty Online Project are the Federalists vs the Antifederalists on the Federal Constitution, Burke vs Paine and Wollstonecraft on French Revolution, Mackay vs the Fabian socialists on individual liberty and state intervention. These "clusters" of texts make the liberty text more useful to scholars by putting it in its intellectual context and by providing other, hard to find texts.

A final category of texts which should be included in the Liberty Online Project are significant documents and other primary sources such as constitutions, bills or rights, treaties, the laws of war and peace, and pamphlets in significant political debates. There are some models we could draw upon for this - there is the Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy at Yale Law School which has a very impressive collection of documents spanning several centuries, and the Gallica Project in Paris for the debates during the period of the French Revolution.

I have attempted to create my own, small-scale Liberty Online Project which you might like to examine to see what is possible. Examples from my personal webpage include an Online Library of the Classical Liberal Tradition with a couple of dozen e-texts, and a CD-ROM which contains an introduction to and facsimile copies of 19th century French classical liberal dictionaries of political economy (1853 and 1890). The latter is available upon request.

3. Projects of Major Scholarly Importance

The strength of the Liberty Online Project will be its comprehensiveness, i.e. the depth and breath of its coverage of the liberty tradition. I believe its major drawcard for outside scholars will be what I have termed the "Projects of Major Scholarly Importance". These are the big projects of digitising the collected works of some of the most important thinkers in the Western tradition - Smith, Mill, Tocqueville. Most will have access to the printed editions of these works at their own college, but what we will offer is something they will not have access to at home - online searchability and links to other relevant material. The Liberty Online Project at the Liberty Fund could get the reputation among scholars and research librarians around the world as being THE place to go to explore these thinkers' greatest works. A comparison could be made to the difference between the printed and the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary. What was extremely difficult to do with the printed text becomes quite simple and straight forward with online searching. For example, to find all first time uses of words in a given year or range of years, to find all words first used by a particular author, and so on. An online and searchable edition of the complete works of John Stuart Mill would allow the following searches to be made:

  • scholars looking for a half remembered quote could search for combinations of key words
  • what did Mill think about subject X (say "liberty")  and how did this change over time?
  • What sources did Mill use in writing his works (say, how often and where did he quote Smith?)
  • How often did Mill use the words "individual" and "liberty" in the same phrase or sentence, and in what context?

Search results could be saved for later use or could be made available to other scholars using the site. These powerful searching opportunities would make the Liberty Online Project a most valuable research and educational resource which would be sought after by scholars all over the world. And as the Liberty Online Project added other "Projects of Major Scholarly Importance" (such as Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, French and British political economy) the value to scholars would increase proportionally.

4. A New Liberty and Culture Program

It is not always the case that people's views about society are influenced by reading works of political, economic or legal theory. This is certainly true for some, but many others have been influenced in their thinking and their values by works of literature, or art, or film. The significance of the connection between culture and liberty has been the topic of several Liberty Fund conferences in recent years - on the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of John Milton, and the films of John Ford. For copyright reasons, Ford's films cannot be put on the Liberty Fund website, but electronic editions of other cultural material which is concerned with individual liberty, the proper relationship between the individual and society, and classical liberal values in general, could be put online. The Liberty Online Project should take advantage of the multimedia possibilities of the WWW to display material which expresses liberal values in art, music, or literature, film, thus showing the rich interdisciplinary nature of the classical liberal tradition.

If copyrights issues can be resolved, it would be possible to have an online art gallery which would include portraits of the great thinkers who have grappled with the meaning of liberty (like the ones which adorn the walls of the Liberty Fund offices) as well as other works of art which express some liberal values. Painters like Goya and Delacroix, for example, used their art to criticise the injustices of the societies in which they lived and to express their own deeply held values of tolerance and liberality. I have an example of what might be done in this area from my person website. I use art a great deal in my own teaching and I have prepared a number of online study guides with commentary and images (see my Study Guide on War Art ).

5. Comprehensive Supporting Guides to the E-Texts

Unlike an academic library, which puts material online without much concern about how or why it might be used by its readers, the Liberty Fund has a clear purpose in why it publishes the texts it does. The aim is to promote interest in and the study of liberty in all its manifestations. Just as the printed texts have an introduction which explains the significance of the text and provides something about the context in which it was written, so too do online texts need to have some introductory and interpretative material to provide them with added value. Some e-texts will have their own separate introductions and scholarly supporting material, for example existing LibertyClassics which are converted to digital form will retain their editor's introductions. Other texts will not, so it will be an important part of the Liberty Online Project to provide guides and introductions which "add value" to the e-texts. These guides could take a number of forms. They could be commissioned pieces written by leading scholars or they could be done "in house" by Fellows and staff. I envisage many short, interpretative essays on a particular text or individual author or some significant theme, with an introduction, bibliography and links to other texts and key passages. Again a model is provided by the Gallica Project - Themes where brief guides to such topics as utopian writing, the Physiocrats, 19th century political economy, and the anti-slavery movement provide readers with some guidance to the huge number of texts which are available online. The Liberty Online Project would need guides to such topics as free trade, constitutionalism, the American Revolution, liberty and religion, and so on.

6. Online Teaching and Research Aids

The Liberty Fund should use the accessibility of the WWW to provide material useful to faculty and students who wish to learn about the classical liberal tradition. This aspect of the Liberty Online Project is an extension of the general guides discussed above but focussed expressly at the needs of students and teachers. The WWW is having a profound impact on the way learning and teaching is carried out. In many ways, the WWW provides an alternative to the traditional teacher and the lecture hall because it provides near instantaneous access to a world-wide collection of educational resources which can be accessed at any time and from any place. The Liberty Fund should use its resources to provide material for online teaching and learning in the areas of the history of political, economic and legal thought, political theory, economics, and history. Resources which would greatly assist faculty and students include brief, introductory "encyclopedia" articles on key topics, themes, individuals, movements, events with accompanying bibliographies and links to other resources. Online texts make it possible to create collections of extracts ("course readers") which faculty might use in courses on the history of political or economic or legal thought - Fordham University's much used Internet Modern History Sourcebooks is a model of how online resources can assist undergraduate learning. Even entire course syllabi could be provided online to assist those wishing to study a particular topic. The  John Templeton Foundation Freedom Project is an example of what might be done. The Institute for Humane Studies used to provide online a large number of its Faculty's course syllabi but they have been taken off-line temporarily while their website is being rebuilt.

I have two examples from my own teaching which could illustrate what I have in mind. Firstly, there is a guide I prepared for my first year history students on the thought of John Stuart Mill. I put a copy of On Liberty online and created a study guide Lecture Notes on Mill's On Liberty with links to key passages in the text. By clicking on the links the students could go to the relevant passages in the text, read the key passage, see the context of the surrounding text and read further if they were so inclined. Secondly, I have used the WWW for some years to disseminate course reading lists and syllabi. Of relevance here is a reading guide for a course on Liberal Europe and Social Change, 1815-1914 and a course on the Enlightenment.

7. Online Feedback and Interaction with the Readers

One of the attributes of the WWW is the capacity to communicate and interact with other people. The WWW makes it possible to get feedback from visitors to the site and to have online discussion of the texts and ideas contained in them. Much greater use should be made of the WWW to keep the friends of the Liberty Fund informed about the Liberty Fund's activities. For example, regular emails could be used to announce new or forthcoming titles with links to the e-text version on the Liberty Fund website, thus encouraging people to visit and perhaps purchase a copy (whether printed or electronic). A number of businesses use their computer records of customer purchases to suggest additional titles which may be of interest to online visitors. Perhaps we could borrow from amazon.com ("the people who bought this book also bought.") and suggest that others who purchased or downloaded that title also purchased another. There are many other possibilities provided by sophisticated software to find out more about our visitors and readers, their favourite authors, their preferred format for texts, and so on.

A number of journals, magazines and newspapers have online colloquia. The New York Times hosts an online discussion group or "circle" for readers. The Chronicle of Higher Education invites a "guest essayist" to write a piece which is then commented upon by readers in a "colloquy". This is something the Liberty Fund needs to investigate as a way of "keeping the conversation going" among seminar alumni and as a way of drawing more people to the idea of liberty as a living and vigorous concept worthy of debate and discussion.

8. Other New Things Which Could be Done

An online journal which provides a forum for discussing the online texts or the topics of the various conferences might be worth considering in the longer term. As the cost of publishing academic journals spirals upwards, many academic groups have turned to the WWW as a lower cost means of publication.

E-texts also suggest new electronic ways of disseminating ideas. They can be downloaded for "free" over the WWW (the cost is the connection to an Internet Service Provider), they can be "burned" onto a CD-ROM and mailed to the customer, or they can be used as a way of enticing people to buy the printed book version of the text. Publishers are turning to a number of alternative means of distributing books as the WWW revolutionises their industry. A possibility which is being investigated is "printing on demand". Customers browse online and then order their selected book which is printed locally. Inventories are kept very small and customers are not limited in their choice to only those titles which are currently "in print" or "in stock". Any book in the online catalogue can be printed at any time. The Liberty Fund will have to keep abreast of the changes which are taking place in the publishing world. Having as many of its titles online as possible is a step towards this.

IV. A PLAN TO BRING IT TO FRUITION↩

The Liberty Fund already has the framework upon which a more ambitious Liberty Online Project could be built. There is the Liberty Fund home page with the catalogue and the Library of Economic Liberty websites with a very useful search engine and a handful of e-texts already online. The Liberty Fund also has the digital rights to many (but not all) of the books in its back catalogue, will have the digital rights to all its new titles, and has been busy acquiring the digital rights to texts published by others. It has a vast network of scholars who are expert in many fields of inquiry and who can be drawn upon for advice in selecting texts and preparing guides to those texts and subject areas. The Liberty Fund is also one of the few institutions in the country with the financial resources to create a digital library of liberty.

In my view, it would be possible to lay the foundation for the Liberty Online Project over a three year period using the existing website as the container and the current search engine as one of the key tools for the site. To begin creating the site the following tasks need to be accomplished in the first year or two:

  • as many texts of the Liberty Fund back-catalog need to be converted to digital form and put on line and linked to a site-wide "table of contents". To create the right balance for the site, texts in the following areas need to be added at roughly the same rate - political theory, economic theory, legal theory, history, liberty and culture. I suggest a target of a total of 10 texts per year for the first 5 years of the project.
  • to put online the major showcase text collections (what I call "Projects of Major Scholarly Importance" which will provide the scholarly backbone for and perhaps create the most outside scholarly interest in the Liberty Online Project - this includes the collected works of major thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and so on. In the first year it would be important to have one of these collections go online (perhaps the John Stuart Mill is closest to being ready) so that scholars around the world can see what the potential of the Liberty Online Project can be. The Mill collection would also allow us to test our website and to begin assessing the usefulness of the text to the Web community of scholars (counting the number of "hits" or visitors each day would be vital in this regard). I suggest 1 Project of Major Scholarly Importance could be added each year (depending upon funding and getting digital rights to the texts).
  • a number of "entry points" into the collection need to be developed. These entry points would be relatively brief introductions to key thinkers (e.g. Smith or Burke) or important themes (e.g. individual liberty) or key periods (e.g. the Enlightenment) or political or economic issues (e.g. free trade) and would include biographical material, bibliographies, images, and links to the online texts on the Liberty Fund site as well as links to other relevant websites. Depending on the use made of the website, I suggest that 10-12 "entry points" need to be created initially, with a mixture of individuals and themes. They can be updated on a regular basis as additional material is added
  • Staff managing the project should visit other Digital Library projects (a number of which are listed above) to learn how they are managing their projects, what pitfalls to avoid, what new technology is on the horizon, and so on. These visits should take place early on in the Project so that what is learned can be applied to the development of the project.
  • a list of other texts which could be to added to the site should be drawn up - these would be minor classics of key authors, other forgotten but important texts, texts which already exist in digital form (and not copyrighted) and which could be added quickly and easily to the Liberty Fund site. This will be an ongoing project.
  • a beginning should be made in creating an interactive component to the website. The options include "circles" or "colloquy" based upon the model provided by The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education; or "tracking software" like that which amazon.com uses to suggest additional texts to customers; or have the search engine ask if the viewer would like to save the results of their search for future use, or ask if the viewer would like to do a similar key word search on another text or author in the database, or perhaps the search engine could draw upon its archive of previous search results to suggest that the current searcher might like to see the results of previous searches on a related topic. This is the most experimental aspect of the LOP. It is not clear what form of interactivity will be most useful to visitors of the site. I suggest that we experiment with a variety of options and see what works best.
  • A beginning should be made in creating some online teaching aides for faculty, students and members of the public. These would consist of an annotated bibliography, other recommended reading, links to other relevant websites, and links to key online texts (or extracts). I think 2 need to be put online in the first year - one on the history of political thought, the other on the history of economic thought, with others on other topics to be added later.
  • a beginning should be made in creating a database of images related to the issue of liberty (portraits, and paintings and etchings which express liberal values) which can be searched by artist, period, content, theme. A model for this is the online searchable collection (75,000 items) of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. I suggest that one "Art and Liberty" project be undertaken in the first year to test the feasibility of the project. There are questions about getting legal permission to use images held by museums and other bodies, and the database and searching software needs to be tested.
  • New ways of delivering Liberty Fund "products" online need to be developed and incorporated into the online catalogue and the website overall. Visitors to the site should have the option of downloading text, purchasing digital texts on CD, or buying the printed book. I suggest a trial period of a year to test the demand for online delivery vs. the sale of CDs and printed books.

V. MY ROLE IN THIS PROJECT↩

I see my role in the Liberty Online Project as assisting in the overall design of the website and in using my knowledge of the texts and the technology of the WWW to make the e-texts as useful as possible to the scholars, students and others who will use the Liberty Fund website. More specifically, I see myself contributing to the following activities:

  • Helping to plan the overall design of the website - its structure, content, and interactive features
  • Participating (in conjunction with the technical staff of the Liberty Fund) in the planning and operation of the interactive components of the site
  • The writing of a mutually agreed upon number of "mini-essays" or "entry points" to the online collection - these would be brief introductions to key thinkers, historical periods, and key themes, and would contain biographical and background information, a bibliography, links to related texts and other websites, and images (where appropriate)
  • The preparation of the first part of the "Art and Liberty" project - one mini-essay on a mutually agreed upon topic will be put online as a test
  • The preparation of the first online teaching aid for faculty and students - one course guide and bibliography (with links to appropriate texts) on a mutually agreed upon topic will be put online
  • Finding appropriate e-texts to put online - some will be what I call "should be" classics of the classical liberal tradition, others will be part of a "cluster" of texts which make up a debate on an important theme (e.g. free trade) and which could linked to one of the "mini-essays" or "entry points" discussed above, others will be non-English language texts

 

 

Endnotes

[1] James J. O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

[2] Don Tapscott, Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1998).

[3] See the discussion in the professional journal for digital librarians D-Lib Forum for the current state of thinking on this topic.

[4] The Future of the Book, ed. G. Nunberg (Berkeley, 1996).