“A Report on Stage I of the "Online Library Of Liberty":
Putting The Goodrich List Online”
(February 24, 2001)

By David M. Hart

[Created: 24 February, 2001] [Revised: 4 November, 2024]

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

Introduction

Because this Report is nearly 25 years old some of the links to websites are no longer current.

Table of Contents

• I. TABLE OF SCREEN SNAPSHOTS. 3
• II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF THE REPORT. 4
• III. INTRODUCTION. 6
  • A. The Scope of this Report. 6
  • B. The Scope of the Project. 6
• IV. THE DESIGN AND STRUCTURE OF THE PROJECT. 9
  • A. The Design and Style of the Site. 9
  • B. Navigating around the Site. 14
  • C. Searching the Texts Online. 19
  • D. The Use of Other/Multi-Media. 20
  • E. Acquiring the Texts. 24
  • F. The Site's Relationship to other Liberty Fund Activities. 26
• V. THE CONTENT OF THE SITE (STAGE ONE). 28
  • A. The "Great Books" of Liberty. 28
  • B. Multiple Versions of Each Text. 31
  • C. Supporting Material to Add Value to the Texts. 36
• VI. THE POSSIBILITIES FOR FUTURE EXPANSION (STAGE TWO AND BEYOND). 45
  • A. Stage Two: Filling Out the Goodrich List. 45
  • B. Stage Three: Adding to the Goodrich List. 45
  • C. Stage Four: New Projects of Major Scholarly Importance. 48
• VII. CREATING THE "ONLINE LIBRARY OF LIBERTY". 50
  • A. The Steps Required to Create the OLL. 50
  • B. The Resources Required to Create the OLL. 51
  • C. Conclusion. 53
• VIII. APPENDIX I: THE PIERRE GOODRICH LIST OF TEXTS. 54
  • A. Introduction. 54
  • B. The Ancient World (Near East, India, Asia). 54
  • C. The Ancient World (Greece). 55
  • D. The Ancient World (Rome). 56
  • E. The Medieval Period. 57
  • F. The Renaissance and Reformation. 58
  • G. The Early Modern Period. 58
  • H. The 18th Century. 59
  • I. The 19th Century. 60
  • J. The 20th Century. 60
• IX. APPENDIX II: THE VARIOUS LISTS WHICH MAKE UP THE GOODRICH LIST. 62
• X. APPENDIX III: IMAGES OF OTHER WEBSITES. 66
  • A. University of Virginia Electronic Text Center. 66
  • B. The Perseus Project at Tufts University. 68
  • C. Project Gutenberg. 72
  • D. The Gallica Project at the Bibliothèque Nationale. 74
  • E. The Furness Shakespeare Library at U. Penn. 78
  • F. Our Own Econlib. 81
  • G. McMaster University History of Economic Thought. 85
  • H. A Great Books Site. 86
  • I. The Freedom Project (Atlas and Templeton Foundations). 87
  • J. The Making of America, University of Michigan. 88
• Endnotes

I. TABLE OF SCREEN SNAPSHOTS

• Screen snapshot 1: OLL Homepage. 7
• Screen snapshot 2: Project Gutenberg - Machiavelli text. 10
• Screen snapshot 3: Perseus Project - Aristotle text. 11
• Screen snapshot 4: Econlib table of contents of Bastiat text. 12
• Screen snapshot 5: Furness Library complex frame for Shakespeare. 13
• Screen snapshot 6: OLL Introductory Essay on Condorcet. 15
• Screen snapshot 7: OLL Study Guide on the French Revolution. 16
• Screen snapshot 8: OLL key passages in Mill's On Liberty. 17
• Screen snapshot 9: Gallica's frame of a Tocqueville text. 18
• Screen snapshot 10: OLL key passage and video extract of Henry V. 21
• Screen snapshot 11: OLL Luther's hymn with link to audio extract. 22
• Screen snapshot 12: OLL intro to Shakespeare's Henry V with artwork. 23
• Screen snapshot 13: OLL main page of the Goodrich List. 28
• Screen snapshot 14: OLL example of PDF text - Grotius. 32
• Screen snapshot 15: OLL example of image of text (Webster's Dictionary). 33
• Screen snapshot 16: OLL example of HTML text (Mill) with numbered paragraphs. 34
• Screen snapshot 17: OLL frame of parallel edition (Henry V). 35
• Screen snapshot 18: OLL Introductory Essay on Mill. 37
• Screen snapshot 19: OLL key passages in Henry V with links. 38
• Screen snapshot 20: OLL main page for Study Guides. 39
• Screen snapshot 21: OLL page for Schiller's poem with link to music extract. 41
• Screen snapshot 22 : Freedom Project Course Syllabus. 42

 

II. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF THE REPORT

I believe that the Online Library of Liberty will fill a very important niche on the WWW. It will eventually take its place as one of the world's leading digital libraries in the area of the history of political, economic, and legal thought. Its unique strengths will lie in the following areas:

• The comprehensiveness of its online collection, spanning the classical world and the heyday of writing about liberty during the 18^th and 19^th centuries
• the authoritative scholarly editions of the texts which it makes available online, ranging from facsimiles of first editions to searchable, modern HTML editions of the texts
• the interdisciplinary nature of the collection, including political, economic, and legal thought, history, music, art, and literature
• its focus on liberty as the underlying theme which ties all the texts together, something which is made clear in the numerous introductory essays and study guides
• Its use of cutting edge technology to make the texts more useful to scholars and students with the addition of searching tools and multi-media audio, video and images of art

The OLL will be able to serve the needs of several groups, some traditional users of Liberty Fund resources and some completely new users:

• scholars who are writing books and articles will be able use the online first edition of a classic text or a searchable HTML edition to find material
• teachers who wish to draw up a course on the history of political or economic thought will be able to use our study guides, model syllabi, and online texts
• college students and other interested users (high school teachers, businessmen and women, journalists, politicians) will be able to use the introductory and explanatory material, enriched by the audio and video clips, to begin their exploration of the ideas in the great books on liberty we will put online.

The OLL will also assist the Liberty Fund in fulfilling its charter, i.e. to disseminate ideas about liberty to scholars and the broader community via the publication of books and its conference program. The WWW and the OLL can help the Liberty Fund achieve this end in the following ways:

• a huge, and rapidly growing world-wide audience is accessible via the WWW
• the OLL can be used to advertise the sale of printed books in our catalog
• the OLL will permit new ways of supplying texts to users in electronic form, as e-books which are downloadable to the user's PC or to dedicated e-book readers, or as e-texts sold or otherwise distributed on CD-ROM
• the OLL can be used in conjunction with the conference program to communicate with the participants (both before and after the event), to supply them with the texts they need for the discussion (online or on CD-ROM), and to provide an online tool for conference organisers to better focus the discussion (listing key passages and linking them to the main text).

If all of these aims can be achieved, the OLL will be a very powerful tool for the dissemination of ideas about liberty and it is my desire to make this happen in the next few years.

III. INTRODUCTION

A. The Scope of this Report

This Report builds upon a number of ideas which I discussed in a previous Report submitted to the Liberty Fund in April 2000. [1] In this Report I would like to apply some of those ideas to a specific collection of texts, namely the texts which make up what one might call the "Pierre Goodrich List" (See Appendix I. Accompanying this Report is a CD-ROM which contains a demonstration website of a representative selection of texts from the Goodrich List to show what the larger online project might look like and how it might function. Another demonstration CD-ROM which I made for a Liberty Fund Conference in September 2000 in Canberra, Australia on "Liberty and Identity in Marlowe, Marx and Shakespeare" is included as an example of how online texts might be used to assist conference organisers in distributing texts to participants and in using the texts during the discussions.

B. The Scope of the Project

The Liberty Fund's brief is to disseminate ideas about liberty. Historically it has undertaken this task with a two-pronged program of book publishing and conferences. The WWW is a new method of communicating ideas which can significantly contribute to this foundation task of the Liberty Fund. The advantages of the WWW are that more texts can be made available at any one time, they never go out of print because they reside on servers which are accessible 24 hours a day 7 days a week, computer-aided searching and comparison of texts means that online texts offer new and important opportunities for research and scholarship, new media (such as audio, video, and other images) can be included to enrich the texts, and it provides access to more "readers" and potential supporters across the world.

Screen snapshot 1: OLL Homepage

Putting online the 130 or so texts from the Goodrich List should be seen as the first stage of a larger project to create the world's largest and most comprehensive online library of texts dealing with the topic of liberty - what I have called the Online Library of Liberty (henceforth "OLL"). The Goodrich List of texts could be regarded as the "Great Books" of liberty and as such would constitute the core of any larger collection of texts. It is thus a natural starting point to show what can be done with online texts and for us to learn how best to do this. But it is not sufficient, in my view, to merely put the texts online. Many websites already do this to some extent. What will make the Liberty Fund's site stand out from the others are the following attributes:

• The particular selection of texts around the theme of liberty
• The comprehensive and interdisciplinary nature of this collection
• The online tools (such as the search engine) which make the site useful to scholars and others
• The supplementary material (such as bibliographies, introductory essays and multi-media) which will make the collection a valuable learning resource for teachers, students and other people interested in exploring issues concerned with individual liberty

I believe the ultimate aim of the project should be to create a site which will be recognised world-wide as the premier website for finding out about the nature of liberty and its history.

IV. THE DESIGN AND STRUCTURE OF THE PROJECT

A. The Design and Style of the Site

In essence, the website should be designed in such a way to make it easy to find what one is looking for, easy to read or otherwise use the material online, and easy to purchase or download the sought for text.

The presentation of the e-texts should follow the excellent example set by the printed texts in the LibertyClassics series both for the sake of having consistency across the entire spectrum of Liberty Fund publications and because of the precedent set by the high standards of the printed editions. I would describe the style of the printed texts as elegant, simple, uncluttered and "classical" in overall appearance and I would like to see this carried over into the online texts. With the LibertyClassics texts there is usually an introduction to the text written by an acknowledged scholar in the field, a table of contents and index to assist readers in finding relevant passages, and an edition of the text which is easy to read because of its largish and uncluttered font (Palatino in many instances - I use this font in this Report and in the demo-CD). The printed texts thus have the substance and the appearance of sound scholarship and "user friendliness". In my view, it is important that the same standards should be applied to the online texts.

On many websites where e-texts are available (Project Gutenberg, University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, Gallica at the Bibliothèque nationale, the Perseus Project at Tufts University, University of Michigan's Making of America, McMaster University Archive for the History of Economic Thought, the Furness Shakespeare Library at the University of Pennsylvania - See Appendix III for screen snapshots of these websites) little effort has been made to make the texts look attractive or to make the texts easy to use online or to make the texts easy to download for later use. For example, at Project Gutenberg the texts are available in what might best be described as a no nonsense, plain vanilla format. The page background is grey, the text is in one long ribbon with single line spacing and with carriage returns at the end of each line. There is no hyperlinked table of contents, no scholarly introduction, no index, no means to search the text for key words. There is only the most basic text. This style and layout reflects the age of the project (started in the early 1970s) before the WWW had been invented and when text had to be kept very simple so that it could be displayed on a wide variety of different computers. The advantage of the  Project Gutenberg texts is that there is a very large number of them, they are free to download,  and they are easy to download (with one click of the mouse). The considerable disadvantages are that to make them more useful and easier to read much editing of the texts is required, such as stripping out the end of line breaks, making the background colour white, adding a hyperlinked table of contents, and so on.

Screen snapshot 2: Project Gutenberg - Machiavelli text

Another example which is instructive is the Perseus Project at Tufts University. It is a massive undertaking to put online the entire corpus of texts from the classical world. It provides considerable "added value" to the texts by having multiple editions (such as original language versions and different translations), key words linked to an online encyclopedia, online dictionaries of Greek and Latin, and a growing multi-media component (such as images of ancient pottery to show inscriptions and art work). In many aspects it is a model for what the Liberty Fund could do with its OLL. In spite of its strengths, there are some difficulties in using the Perseus Project site which the Liberty Fund project should avoid. One difficulty lies in the readability of the texts. The editors at Perseus have broken up most of the texts into very small "pages" which can only be viewed one at a time in quite a small window at the website. This makes for slow reading online as the database must prepare each page individually for viewing, and it makes it nearly impossible to download conveniently the entire text for later viewing. The reasoning behind this approach is that the Perseus Project was conceived at a time when the bandwidth of Internet connections was quite low and the idea was to present small, single pages at a time in order to overcome this bandwidth problem. The current growth of high bandwidth domestic connections makes this much less of a problem than it used to be. I believe we should plan the site on the assumption that high bandwidth connections will continue to grow and will soon be available to most internet users. As fibre optic cable begins to replace copper wire the gains in speed and download capacity will be even greater.

Screen snapshot 3: Perseus Project - Aristotle text

The Liberty Fund's first foray into publishing e-texts, Econlib, has some considerable strengths, but also some weaknesses which need to be addressed. In terms of design and style, the Econlib site differs from the classical, uncluttered look of the printed texts. In my view the site has too many buttons and curlicues and the colours are not consistent. Anything which distracts the reader from the text should be omitted. There should be consistency of design and style across all the Liberty Fund's publications, whether printed or online, so that the mere look of the text is sufficient to indicate that it is a Liberty Fund publication. This means that there should be uniform logos, letterheads, fonts and colours across all divisions of the Liberty Fund. Another weakness of the Econlib site is the sometimes confusing table of contents which makes it difficult to go from part of the text to another. On the other hand, many of the other features of the site are excellent, such as the search engine (discussed in more detail below) and some of the study guides and the note book feature.

Screen snapshot 4: Econlib table of contents of Bastiat text

Complex and long texts require a special mechanism for navigating from one part of the text to another. One solution is to use a frame structure with a table of contents in a smaller frame to the left and the body of the text in the larger frame to the right. This is the solution favoured by Gallica and the Furness Shakespeare Library at the University of Pennsylvania. I think it has merits but I realise there is some opposition to the use of frames by some web designers. The use of frames will have to be discussed at an early stage in the planning of the OLL.

Screen snapshot 5: Furness Library complex frame for Shakespeare

B. Navigating around the Site

It is vital to build a simple and unambiguous navigation system into the site from the very beginning. As the project grows to include more and more texts simple navigation becomes harder and harder. Readers can get lost and give up in frustration because they can't find what they are looking for. This is especially the case with newcomers to the site. This is one reason why I prefer frames for navigating long and complex documents. In a frame, the table of contents is always visible (say in the tall narrow frame at the left) which means that the reader can move from chapter to chapter or section to section within a chapter by clicking on the table of contents on the left. When one views a text page by page it is too easy to get lost, clicking on  the "back" or "forward" buttons can be confusing, or one has to click too many times to navigate easily and quickly around a long document. The problems with using frames are well known: older browsers do not handle frames well or even at all; those using a small screen find that the frame which displays the main body of the text is quite small in size; and some viewers object to frames on aesthetic grounds.

Whether frames are used or not, I suggest that we need to create a number of "entry points" to the collection designed specifically for newcomers, students, and general readers who might wish to use the collection. These entry points to the collection could be:

• mini-essays on selected themes and key authors which contain brief biographical information, additional recommended reading, and links to the texts in the collection (such as the ones I have provided on J.S. Mill, Destutt de Tracy, and Condorcet on the demonstration CD)

Screen snapshot 6: OLL Introductory Essay on Condorcet

• mini-essays on various groupings of texts. These could based upon periods (e.g. "Liberty in the Ancient World"), disciplines (e.g. "Literature and Liberty"), or significant events (e.g. "The American Revolution" or the "French Revolution" - the example I have provided on the CD).

Screen snapshot 7: OLL Study Guide on the French Revolution

• A selection of "key passages" with links to the online text. It may be quite daunting for a newcomer to these ideas to plunge straight into John Stuart Mill's political philosophy. To assist them, we should provide an introduction to the text in the form of a selection of "key passages" which express key aspects of the author's view of liberty. There would be a hyperlink to the full text where the key passage is highlighted in bold and placed in the context of the rest of the work. On the demo-CD I have provided an example of how this might work for John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and The Subjection of Women, and for Shakespeare's Henry V both of which have additional links to either audio or video clips.

Screen snapshot 8: OLL key passages in Mill's On Liberty

More experienced users of websites and online libraries might prefer to use more sophisticated entry points into the collection, such as a traditional online catalogue or search engine of some kind. One of the largest digital libraries on the WWW is the French Bibliotheque Nationale's Gallica Project (with 15 million digitised pages, mainly from texts published in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries). Gallica's solution to the problem of navigating around a huge collection of digital texts is not perfect but it is worth examining closely. One starts at the home page, selects the catalogue from the menu items across the top of the page, searches for author or title or period or key word, and the results appear in a long list of items. One can click on other links to find more detailed bibliographic information about each item or one can examine the text itself. See Appendix III for additional screen snapshots of the Gallica website).

Screen snapshot 9: Gallica's frame of a Tocqueville text

Most of the texts are in facsimile PDF form which are very large files but they have the great advantage of letting researchers read copies of the "original" text. Reading is done via an arrangement of "frames", with a range of options across the top and the table of contents or list of page numbers down the left hand side. The large frame at the right is where the individual pages are displayed. One can choose to read the text page by page (where the server finds and displays the relevant page) but even this method can take some time for pages to download. Alternatively, one can choose to download groups of pages or even the entire book in one go. This is the method I prefer. I use the "single page at a time" method to see if the text is the one I want, or to find the chapter or section of the book I want. I then download the entire book or chapter to my own computer for viewing at a more convenient time and at a speed which is closer to the "normal" way one reads a book.

C. Searching the Texts Online

One of the main things which attracts readers to an online library, apart from the size of the collection, is the electronic tools which are available to aid the reader in their research. A printed book may have a table of contents and an index to help the reader find what they are looking for, but an online library with a sophisticated search engine can not only speed up the process of finding what one wants, it can also let the reader do things which were not possible before. For example, it is possible to do a key word search on more than one text at a time, say the complete works of Adam Smith and not just the Wealth of Nations. Or one could do a search on two different authors and compare the results.

The Econlib site has an excellent search engine which should also be used for the OLL site. Its attractions are its speed, the way it shows the results of the search in the surrounding paragraph thus contextualising the quotation, and the way in which it allows for the automatic creation of citations for later reference. It would be useful to build up a database of previous searches done on texts at the site which could be used to speed up searches (why redo a search on "natural liberty" in Smith when you could download the results of an earlier search on the same topic?) and to suggest to the searcher other, related search results (e.g. someone who requests a search on "natural liberty" in Smith might also be interested in seeing the results of a search on "natural liberty" in Hume).

D. The Use of Other/Multi-Media

The WWW also allows other material such as audio, video, art, and music to be integrated with text to create a much richer collection. What I have in mind is a combination of as many of the following media as possible, subject of course to its applicability to any particular text:

• audio - in my demo CD-ROM I have linked some of the key passages in Mill's On Liberty to audio files with me reading out the passage in question. (See the screen snapshot in another section of this Report). We could employ a professional actor to do this, or we could invite scholars who are acknowledged experts on the author to comment on and/or read out their favourite passages. Alternatively, there are many companies which produce "audio books" some of which may be interested in licensing the Liberty Fund to put extracts of some of their texts online. One such company, Knowledge Products, has used the work of George Smith and has numerous classical liberal titles currently available on cassette.
• video - in the case of Shakespeare's play Henry V on the demo-CD I have illustrated key passages in the text with "quotes" from Laurence Olivier's film version of the play from 1944. The idea is that not only can readers read the relevant passage from the third quarto edition, or a modern edition in HTML, they can see and hear the passage being acted out on film.

Screen snapshot 10: OLL key passage and video extract of Henry V

• music - I was very pleased to see on the Goodrich List a number of musical genres such as Roman Chants and Reformation Chorales. To illustrate the possibilities of multi-media treatment of these texts I have used on the demo-CD the words of one of Luther's hymns which are linked to an extract of Bach's cantata.

Screen snapshot 11: OLL Luther's hymn with link to audio extract

• art - there is no art mentioned on the Goodrich list but I think its presence would be in keeping with the broad cultural and interdisciplinary nature of the list overall. We could certainly use images of portraits or photographs of the main authors whose texts we will be putting online. With the Board's approval much more could be explored in this direction, namely the use of art to express ideas and values in keeping with the idea of individual and political liberty. The example I have used in the demonstration CD are the illustrations to the Duc de Berry's Book of Hours which inspired the design of some of the scenery in Olivier's film of Henry V.

Screen snapshot 12: OLL intro to Shakespeare's Henry V with artwork

To use these supplements to the texts visitors to the site will have to have the correct software, usually a free plugin for their browser such as Quicktime, RealAudio, or Adobe Acrobat. We can provide links to the source of these software plugins so that visitors can download the necessary software if they need it. I have provided some of these plugins and readers on the CD-ROM which accompanies this Report.

E. Acquiring the Texts

i. Acquiring the Digital Rights to the Texts

By "acquiring" the texts I mean both the way in which the reader can acquire a copy of the text and how the Liberty Fund can acquire the digital rights to texts which it wishes to put online. Since the bulk of the texts on the "Goodrich List" were published before the 20^th century they are in the public domain and can be reprinted without legal difficulty. Furthermore, many but by no means all of the texts have been digitised and have been put online already. Sites such as the Project Gutenberg have many of the texts online in very, very basic HTML form and these can be copied and "reworked" without need to get copyright permission (although I do state on my own website where I have got the text from as a matter of courtesy and as the normal, scholarly way of citing one's sources). Other academic repositories of texts (like Gallica at the Bibliotheque Nationale) freely make available online many non-copyrighted texts.  I think that at the initial stage of the project we should make use of these freely available already existing digital texts which are not copyrighted. This will permit a rapid growth of the OLL at minimal cost.

As for the texts on the List which have not been digitised before, we will have to begin looking for a suitable edition to digitise (preferably an out of copyright 18^th or 19^th century edition). It will then cost us to have the text scanned and converted into HTML text or PDF. The texts on the "Goodrich List" thus need to be prioritised and a schedule of digitisation drawn up for those texts which have not been already digitised elsewhere.

ii. Distributing the Texts to the Reader

We should give some thought to how the average visitor to the OLL may wish to acquire the texts and how we can make this as easy as possible. There are three ways in which the reader might acquire the texts they want:

• By purchasing the printed book
• By purchasing the e-text on a CD-ROM
• By downloading the e-text directly to their PC or e-book reader

In some cases a text in the OLL will also be a text we carry in the catalogue of printed books (such as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations). When this occurs, we should make it as easy as possible for the reader to order that book online. There should be links to the book catalog so the reader can see what is available and at what price. Many online stores have a "shopping cart" arrangement to facilitate online purchases and this is something which the Liberty Fund might consider for the future. It is increasingly the practice to make a link from a book mentioned online (e.g. Joe Stromberg's column at mises.org or rockwell.com ) to a bookseller such as amazon.com or Laissez-Faire Books where the text can be purchased online. For books in the OLL which are not in the book catalog something similar could be done.

The Liberty Fund should also consider publishing collections of the e-texts on CD-ROM. It would be possible to put the entire "Goodrich List" onto a small number of CDs which individuals could purchase in order to have their own "Library of Liberty Classics". We could squeeze the "Top 50" texts onto one CD (even more if they were only in HTML and not PDF) and distribute it free of charge to all school libraries across the country to make sure that school children had access to pro-liberty material. There would be links on the CD to the Liberty Fund website to encourage readers to explore the complete online library and to purchase material in the catalogue.

In the future, I believe publishing will increasingly be done "on demand". Books will be stored in electronic form and only printed when an order arrives. This system has the advantage of drastically lowering the need for inventory and of keeping all titles "in print" for longer. It will also allow for the more flexible delivery of the texts. The purchaser or reader can choose to have the text in printed form, as an e-text on a CD-ROM (burnt to order), or as an e-text downloaded to a dedicated reader or to their PC. The OLL project should keep the future direction of publishing in mind as the site is being designed. We should be able to take advantage of these changes in publishing as they develop as long as we have designed the flexible delivery of texts into the library from the very beginning.

F. The Site's Relationship to other Liberty Fund Activities

The OLL site needs to be fully integrated with the other activities of the Liberty Fund. Links to the book catalog and from the catalog to the OLL site will make it easier for readers to purchase the text if they wish to, or to alert them to the fact that related or similar texts are for sale.

The status of Econlib needs to be clarified. It may evolve into the "economics only" branch of the project or, as I would prefer, it should be absorbed into the larger OLL project. In the meantime there needs to be consistency of design and appearance in the two sites and readers should be able to go back and forth easily between the two. Ideally there should be only one search engine covering all texts (if only to save readers from learning two different procedures and two different ways of navigating around the sites).

The OLL site should be fully integrated with the staff intranet as I believe the site will be a useful research tool for the Fellows. I believe they should be encouraged to contribute material for the site whether in the form of suggesting texts to be added, writing short introductions to the texts, recommending additional reading for bibliographies, or even allowing themselves to be recorded so that their commentaries on the texts can be put online.

I also see the OLL site assisting the conference program. There are some texts which are used repeatedly in conferences (for example, texts by Mill, Tocqueville, Locke, Smith, etc) because of their importance in the development of the idea of liberty and these texts should be put online as early as possible so that they can be used by conference organisers and participants. I foresee a time when texts will be distributed to conference participants in electronic form (perhaps on CD-ROM) and when they will be used during conferences to focus discussion around say a key passage or passages. The demo CD I did for a Liberty Fund Conference in September 2000 on "Liberty and Identity in Marlowe, Marx and Shakespeare" is an example of what might be done in this area.

Finally, the traditional book publishing branch of the Liberty Fund and the OLL need to have a close working relationship as they are both in the "book publishing business" and both serve the same end of furthering the spread of the idea of liberty. The aim should be eventually to have all new books published by the Liberty Fund appear in a printed paper form and in an online electronic form. Wherever possible the electronic publishing rights to books in the back catalogue should be acquired and those texts added to the OLL. I believe the activities of the two publishing branches will be complementary as each form of the text (whether printed or electronic) has its own advantages and disadvantages over the other. The printed form is compact, easy to hold and read, and is widely understood and accepted by readers. The electronic form is also compact, can be searched, is cheap to distribute, need not ever go out of print, and can be enriched with other media elements. My view is that for the foreseeable future books will exist in hybrid forms, both printed and electronic (CD and online) forms, and that readers will go back and forth between the two as their needs dictate. I also believe that the electronic form of the text can be used to sell more of the printed books. Not everybody will want to read online or download the electronic form of the text. They will use the electronic form for a specific purpose (review the text, search for a particular passage, etc) and then purchase the book if they want to have their own copy. Thus we should encourage this by advertising the availability of the printed books in the OLL and by making it as easy as possible to purchase these books. Many online stores have "shopping carts" for this purpose. Stores like amazon.com also suggest to their customers that they look at related or similar titles which other customers have purchased.

V. THE CONTENT OF THE SITE (STAGE ONE)

A. The "Great Books" of Liberty

Screen snapshot 13: OLL main page of the Goodrich List

The first stage of the project should be to put online as many titles on the Goodrich List as possible. The list includes just over 130 names, most of which are the names of authors, although there are a number of texts which are specifically mentioned such as the Bible or some American constitutional documents. (See Appendices I and II for the actual Goodrich List of texts). The individual works of the authors which Pierre Goodrich had in mind are not specified although one could assume that by listing Adam Smith he had in mind both the Wealth of Nations and the Theory of Moral Sentiments as texts which are a vital part of the historical tradition of liberty. Some authors were probably included on the list for only one relevant text which they wrote; many others for more than one text (e.g. which of Shakespeare's plays did Pierre Goodrich have in mind when he drew up the list?). The total number of texts which are encompassed by the Goodrich List is thus hard to determine but I would suggest that it numbers well over 200 individual works.

The texts on the Goodrich List make up a collection of "Great Books" on the idea of liberty. An analysis of the books on the List show that the 130 odd titles published before the 20^th century are drawn from the following disciplines:

• Legal codes and constitutions, e.g. the Hummurabi Code, the Constitution of the U.S.A.
• Religious thought, e.g. the Old Testament
• Literature, e.g. the plays of Shakespeare, epic poetry such as Beowulf
• Philosophy, e.g. Plato and Aristotle
• Political thought, e.g. Machiavelli, John Locke
• Science, e.g. Hippocrates, Copernicus, Newton
• History, e.g. Thucydides, Gibbon
• Legal thought, e.g. Coke, Blackstone, Grotius
• Music, e.g. Roman chant, Reformation chorale
• Economic thought, e.g. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill
• Dictionaries and language, e.g. Noah Webster, Liddel and Scott

The great strength of the Goodrich List lies in its broad temporal, geographic, and disciplinary spread. It ranges from 2,000BC to the 20^th century, from ancient China and India to modern Europe and America, and from literature and philosophy to political and economic thought. This strength is also a weakness, in that the diversity of material can make it difficult to show the newcomer what the connection is between these diverse texts which have been drawn from such a range of periods, places and disciplines. This, I think, places even more weight on the supporting material which we need to provide to help visitors navigate their way about the collection. In an earlier section I discussed the need for numerous "entry points" (author, theme, period, discipline) which would explain the theme or themes which tie the texts together and which provide links to the texts in the collection for further exploration of these themes.

I suggest that in the first year we begin the process of putting the Goodrich "great books of liberty" online by having 2-3 examples of each of the above 11 disciplines (for a total of 22-33 texts). This would show the interdisciplinary nature of the collection and prevent the OLL from being too top-heavy in one or more disciplines (such as economic or political thought). As time goes by more texts from each of the disciplines could be added and, in the areas of special depth such as political and economic thought, we could expand this after we have laid the broad, interdisciplinary foundations of the collection.

A brief survey I have done of other "Great Books" programs on the WWW shows how poorly this area of study is served. It suggests that there is a real niche which the OLL could fill quite quickly. The "Great Books" websites I visited were too often examples of the less attractive side of the WWW, namely they were lists of lists rather than content-rich sites themselves. (See a section of Appendix III for an example of such a Great Books website). Too often they provided a list of some "great books" (the selection criteria for which was usually not specified), sometimes with links to other sites where online versions of the texts could be found, and never with any supportive, explanatory, or educational material with which the reader could use to make sense of the texts in the list. Where the Liberty Fund's "Great Books of Liberty" program would rise above the competition on the WWW is in the following areas:

• The texts would be provided "in-house" and not stored elsewhere on the WWW. Hence the format and presentation of the texts would be consistent and would be at the high level one has come to expect from Liberty Fund publications.
• The texts would be linked by common, scholarly tools (such as the search engine) and by the supportive material (such as the mini-essays and bibliographies on authors, themes and disciplines described above)
• The texts would be much more than the plain vanilla online texts commonly found on the WWW. The Liberty Fund's "great books" would be enriched by the scholarly tools and the supportive educational material mentioned above, as well as by the multi-media enhancements of audio, video and art work.

The final product would an online text collection which would further the goals of the Liberty Fund and which would serve the needs of scholars, teacher, students and other persons interested in studying the idea of liberty.

B. Multiple Versions of Each Text

"All texts are created equal, but some texts are more equal than others."

The needs of scholars, teachers, students, and general readers are not the same when it comes to deciding what version of any given text to read. The scholar writing a chapter of a book or an article might what to read the first English translation of Tocqueville's Democracy in America in order to understand how contemporaries may have understood what Tocqueville was saying. He or she then may want to check that translation against the original French edition and then compare that to the latest, authoritative, modern English translation. The teacher choosing texts for a survey course on the history of economic or political thought will want a cheap, easy to read, accessible, and accurate edition to give to his or her students. The student or general reader will want a cheap, easy to read edition which has some explanatory material to assist them in reading what may appear to be a difficult, obscure and intimidating text. Therefore, we need to think carefully about what kinds of texts we plan to include in the OLL.

In my view, the falling cost of online storage (cents/byte), the increasing speed of domestic connections to the WWW, and the ease of hyperlinking documents on the WWW now mean that it is possible to have multiple editions of any text in an online collection and we should plan to have this in the OLL from the very beginning. Each different edition of the text as has its own strengths and weakness for different types of readers such as scholars and general readers. The main forms of online texts are the following:

• facsimile PDF (Adobe's Portable Document Format  - viewable in one's browser by using a free Acrobat Reader and PDFViewer plugin) - this is a format which preserves the look of the original document even when viewed on different computers. It is possible to scan an original edition of a book (say the 1^st French translation of Grotius' Law of War and Peace) and convert it into a PDF facsimile of the original. Such a facsimile of the first edition is important for scholars who want to see and use the original but who cannot afford to go one of the major research libraries which has a copy (even if that institution  were willing to allow all readers to actually handle and view the original, often fragile text). Publicly available PDF editions therefore make first editions of rare books accessible to a much greater readership throughout the world.

Screen snapshot 14: OLL example of PDF text - Grotius

• GIFF or JPG images - these are common formats on the WWW for images. Some documents are scanned and converted into images (each page is a separate image file) which can be viewed or downloaded online. For example, the Furness Shakespeare Library at the University of Pennsylvania allows readers to view pages of the original editions of Shakespeare's plays in this format. The University of Michigan's Making of America digital book program (concentrating on mainly 19^th century American books and journals) also provides images of pages in this format (see the pages from Webster''s Dictionary on my demo-CD for examples of this)

Screen snapshot 15: OLL example of image of text (Webster's Dictionary)

• HTML - The benefits of HTML files (the most common format for texts on the WWW) are that they are much more compact than PDF files and so are quicker to download; they are able to be searched for key words, they allow for rapid movement within the text and between texts by means of hyperlinks, and they are very flexible in the way they can be formatted and displayed. The disadvantages are that they are not formatted consistently, thus making it impossible to have an authoritative edition of a text which can be cited by reference to a specific "page", as scholars usually wish to do, because every computer and browser formats "pages" in its own way. Bartleby.com's solution to the problem of academic citation of HTML texts is to number each paragraph of each chapter so that one cites the text like a verse from the Bible, e.g. Mill, On Liberty, Chapter 1, para. 28.

Screen snapshot 16: OLL example of HTML text (Mill) with numbered paragraphs

The solution to the problem of what version of a text should be put online is, in my view, to have multiple, even parallel editions of all texts available for the different types of readers who may wish to use the site and for the different needs individual readers might have for the texts. The use of parallel editions of texts was pioneered by the great Reformation scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his parallel edition of the Bible - with original Greek on one page, faced by his elegant Latin translation on the other (all of course copiously and thoughtfully annotated in marginalia). I have supplied an example of what I have in mind in the demo-CD where I have created a parallel edition of Shakespeare's play Henry V.

Screen snapshot 17: OLL frame of parallel edition (Henry V)

A facsimile of the third quarto edition is displayed on the left with links to a modern HTML edition of the play on the right. I have another example of a parallel edition of a text which I prepared for a Liberty Fund Conference in September 2000 in Canberra, Australia on "Liberty and Identity in Marlowe, Marx and Shakespeare". Here there are three, side-by-side editions of the Merchant of Venice.

In both examples, the reader can view a facsimile of the first edition and see it as contemporaries did (old spelling being one of the "joys" of reading such texts), and at the same time view a modern, searchable HTML edition in an adjoining window. The possibilities for scholarship of this method of viewing and comparing texts are considerable. The Furness Shakespeare Library recognises this but has not been able to put it successfully into practice because of its ugly and confusing way of handling parallel texts. (See the screen snapshot of this elsewhere in this Report). But this is a technical problem in the execution of the idea - not a problem in the idea itself. The Liberty Fund's OLL can overcome this design problem and provide a modern version of Erasmus' beautiful and scholarly useful parallel edition of the Bible.

C. Supporting Material to Add Value to the Texts

i. Introductory Essays

I believe one of the most important contributions the OLL can make to the study of liberty is the interpretive framework which we provide to support the bare texts. Many of these texts will be available elsewhere, either online or in printed format. What these versions of the texts lack is a supporting structure which encourages the reading of the texts in a pro-liberty light. This is, after all, the purpose of the scholarly introductions to the printed editions of the LibertyClassics, to provide such an interpretive framework. The same thing should hold for the online versions of the texts. For the OLL I propose that every text be accompanied by a brief biography of the author, a photo or other depiction of them, a list of their main texts and links to those texts where we have them online. The biography should list the main contribution of the author to the development of the idea of liberty, their relationship to other authors in this tradition, and it should place the author in the historical context in which they wrote. There should also be a brief bibliography of recommended reading (especially any LibertyClassics titles) and links to other websites for those readers who wish to deepen their knowledge of the author and the text.

Screen snapshot 18: OLL Introductory Essay on Mill

For newcomers to the author or to the text there should also be a list of key passages with links to the online version of the text. The examples I use in the demonstration CD are John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Shakespeare's Henry V.

Screen snapshot 19: OLL key passages in Henry V with links

For both texts I have drawn up a list of about a dozen key passages which exemplify the author's view of liberty or political power or individual responsibility. A reader could peruse the list of key passages to get an overview of the author's attitude to these topics, then they could click on the link to take them to the text in question where the key passage is highlighted in bold and can be seen in the context of the surrounding text. Or they could click on the link to an audio file to hear the passage in question read out or a video file to see a clip of a film where that passage is acted out. This then helps them explore the deeper meaning of the key passage in question and encourages them to read beyond it, perhaps to read the entire chapter. For students who may not ever read the entire text the key passages provide a short-cut to the ideas expressed in the text. For academics, the key passages would provide a useful teaching resource for their students who may feel overwhelmed by the complexity and difficult language of some of the older texts.

In addition to the biographies, I believe there should be a selection of "Study Guides" to assist readers finding their way around  the OLL.

Screen snapshot 20: OLL main page for Study Guides

These "Study Guides" would be brief essays on key events or historical periods, say essays on the Enlightenment, or the American Revolution, or the French Revolution (the example provided on the demonstration CD), or the Free Trade movement of the 19^th century, and their purpose would be to provide another way to introduce readers to the idea of liberty. The essays would include a brief discussion of the historical background, the key figures involved, the ideas which were debated, the contribution of the event or period to the development of liberty, a bibliography of recommended reading, and links to the online texts. I envisage that about a dozen or so such Study Guides on key events or periods would be sufficient to cover the main historical moments in the development of ideas about liberty and would thus provide useful entry points to the online collection of texts.

ii. Multi-Media Material

What distinguishes the WWW from traditional printed forms of the texts is the possibility of adding audio, video, and other interactive components to enhance the reading of the text. This not only considerably enriches the bare texts but also provides a mechanism for engaging the reader in an educational dialogue with other readers of the text. We can highlight key passages which provide insights into the nature of liberty by the deepest thinkers in the liberty tradition by literally putting the text in bold (as I propose we do with the hyperlinked key passages) and by linking those passages to audio or video files. For example, we could have a scholar (or professional actor) read out the key passages in order to bring the text "alive" to the reader. I have done this with a number of passages in Mill's On Liberty with my own admittedly alien sounding "Aussie" accent. Alternatively, we could link the key passages to a film of the text in order to both hear and see the text in question. I have provided an example of this with Shakespeare's Henry V where I have linked the key passages to the online text as well as to extracts from the 1944 film by Laurence Olivier. (See the screen snapshot elsewhere in this Report). Thus, the reader can literally see and hear the key passages where ideas about political power, liberty and individual responsibility are played out. It would be worth investigating what the cost would be of paying professional actors to record these key passages, or acquiring the digital rights from companies which distribute classic films or which already produce "audio books" in our area of interest.

Another aspect of multi-media which would considerably enhance the impact of the printed text on the reader is music. We should build upon the musical genres specifically mention in the Goodrich List by including other examples where classical liberal ideas had a profound impact on musical culture: such as the music of the Enlightenment (Mozart), the American and French Revolutions ("La Marseillaise"), and the early Romantic period (Beethoven). An example I use on the demo CD is Schiller's poem "Ode to Joy/Freedom" (Ode "An die Freude/Freiheit") which Beethoven put to music in his 9^th Symphony.

Screen snapshot 21: OLL page for Schiller's poem with link to music extract

A key aspect of the liberty tradition is its multi-disciplinary dimension involving literature, political philosophy, economic thought, art, music and history. The OLL gives us an opportunity to show the interdisciplinary nature of this tradition by linking texts of various kinds. On the demo CD I have examples of the Reformation hymns written by Luther linked to the music of Bach; and the poetry of Schiller linked to the music of Beethoven (the "Ode to Joy/Freedom" in the 9^th symphony). I believe it is important to show our readers that liberty is not just dry political or economic thought but is a vital part of human artistic creativity in art, music, and literature.

iii. Course Syllabi

The texts in the OLL will provide a rich teaching resource for professors and students in the areas of the history of political thought, law and economic thought. Having some Course Syllabi online would help open up the collection to more users. A model for this is the Freedom Project sponsored by the Atlas Foundation and the Templeton Foundation where grant recipients for courses on liberty put up their syllabi.

Screen snapshot 22 : Freedom Project Course Syllabus

We could ask friends and associates of the Liberty Fund who teach in these areas to let us make links to their course websites or to assist us in developing some "model" course syllabi or our own. These syllabi would not just be a list of weekly recommended reading but would also include links to the actual texts (or at least extracts of them). The OLL could provide the entire teaching resources for such courses (such as recommended reading, bibliographies, extracts of texts, or even complete texts) perhaps online or for sale or distribution on CD-ROM.

iv. Interactive Components of the Site

The WWW makes it possible to offer more than just the presentation online of texts. There are numerous ways visitors to the OLL can engage in conversations with us and with other visitors to the site. The range of such interactive components on the WWW is quite extensive and what will work best with a site like the OLL remains to be determined. I believe a range of interactive activities should be trialled to see what suites our particular needs and the needs of our visitors. At the simplest level, there are regular emails to those who "sign up" as "friends" of the Liberty Fund. Econlib already has such a program of regular mail outs and this should be continued. Econlib sends out regular announcements of new texts which have been put online, new introductory essays (such as the one on Frédéric Bastiat), and online discussions with featured scholars (not so successful). A number of websites post weekly articles and encourage readers to post comments on those articles in the form of a "list server". Other sites have "colloquia" or forums on special topics with the initial discussion started by a guest commentator or academic who also responds to the comments of the readers within a short time period (2-3 days). Other sites have a "frequently asked questions" section (FAQ) where visitors can go to have their most basic questions answered before having to engage in any formal "conversation" with a member of the Liberty Fund. It may be possible to allow "side comments" or other commentaries to be posted on any of the texts we place online. A reader of any given text can post a comment on any given passage or section of the work with a marker being created to alert other readers of the text to the fact that a previous reader has commented on this part of the text. They can read earlier readers' comments and add their own. Over time what is created is a dynamic and growing commentary on the text which reflects the interests and concerns of the readers. I would also like to invite scholars and academics sympathetic to the liberty tradition to list online their top 10 or 20 classic texts, with justifications for why they have chosen those texts, a list of their favourite passages in those texts, and perhaps some audio commentary explaining their choices. These lists of favourite texts would be linked to the OLL so that readers could see for themselves why they have been chosen by the scholar in question. It would also show the diversity of texts which have influenced scholars of liberty, the interdisciplinary nature of the liberty tradition, and it would provide a guided reading list for those wishing to deepen their knowledge of liberty.

VI. THE POSSIBILITIES FOR FUTURE EXPANSION (STAGE TWO AND BEYOND)

A. Stage Two: Filling Out the Goodrich List

• The website needs to be designed from the very beginning with expandability in mind. The OLL should be gradually expanded to include as many of the following texts as resources allow:
• As many as possible of the names on the Goodrich List should have at least one text online as an example of that person's contribution to the development of the idea of liberty
• For many authors on the List more than one of their works needs to be part of the OLL. The Goodrich List could be "filled out" as more of an individual author's work is digitised and placed online. The authors and texts need to be prioritised so that this process can proceed in an orderly fashion.
• For those authors on the list whose work appeared as part of a broader debate it would be very useful to scholars to have online the associated texts as well, so they can compare and contrast the ideas and arguments of the various parties. There are a number of such "clusters" of texts which could be included in the OLL: the Federalist vs. Anti-Federalist debate about the nature of the American constitution; the debate about the French Revolution which involved Priestly, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Paine and others

B. Stage Three: Adding to the Goodrich List

As useful as the Goodrich List is as a "core" of Great Books on liberty, there are other titles and authors not on the List which should be added to the OLL. For example, there are some surprising omissions from the list - Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant, Herbert Spencer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Delacroix, and others. I believe each of these individuals made important contributions to the development of the idea of liberty or who expressed the value of liberty in their creative work.

The back catalogue of LibertyClassics is another source of texts which should be part of the OLL. As many of these texts as possible (given the current ownership of the digital rights to things like the scholarly introductions) should be put online and integrated into the collection. Some will be stand alone texts and others could be part of a "cluster" of texts as described above. One very suitable candidate for a cluster of texts is the 1981 LibertyClassic edition of Thomas Mackay's collection of essays A Plea for Liberty (1891) which was a response to the Fabian socialist collection of essays Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889). Mackay later published another collection  called A Policy of Free Exchange (1894) which has never been republished. Taken together, these texts in the debate between free market individualists and Fabian socialists constitute an important period in the decline of market liberalism and the rise of socialist thought in the late 19^th century. I believe scholars would find such a "cluster" of texts, introduced by a short essay and with links to key passages, a very useful resource as they place the texts in their historical context and make available very hard to find texts. There are other texts in the Liberty Fund back catalogue which could also be used in this way.

As additional authors and texts are added to the OLL they need to linked into the existing structure of the website. This can be done in a number of ways. Where the text is an additional text of an author who is already on the List and for whom there is already a biography, the link to the new text is just added to the Biography. Authors who are not included on the original list will have to have their own Biography page and links to their texts will have to added to the other supporting material (such as the essays on key historical periods or events or disciplines). All of the authors and titles of texts will also be available via the search engine.

As new authors and texts are added to the OLL it is still important, I believe, to preserve the integrity of the Goodrich List of great books on liberty. This could be done by keeping the separate page which I have termed "The List". This lists all the texts and authors on the Goodrich List and will have links to all the online texts as they become available. We can add material to the introduction of this page, such as a brief biography of Pierre Goodrich, a statement of his aims in drawing up the list and in founding the Liberty Fund (in the demonstration CD I have included a page from a booklet published by the Liberty Fund with some of this information), and so on.

Another way to preserve the integrity of the List is to indicate in some way throughout the OLL which author or texts is part of the original List (perhaps with a special icon for this purpose). A smaller version of the cuneiform image might serve this function quite well. Thus, as the collection grows it will still be clear to visitors which texts were part of the original list and which ones have been added subsequently.

C. Stage Four: New Projects of Major Scholarly Importance

The strength of the OLL Project will be its comprehensiveness, i.e. the depth and breath of its coverage of the liberty tradition. I believe its major draw card 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 such as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Most scholars 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 OLL 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 OLL a most valuable research and educational resource which would be sought after by scholars all over the world. And as the OLL Project added other "Projects of Major Scholarly Importance" the value of the site to scholars would increase proportionally.

I suggest there are a number of candidates for these much larger digitisation projects which the Liberty Fund might consider adding to its OLL. Some of these collections exist already in printed form, on microfilm, and in a very few cases online. The task of the Liberty Fund would be to acquire the digital rights to these existing collections. Possible projects of this kind include:

• The complete works of such stellar thinkers as John Locke, Adam Smith (the Glasgow edition is already published in paper form by the Liberty Fund), Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Lord Acton
• A comprehensive collection of 18^th and 19^th century French and British political economy (many titles are already online at Gallica and McMaster University, and others are part of the August M. Kelley reprint series from the 1970s)
• A comprehensive collection of books, speeches and pamphlets in the 19^th campaigns to introduce free trade (Richard Cobden, John Bright, Frédéric Bastiat)
• A comprehensive collection of books and pamphlets (and art work) in the campaigns in Britain, France, and America to abolish the slave trade and slavery in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries.

VII. CREATING THE "ONLINE LIBRARY OF LIBERTY"

A. The Steps Required to Create the OLL

I  envisage an initial period of perhaps a year during which time we will concentrate on getting the core of the Goodrich List online, along with its supporting material, and on sorting out any technical or administrative problems. Since the WWW and the technologies associated with it are changing at breakneck speed it is imperative that we then begin implementing stage 2 ('filling out" the Goodrich List), stage 3 (adding to the Goodrich List), and stage 4 (new projects of scholarly significance) concurrently if we wish to create a repository of liberty texts of world class significance. Getting stage 4 up and running as quickly as possible is vital if we wish to be recognised as one of the leading, scholarly sources of online texts for teaching and research.

I believe the "new projects of scholarly significance" are especially important for two reasons. First, an online version of the complete works of leading classical liberal thinkers like Adam Smith (University of Glasgow and Oxford) or John Stuart Mill (University of Toronto Press) would be of enormous benefit to scholars and students already sympathetic to the Liberty Fund's worldview (namely, free markets, limited government, and individual liberty). It would provide them with the tools and resources they need to make a name for themselves in the scholarly world by writing important pieces of research based on these texts. Secondly, it would appeal to other scholars not so sympathetic to our worldview but who nevertheless regard these thinkers as important in the overall history of economic or political thought. The "new projects of scholarly significance" would attract these less sympathetic scholars to the Liberty Fund website because of its very existence and the tools we provide to add value to the texts. Their visits to our website thus provide us with an opportunity to reach a broader audience, to encourage them to purchase books from the catalog, to explore the connections between the texts which we have established in the Introductory Essays and Study Guides, and to inform them about the Liberty Fund's conference program. The OLL would thus be an important component in the Liberty Fund's outreach program.

To put online the complete works of thinkers like Smith and Mill will require considerable planning. The Liberty Fund has already successfully negotiated with the University of Glasgow and Oxford University Press to publish in book form the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. Something similar should be done for the digital publishing rights, perhaps again in a cooperative venture. Given the serious economic plight of many academic and university publishers, they may be more willing than we might expect to receive outside funding to undertake joint projects like the ones I am proposing. With authors whose complete works have never been published before (e.g. Lord Acton) the Liberty fund could create a name for itself in being the first to do so in any form, and particularly to be the first to take advantage of the multi-media and hyperlinking possibilities provided by the WWW.

There are several significant digitisation projects underway at the moment by world-leading research and national libraries, such as Oxford University, the British Library, Gallica at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan, and the Library of Congress. I think the Liberty Fund should have as its aim to create a world-class digital library in the general area of the history of economic, legal and political thought, but with a special focus on the theme of liberty. I think it should be one of the tasks of the Director of the OLL Project to visit as soon as possible these leading digital library projects and to discuss with them the possibilities of collaborative arrangements, the sharing of technical expertise, the avoidance of unnecessary duplication, and problems of website design and usability.

B. The Resources Required to Create the OLL

The OLL Project will need financial and technical support in the following areas:

• Internal Server and Network - more demands will be placed on the Liberty Fund's server and network as the website is expanded. Considerable storage space will be required to host the online texts. Software for the search engine, the list server or other communication software will have to be installed and maintained.
• Website design - We will need to have access to professional website designers to ensure that the website looks good and works well, given some of the complex things we wish the site to accomplish. Consistency in style and appearance across the OLL, Econlib and the book publishing division needs to be ensured. Any interactive aspects we might wish the website to have will have to be carefully designed and will have to fit in with the technical limitations of the server and network. The appropriate web editing software will have to be purchased.
• Multi-media Creation - As art work, images, sound and video files will play an important role in the Project we will have to have access to skilled users of graphics, audio and video technology and software. It is important that we have the highest quality material online and that it be in a format (or formats) which makes it possible for the largest number of visitors to access it online.
• Scanning and Digitisation of Texts - Professional scanners will be needed to convert the printed texts into TIFF or PDF formats. Optical character recognition software will have to be used to convert the scanned image into HTML text. Editing the OCRed material and correcting the numerous errors which will appear will be time consuming and onerous, but it is one of the most important tasks in the entire process of putting a text online. Much care will have to be taken to ensure the same standards of presentation and accuracy which exist in the printed books are carried over into the OLL. Many of the texts we scan will be available from the Liberty Fund's own library. Where this is not the case, we will have to buy a copy of the original text or arrange with a university or other research library to scan and digitise theirs.
• Editing and Proofreading Scanned Texts - As mentioned above, the editing and presentation of the e-texts will be a time-consuming but important task. The editing and design resources of the existing book publishing division of the Liberty Fund should be available to assist in the creation of the OLL. Their assistance will be especially needed when the back catalog of LibertyClassics titles is placed online. I also believe the Liberty Fund should explore the possibilities of publishing texts or collections of texts on CD-ROM as well as in book form.
• Administrative Support and Legal Advice - The Director of the OLL will need standard secretarial and office support to carry out his duties. In addition, legal advice will be needed from time to time in order to acquire the digital rights to some of the texts or to the supporting material (such as music, audio, images, film clips).
• Self-education and Training - What we are attempting to do is complicated by the fact that rapid technological change results in the technical obsolescence of hardware and software every 12 months or so. We will need access to the latest hardware and software so that we can stay ahead of a rapidly changing field. The digitisation of texts is also proceeding at a very fast rate among leading university and national libraries and archives. Many traditional book publishers are also exploring the commercial possibilities of e-books. Thus, part of the Director's self-education and training should consist of getting in touch with leaders in the fields of the digitisation of texts and electronic publishing. It would be worth while organising trips from time to time to visit the top research libraries to see first hand how these institutions are coping with the online, digital revolution. Attending conferences in these areas would also be of considerable value.

C. Conclusion

I believe that the Online Library of Liberty will become one of the world's leading digital libraries in the area of the history of political, economic, and legal thought. Its unique strengths will lie in the comprehensiveness of its online collection, the authoritative scholarly editions of the texts, the interdisciplinary nature of the collection, its focus on liberty as the underlying theme which ties all the texts together, and its use of cutting edge technology to make the texts more useful to scholars and students .

The OLL will be able to serve the needs of several groups such as scholars doing research, teachers planning a course on the history of political or economic thought, and college students and other interested users who wish to explore the idea of liberty in the great books we will put online.

The OLL will also assist the Liberty Fund in fulfilling its charter of disseminating ideas about liberty to scholars and the broader community. The OLL can reach a huge, world-wide audience via the WWW, it will permit new ways of supplying texts to users in electronic form, and it can be used in conjunction with the conference program to communicate with the participants and to supply them with the texts they need for the discussion.

If all of these aims can be achieved, the OLL will be a very powerful tool for the dissemination of ideas about liberty and it is my desire to make this happen in the next few years.

VIII. APPENDIX I: THE PIERRE GOODRICH LIST OF TEXTS

A. Introduction

What I have called the "Goodrich List" is actually made up of the following four lists: the Wabash Reading List, the Liberty Fund Basic Memorandum List, the Education Memorandum Book List, and the Goodrich Seminar Room list. They can be categorised in various ways, such as by subject area or discipline as the following shows:

• Legal codes and constitutions, e.g. the Hummurabi Code, the Constitution of the U.S.A.
• Religious thought, e.g. the Old Testament
• Literature, e.g. the plays of Shakespeare, epic poetry such as Beowulf
• Philosophy, e.g. Plato and Aristotle
• Political thought, e.g. Machiavelli, John Locke
• Science, e.g. Hippocrates, Copernicus, Newton
• History, e.g. Thucydides, Gibbon
• Legal thought, e.g. Coke, Blackstone, Grotius
• Music, e.g. Roman chant, Reformation chorale
• Economic thought, e.g. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill
• Dictionaries and language, e.g. Noah Webster, Liddel and Scott

Below, the texts are categorized by chronologically or by historical period as they were on the original list. It would also be useful to be able to sort the list according to a variety of criteria such as by author's name, by period, by country, by discipline, and so forth. Other information which should be included as part of the main list is life span of the author, main works, and links to other resources related to that text or author.

B. The Ancient World (Near East, India, Asia)

• Ur-Nammu Code
• Urukagina
• Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2000 BC)
• Hammurabi Code (c. 1790 BC)
• Rigveda (c. 1500-1000 BC)
• Mahabharata (c. 400 BC - 200 AD)
• Shin Ching
• Upanishads (c. 800-500 BC)
• The Bible (Old Testament)
  • Moses
  • Exodus
  • Deuteronomy
  • Psalms
  • I Kings
  • II Samuel
  • Amos
  • Hosea
  • Micah
  • Isaiah
  • Jeremiah
• Job
• Zarathustra
• Lao Tzu (c. 570 BC)
• Buddah
• Confucius (c. 551-479 BC)
• Mo Tzu
• Mencius
• Bhagavadgita (c. 200 BC)

C. The Ancient World (Greece)

• Homer (c. 9thC BC)
• Hesiod (c. 700 BC)
• Thales
• Aeschylus (c. 525-456 BC)
• Sophocles (c. 495-406 BC)
• Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC)
• Socrates (?469-399 BC)
• Hippocrates (c. 460-377? BC)
• Plato (c. 427-347 BC)
• Euclid (c. 365-300 BC)
• Aristotle (384-322 BC)
• Archimedes (c. 287-212 BC)

D. The Ancient World (Rome)

• Cicero (106-43 BC)
• Virgil (70-19 BC)
• The Bible (New Testament) (48-130 AD)
  • Jesus Christ
  • Matthew
  • Mark
  • Luke
  • John
  • Paul
• Plutarch (c. 45-125)
• Epictetus (c. 60-120)
• Tacitus (c. 55-117)
• Gaius, The Institutes (150 AD)
• Claudius Ptolemy (c. 127-145)
• Galen of Pergamum (c. 129-199)
• Origen (185-253)
• Plotinus (205-270)
• Ambrose (339-97)
• St. Augustine (354-430)

E. The Medieval Period

• Kalidasa 400)
• Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (470?-524)
• Benedict
• Roman Chant
• Mohammed
• Bede (673-735)
• Beowulf (c. 700-750)
• Rhazes
• Avicenna (980-1057)
• The Saga of Burnt Njal (c. 13thC)
• St. Anselm (1033-1109)
• Al Ghazali (1059-1111)
• Averroes
• Maimonides (1135-1204)
• Francis of Assisi
• Heimskringla
• Magna Carta (1215)
• St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274)

F. The Renaissance and Reformation

• Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
• Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374)
• John Wyclife (c.1328-84)
• Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400)
• Groot
• Gerard Zerboldt
• Jan Hus (1371?-1415)
• Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498)
• Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536)
• Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
• Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471)
• Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527)
• Martin Luther (1483-1546)
• Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560)
• Zwingli
• Robinson
• John Calvin (1509-1564)
• Richard Hooker (c.1554-1600)
• Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
• Reformation Chorale

G. The Early Modern Period

• Coke
• William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
• William Bradford
• Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
• Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
• George Fox
• James Harrington (1611-77)
• John Locke (1632-1704)
• Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677)
• John Milton (1608-1674)
• Hugo Grotius (1583-1645)
• Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

H. The 18th Century

• Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
• Voltaire (1694-1778)
• Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
• John Woolman
• David Hume (1711-1776)
• Blackstone
• Adam Smith (1723-1790)
• Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
• Edmund Burke (1729-1797)
• Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
• Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)
• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and the Declaration of Independence
• John Jay (1745-1829), James Madison (1751-1836), Alexander hamilton (1757-1804), Federalist Papers
• U.S. Constitution
• Convention Records

I. The 19th Century

• Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)
• Jermey Bentham (1748-1832)
• Noah Webster (1758-1843)
• Henry Liddel (1811-1898) and Robert Scott
• John Stuart Mill (1806-1859)
• Burkhardt
• Acton
• Boehm-Bawerk

J. The 20th Century

• Leichtentritt
• Roscoe Pound
• Ludwig von Mises
• Leonard Read
• Dean Russell
• Richard M. Weaver
• Friedrich Hayek
• Henry Hazlitt
• Felix Morely
• Wilhelm von Roepke
• Pierre Goodrich
• Andrew Dickson White
• Gottfried Dietze

IX. APPENDIX II: THE VARIOUS LISTS WHICH MAKE UP THE GOODRICH LIST

X. APPENDIX III: IMAGES OF OTHER WEBSITES

A. University of Virginia Electronic Text Center

i. Homepage

ii. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

B. The Perseus Project at Tufts University

i. Homepage

ii. Table of Contents

iii. A Page from Aristotle's Politics

iv. Another Page from Aristotles Politics

C. Project Gutenberg

i. Homepage

ii. Plain Vanilla Text - Machiavelli's The Prince

D. The Gallica Project at the Bibliothèque Nationale

i. Homepage

ii. The Catalogue

iii. The Results of a Search - Tocqueville

iv. The Frame Structure of the Text

E. The Furness Shakespeare Library at U. Penn

i. Homepage

ii. The Frame Structure with a Facsimile Page of The Tempest

iii. A Frame Structure with Parallel Editions

F. Our Own Econlib

i. Homepage

ii. The Table of Contents

iii. The Table of Contents for Bastiat

iv. A Page from Bastiat

G. McMaster University History of Economic Thought

i. Homepage

H. A Great Books Site

i. Homepage

I. The Freedom Project (Atlas and Templeton Foundations)

i. Course Syllabi

J. The Making of America, University of Michigan

i. Homepage

ii. A Search for "Dictionary"

iii. Webster's Dictionary

Endnotes

[1] Dr. David M. Hart, A Report on Creating an Online Library of Liberty (21 April, 2000). A copy of the earlier report as well as the present one can be found on the accompanying CD-ROM in MS Word and PDF formats.