ibiblio receives $50,000 donation

ibiblio, the public’s library and digital archive, has received $50,000 from the Beal Fund of the Triangle Community Foundation on behalf of Lulu.com. Lulu.com is an open publishing resource that helps authors distribute their work for profit and helps buyers find the content they need. The gift was made to support ibiblio’s continued growth as one of the Internet’s largest public libraries.

“Public libraries serve the needs of our society that can’t be served through the markets,” said Robert Young, founder and CEO of Lulu.com. “The value of ibiblio is that it stores content and cultural icons that people don’t know how to monetize. Without storing such content, they may disappear from human experience.”

ibiblio.org, which will celebrate its 18th birthday in October, was one of the first websites on the Internet. It historically has been a pioneer in a number of areas, including Internet radio. Today, ibiblio is home to one of the largest “collection of collections” on the Internet and hosts nearly 2,500 non-software related projects.

“All the giving to ibiblio helps us reach out further and touch more people,” said Paul Jones, director of ibiblio and clinical associate professor at the School of Information and Library Science and the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We process anywhere from 12 to 16 million transactions per day on ibiblio.”

Jones said the $50,000 gift will be used to help ibiblio staff with upcoming projects, including a recent move in data centers and a shift to cloud computing.

“This gift comes at a very pivotal time for us since it will assist in our transition to a new, more affordable data center, which will ultimately save us thousands of dollars every year,” Jones said. “We are grateful to Lulu.com and to the Foundation for the generous support they’ve provided.”

About ibiblio:
ibiblio.org is one of the world’s first Web sites and largest “collections of collections” on the Internet. It is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics and cultural studies. ibiblio.org was formed as a collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's MetaLab, formerly known as SunSITE, and the Center for the Public Domain in September of 2000. At UNC at Chapel Hill, ibiblio is supported by the School of Information and Library Science, the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, Information Technology Services, the UNC at Chapel Hill Libraries, and the Office of the Executive Chancellor and Provost. ibiblio is housed in the School of Information and Library Science located in Manning Hall on the UNC at Chapel Hill campus.