CHAPEL HILL, NC – 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 Web sites 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 School of Journalism and Mass Communication 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.”
Jones has been on TechJournal South’s list of the most influential Southeast Internet experts and a participant at its Internet Summit.
TechJournal South editor and writer Allan Maurer has been an adjunct professor at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
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Tags: digital archive, ibiblio, Lulu.com, Paul Jones, Robert Young, Triangle Community Foundation, UNC Chapel Hill
