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Last Updated: 2024, February 29
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Origins of the Scholarly Societies Project
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Date |
Development |
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1993, October
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The notion of creating a set of links to gophers of scholarly societies
was discussed by the Internet Resources Committee (IRC) of the University
of Waterloo Library.
It was pointed out that, in addition to the usefulness of such a resource
to the UW campus, it would represent a resource that the IRC could give to
the Internet in exchange for the valuable resources to which the UW
Library gopher made
links. The IRC approved the project.
Later that month a collection of about a half-dozen resources had been
assembled.
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| 1994, February 18 |
By February 18 1994, after several months of performing Veronica searches,
and monitoring announcements of new gophers, the number of gophers was
increased to 16. At this point, the collection was considered
rich enough to be announced to the public. Announcements were sent out
over various listservs and newsgroups. Some readers of this announcement
evidently cross-posted it to other listservs or newsgroups, so that the
total audience was even wider than originally expected. As a result,
Project staff were notified of several new resources.
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| 1994, March 9 |
The Chronicle of Higher Education article on the Project (p.A27) appeared. At the time, there were 20 gophers.
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| 1994, May 19 |
Prototype for WWW phase of the Project was developed. At the time, there were:
10 webpages and 42 gophers.
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| 1994, Summer |
By the summer of 1994, a WWW version of the Scholarly Societies Project
was being created.
After the first few months of the summer of 1994, the ratio of gophers to
webpages in the Project was about 2:1, and remained so for a couple of
months. But by November 1994, the ratio began to approach 1:1; the number
of new webpages was continuing at a steady rate, but the number of new
gophers had slowed considerably.
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| 1994, November 25 |
The WWW version was announced to the public over several
listservs and newsgroups. At the time, the Project had links to:
- 70+ webpages
- 100+ gophers
- 29 subject guides
- serial publications in full-text form
Soon after, Project staff were occupied in a flurry of
correspondence with readers of the announcement. As a result, a number of
new and interesting resources (virtually all webpages) were added.
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| 1994, December 17 |
There were 91 webpages.
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| 1995, January 5 |
100 webpages & 111 gophers
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| 1995, January (early) |
The Editor created a chronological listing for many, but not all, societies with webpages in the Project.
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| 1995, February 1 |
115 webpages
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| 1995, February 24 |
Another Chronicle of Higher Education article on the Project (p.A27) At the time, there were 123 webpages & 110 gophers.
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| 1995, March 1 |
The number of gophers was frozen at 117.
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| 1995, March 2 |
134 webpages & 117 gophers.
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| 1995 -1996 |
The Project went through a period of rapid growth, passing from 115 websites at the
end of January, 1995 to 968 websites at the
end of October, 1996 (less than 2 years later).
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| 1996, November 20 |
Late on the afternoon of Wednesday, November 20, 1996, a
milestone in the Scholarly Societies Project was passed when
the Editor added the 1000th society to the Scholarly
Societies Project.
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| 1999 (Summer) |
The Editor began to create a sub-project entitled the
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum
(Inventory of the Oldest Scholarly Societies), to contain society
information likely to be of special interest to historians.
This sub-project was restricted to societies founded up to and including
the year 1799.
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| 2000, Spring |
The Project acquired its own domain name,
www.scholarly-societies.org.
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| 2000, December 22 |
The Editor added the 2000th society website
to the Project.
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| 2001, Summer |
The Editor learned how to use the
Unicode Standard
to encode society names that require either the use of
diacritics, or non-Latin scripts, if they are to be properly displayed.
By the end of Summer, over 130 society names had been thus encoded in
non-Latin scripts.
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| 2002, September 13 |
The Editor added the 3000th society website
to the Project.
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| 2004, July 2 |
The Editor added the 4000th society
to the Project.
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| 2007, March |
At the age of 63, the Editor retired as a professional librarian at the University of Waterloo Library, where he had worked his entire career - from 1970 to 2007. With the kind permission of the Library he was permitted to continue to develop and maintain the Scholarly Societies Project.
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| 2011 March |
The Editor had become completely overwhelmed by the amount of time and energy required to fix broken URLS for the more than 4000 societies listed in the Project. He made the difficult decision to abandon work on this undertaking, which had already taken 18 years of his life, and had cost well in excess of 10,000 hours of work. Saying goodbye to this Project was devastating - especially to his beloved historical area - the
Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum
(Inventory of the Oldest Scholarly Societies).
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| 2024, January 1 |
But, in January 2024, that goodbye changed to a fare thee well when the Editor devised an ingenious plan to revive and continue the most valuable part of the Project - the Repertorium Veterrimarum Societatum Litterariarum. The solution to preventing Edition Two of the Project from collapsing a second time was to narrow its scope, whilst increasing the historical detail included.
And that is where matters stand at the moment, this 29th day of February, 2024.
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