Two score and twelve years ago, Michael Hart sat down at a terminal at the University of Illinois and typed in the text of the Declaration of Independence. He shared the file he created with other users of the computer time-sharing system he was using, and spread it over what would eventually become the Internet as we know it today.

Thirty years ago this summer, Robert Stockton decided to adapt some of the electronic texts that Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg had been putting online, and created some of the first illustrated hypertext books on the then-new World Wide Web. I’d just set up a web server at Carnegie Mellon, where he and I were at the time, and I set up a web page with links to his web editions, as well as to other books from Project Gutenberg and other early electronic text sites. That was the beginning of The Online Books Page, which, like Project Gutenberg, is still going today.

I’ve kept the service going for a number of reasons, some of which I recently discussed in an article Renata Ewing wrote for the University of California’s HathiTrust service. I’ve been motivated in part by the opportunities The Online Books Page provides for prototyping and demonstrating ways to discover, organize, and link information about books and serials (some of which can then be also used to increase the usefulness of library collections more broadly). But I’ve also been motivated by the opportunities to publicize and encourage the work of lots of people who share literature, and knowledge about literature, with readers across the world on the internet.

So many individual people have made a real difference doing that work. It’s not just folks like Michael Hart and Robert Stockton. It’s also folks like Mary Mark Ockerbloom, who shortly after I met her resolved to increase and promote online writings of women, who were grossly underrepresented in early online collections. And it’s many other folks who continue to promote and make available online the writings of many other underrepresented groups. And it’s folks like Charles Franks and the thousands of volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders who work a page at a time to produce the majority of Project Gutenberg’s new releases. (They just posted their 46,000th title this week.)

It’s authors, author’s families, and publishers who freely share their works with others via mechanisms such as Creative Commons licenses, or just by granting permission for free online editions. Some have done so after the works have had their peak sales in the market (like Tom Lehrer, or the families of Leo Edwards and Jan Struther). Some have done so earlier. Many scholars, for instance, now make their work open access upon publication, to maximize the reach and impact of their scholarship. These include the authors of more than 60,000 books listed in the Directory of Open Access Books (now celebrating 10 years online).

It’s folks who share information about books and other works that deserve more attention. Folks like Bob and Molly Freedman who have collected and shared detailed descriptions of Jewish songs and music from all over the world (and whose rich catalog I helped put online some years ago, and will be soon putting back online in updated form). It’s folks like the recently departed Denny Lien who extensively documented the contents of the magazines he collected on sites like FictionMags, and who was one of many people who suggest books and serials to list on my site and make them more visible to the world. It’s the many folks who contributed information to the Deep Backfile project, and others like Greg Cram and Melissa Levine who have helped bring to light the “hidden public domain” of the mid-20th century to make it easier for it to be opened to world in large library projects (as folks like Kristina Hall at HathiTrust and Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive have then done).

It’s folks who want to make books online more accessible and appreciated by readers. Teachers like Philip Weller, who made Shakespeare easier to understand, publishers like Alex Cabal. who makes elegantly formatted ebooks available for a variety of ebook reading devices and programs, and book lovers like Louise Hope, who adds witty and informed annotations and illustrations to her favorite public domain books, and shares them with the world.

There are many other people I could name, but this post is already getting long. What they all have in common, though, is a desire to share knowledge and artistic creations with the world. In an internet that’s increasingly dominated by a small number of giant corporations exploiting users for profit, these people are sharing knowledge and art online not to monetize it, or mine the personal data of people who read it, or become influencers over millions of followers, but to enrich the lives of their fellow readers. And from one person to another, they’re making a difference, continuing to advance the visions that many of us have had for the internet since it was young.

For all the people who share like this, and for the institutions like mine that support our work, I’m grateful to be in your company. I’m thankful that I’ve gotten to work with you for the last 30 years, and I hope to continue to work with you and appreciate what you do for many more.

(Postscript added July 13, 2023: I want to add thanks to Rebecca Ortenberg, one of my colleagues at the Penn Libraries who just published an article on The Online Books Page for the Penn Libraries news. My co-workers at the Penn Libraries do so much to share books and information resources with people at my institution and well beyond, and I’m fortunate to get to work with them on this project and many others.)