Introduction

In June 1989, I launched PACS-L, a LISTSERV mailing list. PACS-L was one of the first library-oriented mailing lists, and, at the time, it was unusual in that it had a broad subject focus (public-access computer systems in libraries, such as online catalogs) rather than a narrow focus on a specific library automation system. Although PACS-L's greatest contribution may have been in raising librarians' awareness of the importance and potential of the then fledgling Internet, it was also the platform on which my initial scholarly digital publishing efforts were based.

In August 1989, I began my scholarly digital publishing efforts, launching one of the first e-journals on the Internet, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review.¹ This journal, if it was published today, would be called a "libre" open access journal since it was freely available, allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and had special copyright provisions for noncommercial use.

Aside from Public-Access Computer Systems News (also "libre" open access), my subsequent digital publications, such as the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, were "gratis" open access until 2004, when all new versions of existing publications and new publications became "libre" open access under various versions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.²

For current information about my publication activities, see "Brief Resume of Charles W. Bailey, Jr." and "Selected Publications of Charles W. Bailey, Jr."

Chronology

Below is an abbreviated chronology of my digital publishing efforts from June 1989 through June 2009. See "A Look Back at Twenty Years as an Internet Open Access Publisher" for a more detailed chronology, articles about these digital publications, and research studies that included the PACS Review.

• June 29, 1989. Established the PACS-L mailing list, acted as list owner and, later, as its first moderator. Sent the first PACS-L message welcoming subscribers. The establishment of PACS-L facilitated the development of my scholarly digital publications.
• August 16, 1989. Established The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review, also known as PACS-R), a free scholarly e-journal, and acted as its first Editor-in-Chief (announcement). (See the list of PACS Review editorial staff.)
• January 3, 1990. Published the first PACS Review issue. Articles were selected by the editors. They were distributed as ASCII files using the LISTSERV software (see example); table of contents messages were e-mailed to subscribers.
• March 5, 1990. Established and acted as co-editor of Public-Access Computer Systems News, a free electronic newsletter (first issue). Acted as co-editor until the end of 1992.
• November 11, 1991. Changed the PACS Review to a peer-reviewed journal.
• November 15, 1991. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS-L moderator. PACS-L had over 3,100 subscribers at the time.
• January 13, 1992. Established the PACS-P mailing list to distribute the University of Houston Libraries electronic publications and Current Cites (announcement).
• April 6, 1992. Published the first peer-reviewed PACS Review article.
• January 29, 1994. Made the PACS Review and PACS News available via a Gopher server.
• March 21, 1995. Published the first HTML version of the PACS Review and established a policy that allowed authors to update articles. This issue was composed of the first version of my "Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography." This article had 26 versions, with the last version being published on October 25, 1996. Starting with version 23 (June 25, 1996), the bibliography was searchable.
• September 12, 1996. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS Review Editor-in-Chief at the end of 1996.
• October 30, 1996. Published the first HTML version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), a free, updated electronic book (announcement) that provides references to new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers. The bibliography is searchable. See the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" for a detailed history of the bibliography from 1996 to 2001.
• November 15, 1996. Published the first Word version of SEPB in version 2.
• December 17, 1996. Published the first Acrobat version of SEPB in version 3.
• September 16, 1997. Published the first version of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (SEPR).
• June 7, 2001. Began the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) (first posting at bottom).
• April 19, 2002. With Version 42 of SEPB, ceased publishing a corresponding Word version.
• September 22, 2003. Established the SEPW@LISTSERV.UH.EDU mailing list and distributed the first ASCII version of SEPW.
• July 13, 2004. Put SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
• March 2, 2005. The Association of Research Libraries published my Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB). The book included an introduction to open access and references to over 1,300 works about it. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License in print and PDF formats. In cooperation with ARL, I made the PDF version freely available.³
• March 15, 2005. Added an RSS feed to SEPW using a mirror Blogger Weblog and FeedBurner.
• April 20, 2005. Established DigitalKoans on my new escholarlypub.com domain using WordPress for the Weblog and FeedBurner for the (RSS feed). DigitalKoans is a Weblog that provides news and commentary on digital copyright, digital curation, digital repositories, open access, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues. (offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License).
• July 8, 2005. Published the first version of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• August 10, 2005. Made a preprint of the "Open Access Webliography" available (coauthored with Adrian K. Ho).
• October 25, 2005. Published the first version of the Google Book Search Bibliography.
• December 31, 2005. There were over 352,000 escholarlypub.com Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2005 by over 146,00 visitors from 163 countries.
• January 8, 2006. Established the digital-scholarship.com domain to replace the escholarlypub.com domain.
• February 6, 2006. Published the Open Access Bibliography Author Index and the Open Access Bibliography Title Index.
• March 22, 2006. Published an HTML version of the OAB.
• April 28, 2006. With Version 62 of SEPB, ceased publishing a corresponding Acrobat version.
• November 1, 2006. Resigned my position as Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development at the University of Houston Libraries, where I had worked since November 1987 (previously as either Assistant Dean for Systems or Assistant Director for Systems).
• November 3, 2006. Migrated SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW from the University of Houston Libraries' servers to escholarlypub.com. Discontinued the SEPW LISTSERV mailing list, and replaced it with a FeedBurner mailing list.
• December 14, 2006. Established the digital-scholarship.org domain on a second hosting service in order to mirror DigitalKoans and other files for increased reliability.
• December 18, 2006. Announced the digital-scholarship.org domain, branding it and digital-scholarship.com under the name "Digital Scholarship."
• December 31, 2006. There were over 2.3 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2006 by over 663,000 visitors from 195 countries.
• December 31, 2006.There were over 4.2 million Gopher or Web file requests for PACS Review files from January 1994 through December 2006 (use data after December 2006 is not available).
• March 14, 2007. Published the first annual PDF version of SEPB.
• December 31, 2007. There were over 7.3 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2007 by over 1.8 million visitors from 206 countries.
• January 6, 2008. Published Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite.
• March 21, 2008. Became a member of the Open Access Directory Editorial Board. Helped build the initial Wiki, and continue to add content to it.
• April 29, 2008. Published the second annual PDF version of SEPB. In this version, links were added for e-prints of published articles from disciplinary archives and institutional repositories, and many additional links were added for freely available versions of articles from publishers.
• May 12, 2008. Published version 2 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• May 27, 2008. Published version 2 of the Google Book Search Bibliography.
• June 14, 2008. Authorized using the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals as the basis for a new wiki bibliography on the Open Access Directory, called the Bibliography of Open Access.
• December 9, 2008. Published version 3 of the Google Book Search Bibliography
• December 31, 2008. Published the third annual PDF version of SEPB.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 15.9 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though December 31, 2008 by over 3.4 million visitors from 214 countries.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 8.6 million Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography Web file requests from October 30, 1996 though December 31, 2008.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 313,000 Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals Web file requests from March 3, 2005 though December 31, 2008.
• December 31, 2008. There were over 71,000 "Open Access Webliography" Web file requests from August 10, 2005 though December 31, 2008.
• January 20, 2009. Published version 3 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography.
• May 5, 2009. Published Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition as a print-on-demand paperback book under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. (Equivalent PDF version was freely available.)
• May 12, 2009. Published version 75 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.
• June 5, 2009. There were over 20 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 20, 2005 though June 5, 2009 by over 4 million visitors from 221 countries.
• June 29, 2009. Published version 4 of the Google Book Search Bibliography
• June 29, 2009. There were over 2,100 DigitalKoans posts in over 90 categories.

Notes

1. In 1989, the Internet was much more fragmented than it is today, and the primary information access tools were e-mail, FTP, mailing lists, and Usenet newsgroups. In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote "Information Management: A Proposal," which tried to persuade CERN officials to support a global hypertext system (it was not called the World Wide Web until October 1990, when he coded the first server and browser). Gopher servers, which represented a significant advance in information access, would not become available until 1991, and NCSA Mosaic, an early Web browser that ignited interest in the Web, until 1993. You can place my publications in the context of the development of the Internet by consulting the Hobbes' Internet Timeline and Internet History. Thanks to Robin N. Downes, then Director of the University of Houston Libraries, for his strong support for my digital publishing efforts from 1989-1996.

2. You can place my publications in the context of the development of the open access movement by consulting the Timeline of the Open Access Movement.

3. Thanks to Peter Suber for his assistance with the Open Access Bibliography and his encouragement during its writing.

Introduction

In 1989, the Internet was much more fragmented than it is today, and the primary information access tools were e-mail, FTP, mailing lists, and Usenet newsgroups. In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote "Information Management: A Proposal," which tried to persuade CERN officials to support a global hypertext system (it was not called the World Wide Web until October 1990, when he coded the first server and browser). Gopher servers, which represented a significant advance in information access, would not become available until 1991, and NCSA Mosaic, an early Web browser that ignited interest in the Web, until 1993.

In June 1989, I began my scholarly digital publishing efforts, launching one of the first e-journals on the Internet, The Public-Access Computer Systems Review: a journal that, if it has been published today, would be called an "open access journal," since it was freely available, allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and had special copyright provisions for noncommercial use.

You can place my scholarly digital publishing efforts in the context of the development of the Internet by consulting the Hobbes' Internet Timeline v8.2.

My scholarly digital publications have all been freely available, and you can place them in the context of the development of the open access movement by consulting the Timeline of the Open Access Movement.

Chronology

Below is an abbreviated chronology of my digital publishing efforts from June 1989 to June 2008.

• June 29, 1989. Established the PACS-L mailing list, acted as list owner and, later, as its first moderator. Sent the first PACS-L message welcoming subscribers.
• August 16, 1989. Established The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review), a free scholarly e-journal, and acted as its first Editor-in-Chief (announcement).
• January 3, 1990. Published the first PACS Review issue. Articles were selected by the editors. They were distributed as ASCII files using the LISTSERV software (see example); table of contents messages were e-mailed to subscribers.
• March 5, 1990. Established and acted as co-editor of Public-Access Computer Systems News, a free electronic newsletter (first issue). Acted as co-editor until the end of 1992.
• August 30, 1990. Published the first version of "Library-Oriented BITNET Lists," a directory of mailing lists.
• August 26, 1991. Published a special PACS Review issue on "Network-Based Electronic Serials," including Stevan Harnad's "Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge."
• October 29, 1991. Adopted a more flexible PACS Review publication schedule that took advantage of electronic publishing capabilities and reduced article publication time.
• November 11, 1991. Changed the PACS Review to a peer-reviewed journal.
• November 15, 1991. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS-L moderator. PACS-L had over 3,100 subscribers at the time.
• January 13, 1992. Established the PACS-P mailing list to distribute the University of Houston Libraries electronic publications and Current Cites (announcement). See the PACS-P chronology for more details.
• April 6, 1992. Published the first peer-reviewed PACS Review article.
• January 18, 1994. Published my last version of "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Subsequently, Ann Thornton and Steve Bonario maintained the document, then Wei Wu maintained it as a searchable Web site until 2006.
• January 29, 1994. Made the PACS Review and PACS News available via a Gopher server.
• March 21, 1995. Published the first HTML version of the PACS Review and established a policy that allowed authors to update articles. This issue was composed of the first version of my "Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography." This article had 26 versions.
• September 12, 1996. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS Review Editor-in-Chief at the end of 1996. (See the PACS Review Wikipedia article for more details about it.)
• October 30, 1996. Published the first HTML version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), a free, updated electronic book (announcement) that provides references to new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers. See the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" for a detailed history of the bibliography from 1996 to 2001.
• December 17, 1996. Published the first Acrobat version of SEPB.
• September 16, 1997. Published the first version of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (SEPR).
• March 2001. Started contributing reviews to Current Cites (reviews).
• June 7, 2001. Began the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) (first posting at bottom).
• September 22, 2003. Established the SEPW@LISTSERV.UH.EDU mailing list and distributed the first ASCII version of SEPW.
• July 13, 2004. Put SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
• March 2, 2005. The Association of Research Libraries published my Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB). The book included an introduction to open access and references to over 1,300 works about it. It was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License in print and PDF formats. In cooperation with ARL, I made the PDF version freely available.
• March 15, 2005. Added an RSS feed to SEPW using a mirror Blogger Weblog and FeedBurner.
• April 20, 2005. Established DigitalKoans on my new escholarlypub.com domain using WordPress for the Weblog and FeedBurner for the (RSS feed). DigitalKoans is a Weblog that provides news and commentary on digital copyright, DRM, net neutrality, open access, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues. (offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License).
• September 29, 2005. Made a SEPB archive Zip file available that contains all versions of the bibliography. This file is updated with each new SEPB version.
• January 8, 2006. Established the digital-scholarship.com domain to replace the escholarlypub.com domain.
• February 6, 2006. Published the Open Access Bibliography Author Index and the Open Access Bibliography Title Index.
• February 21, 2006. With Version 61 of SEPB, ceased publishing a corresponding Acrobat version.
• March 22, 2006. Published an HTML version of the OAB.
• October 25, 2006. Created a Google Custom Search Engine for the OAB.
• October 28, 2006. Created a Google Custom Search Engines for SEPB and SEPW.
• November 1, 2006. Resigned my position as Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development at the University of Houston Libraries, where I had worked since November 1987 (previously as either Assistant Dean for Systems or Assistant Director for Systems).
• November 3, 2006. Migrated SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW from the University of Houston Libraries' servers to escholarlypub.com. Discontinued the SEPW LISTSERV mailing list, and replaced it with a FeedBurner mailing list.
• December 14, 2006. Established the digital-scholarship.org domain on a second hosting service in order to mirror DigitalKoans and other files for increased reliability.
• December 18, 2006. Announced the digital-scholarship.org domain, branding it and digital-scholarship.com under the name "Digital Scholarship."
• January 8, 2007. Replaced the mirror Blogger SEPW Weblog with a new one on the digital-scholarship.org domain using WordPress and FeedBurner.
• February 11-12, 2007. Recoded the Digital Scholarship Web sites to give them a common look and feel. Published an HTML version of the "Open Access Webliography."
• March 14, 2007. Published the first annual PDF version of SEPB.
• April, 11 2007. With Version 67, recoded SEPB in XHTML and CSS.
• September 25-27, 2007. Redesigned the entire Digital Scholarship site. Converted Version 69 of SEPB to the new design, and recoded all other site documents in XHTML and CSS to comply with the new design.
• December 31, 2007. There were over 7.5 million Web file requests for SEPB since October 1996 (see the SEPB use statistics). There were close to 260,000 Web file requests for the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals. There were over 4.2 million Gopher or Web file requests for PACS Review files from January 1994 through December 2006 (use data after December 2006 is not available).
• January 6, 2008. Published Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite.
• March 6, 2008. Added a WordPress plug-in to create the DigitalKoans Category Index with Post Titles.
• March 21, 2008. Became a member of the Open Access Directory Editorial Board. Helped build the initial Wiki, and continue to add content to it.
• April 29, 2008. Published the second annual PDF version of SEPB. In this version, links were added for e-prints of published articles from disciplinary archives and institutional repositories, and many additional links were added for freely available versions of articles from publishers.
• May 27, 2008. Published version 2 of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography (version 1 was originally published as a DigitalKoans posting).
• May 27, 2008. Published version 2 of the Google Book Search Bibliography (version 1 was originally published as a DigitalKoans posting).
• May 31, 2008. There were over 10.8 million Digital Scholarship Web file requests from April 2005 though May 2008 by over 2.5 million visitors from 212 countries.
• June 9, 2008. Published version 72 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. In this version, links were added for e-prints of published articles from disciplinary archives and institutional repositories, and many additional links were added for freely available versions of articles from publishers.
• June 14, 2008. Authorized using the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals as the basis for a new bibliography on the Open Access Directory, called the Bibliography of Open Access, which will be written by OAD participants.
• June 28, 2008. There were over 1,100 DigitalKoans posts.

Articles about These Digital Publications

Altman, Ellen, and Allan Pratt. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 3, 1992, ed. Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Leslie B. Pearse, Dana Rooks, and Roy Tennant. The Journal of Academic Librarianship 20 (July 1994): 180-181.

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. "Brought to You By . . ." Interview by Carol Ebbinghouse. Research & Education Networking 2 (March 1991): 12-15.

———. "Electronic (Online) Publishing in Action . . . The Public-Access Computer Systems Review and Other Electronic Serials." ONLINE 15 (January 1991): 28-35 (preprint).

———. "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 7 (December 2001).

———. "The Public-Access Computer Systems Forum: A Computer Conference on BITNET." Library Software Review 9 (March-April 1990): 71-74.

Cisler, Steve. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. ONLINE 15 (January 1991): 71-72.

Crawford, Walt. "Talking About Public Access—PACS-L's First Decade." Information Technology and Libraries 19 (September 2000): 112-115.

DeLoughry, Thomas J. "The Latest Scoop on Internet Resources." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 November 1994, A28.

Ensor, Pat, and Thomas Wilson. "Public-Access Computer Systems Review: Testing the Promise." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 3, no. 1 (1997).

Gillespie, Thom. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review. The Library Quarterly 64 (January 1994): 100-102.

Henner, Terry. Review of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, Volume 4, 1993, ed. Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Leslie B. Pearse, Dana Rooks, and Roy Tennant. Research Strategies 13 (Summer 1995): 188-189.

Jacsó, Péter. "Peter's Picks & Pans." Review of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. ONLINE 27, no. 3 (2003): 73-76.

Jensen, Ann. Review of Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, no. 43 (2005).

Moothart, Tom. "Charles W. Bailey, Jr.: Editor, Publisher, Innovator." Serials Review 23, no. 1 (1997): 59-62.

Piper, Alison I. Review of LIBRES: Library and Information Science Electronic Journal and Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS-R). Library and Information Science Research 20, no. 1 (1998): 108-110.

Staff. "The Imagineer—Charles W. Bailey." Library Journal, 15 March 2003.

Wu, Wei. "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Texas Library Journal, 74, no. 1 (1998): 36-38.

Further Information

Selected Publications of Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

A three-segment video about the historical development of open access to legal information, titled A Short History of Legal Information Institutes, is available from LexUM on YouTube.

• Segment 1
• Segment 2
• Segment 3

In 1934, Belgian Paul Otlet wrote a book in which he envisioned a worldwide "mechanical, collective brain" that would store and make accessible the world's knowledge. By that time, he had created with co-visionary Henri La Fontaine a "database" of over 12 million index cards and was responding to over 1,500 queries a year. Unfortunately, the project's sponsor, the Belgian government, withdrew support, the Nazis invaded, they displaced the project to make way for a Third Reich art exhibit, and Otlet died in relative obscurity in 1944.

Read more about it at "Paul Otlet," The Universe of Information: the Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation, "Visions of Xanadu: Paul Otlet (1868-1944) and Hypertext," and "The Web Time Forgot."

Update: See "A Look Back at Nineteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher" for current information.

When I began my digital publishing efforts 18 years ago, the global network environment was much more fragmented than it is today (for details, see The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide), and the primary information access tools were e-mail, FTP, mailing lists, and USENET newsgroups. Gopher servers, which represented a significant advance in information access, would not become available until 1991, and NCSA Mosaic, an early Web browser that ignited interest in the Web, until 1993. You can get a good sense of the context of my digital publishing efforts by consulting the Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v8.2 and the Timeline of the Open Access Movement.

Below is an abbreviated chronology of my digital publishing efforts from June 1989 to June 2007.

• June 29, 1989. Established the PACS-L mailing list, acted as list owner and, later, as its first moderator. Sent the first PACS-L message welcoming subscribers.
• August 16, 1989. Established The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review), a free scholarly e-journal, and acted as its first Editor-in-Chief (announcement).
• January 3, 1990. Published the first PACS Review issue. Articles were selected by the editors. They were distributed as ASCII files using the LISTSERV software (see example); table of contents messages were e-mailed to subscribers. Authors retained the copyright to their articles. Liberal copying was permitted for noncommercial purposes.
• March 5, 1990. Established and acted as co-editor of Public-Access Computer Systems News, a free electronic newsletter (first issue). Acted as co-editor until the end of 1992.
• August 30, 1990. Published the first version of "Library-Oriented BITNET Lists," a directory of mailing lists.
• August 26, 1991. Published a special PACS Review issue on "Network-Based Electronic Serials," including Stevan Harnad’s "Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge."
• October 29, 1991. Adopted a more flexible PACS Review publication schedule that took advantage of electronic publishing capabilities and reduced article publication time.
• November 11, 1991. Changed the PACS Review to a peer-reviewed journal.
• November 15, 1991. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS-L moderator. PACS-L had over 3,100 subscribers at the time.
• January 13, 1992. Established the PACS-P mailing list to distribute the UH Libraries electronic publications and Current Cites (announcement). See the PACS-P chronology for more details.
• April 6, 1992. Published the first peer-reviewed PACS Review article.
• January 18, 1994. Published my last version of "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Subsequently, Ann Thornton and Steve Bonario maintained the document, then Wei Wu maintained it as a searchable Web site until 2006.
• January 29, 1994. Made the PACS Review and PACS News available via a Gopher server.
• March 21, 1995. Published the first HTML version of the PACS Review and established a policy that allowed authors to update articles. This issue was composed of the first version of my "Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography." This article had 26 versions.
• September 12, 1996. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS Review Editor-in-Chief at the end of 1996. (See the PACS Review Wikipedia article for more details about it.)
• October 30, 1996. Published the first HTML version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), a free, updated electronic book (announcement). See the "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography" for a detailed history of the bibliography from 1996 to 2001.
• December 17, 1996. Published the first Acrobat version of SEPB.
• September 16, 1997. Published the first version of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (SEPR).
• March 2001. Started contributing reviews to Current Cites (reviews).
• June 7, 2001. Began the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) (first posting at bottom).
• September 22, 2003. Established the SEPW@LISTSERV.UH.EDU mailing list and distributed the first ASCII version of SEPW.
• July 13, 2004. Put SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
• March 2, 2005. The Association of Research Libraries published my Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (OAB). The book was published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License in print and PDF formats. In cooperation with ARL, I made the PDF version freely available.
• March 15, 2005. Added an RSS feed to SEPW using a mirror Blogger Weblog and FeedBurner.
• April 20, 2005. Established DigitalKoans on my new escholarlypub.com domain using WordPress for the Weblog and FeedBurner for the (RSS feed). DigitalKoans provides commentary on scholarly electronic publishing and digital culture issues (offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License).
• September 29, 2005. Made a SEPB archive Zip file available that contains all versions of the bibliography. This file is updated with each new SEPB version.
• January 8, 2006: Established the digital-scholarship.com domain to replace the escholarlypub.com domain.
• February 6, 2006. Published the Open Access Bibliography Author Index and the Open Access Bibliography Title Index.
• February 21, 2006. With Version 61 of SEPB, ceased publishing the Acrobat version.
• March 22, 2006. Published an HTML version of the OAB.
• October 25, 2006: Created a Google Custom Search Engine for the OAB.
• October 28, 2006. Created a Google Custom Search Engines for SEPB and SEPW.
• November 3, 2006. Migrated SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW from the University of Houston Libraries’ servers to escholarlypub.com. Discontinued the SEPW LISTSERV mailing list, and replaced it with a FeedBurner mailing list.
• December 14, 2006: Established the digital-scholarship.org domain on a second hosting service in order to mirror DigitalKoans and other files for increased reliability.
• December 18, 2006. Announced the digital-scholarship.org domain, branding it and digital-scholarship.com under the name "Digital Scholarship."
• December 31, 2006. There were over 4.2 million successful Gopher or Web file requests for PACS Review files since January 1994; LISTSERV use was unknown (see the PACS Review use statistics and the 2006 update). There were over 6.6 million successful Web file requests for SEPB since October 1996 (see the SEPB use statistics).
• January 8, 2007. Replaced the mirror Blogger SEPW Weblog with a new one on the digital-scholarship.org domain using WordPress and FeedBurner.
• February 11-12, 2007. Recoded the Digital Scholarship Web sites to give them a common look and feel. Published an HTML version of the "Open Access Webligraphy."
• March 14, 2007. Published the first annual PDF version of SEPB.
• April, 11 2007. With Version 67, recoded SEPB in XHTML and CSS.
• May 31, 2007. There were over 3.9 million Web file requests for the escholarlypub.com, digital-scholarship.com, and digital-scholarship.org domains since April 2005 (see the .com and .org use by countries reports).
• June 19, 2007. Published version 68 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.

Articles about These Electronic Publications

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. "Brought to You By . . ." Interview by Carol Ebbinghouse. Research & Education Networking 2 (March 1991): 12-15.

———. "Electronic (Online) Publishing in Action . . . The Public-Access Computer Systems Review and Other Electronic Serials." ONLINE 15 (January 1991): 28-35 (preprint).

———. "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 7 (December 2001).

———. "The Public-Access Computer Systems Forum: A Computer Conference on BITNET." Library Software Review 9 (March-April 1990): 71-74.

Crawford, Walt. "Talking About Public Access—PACS-L’s First Decade." Information Technology and Libraries 19 (September 2000): 112-115.

DeLoughry, Thomas J. "The Latest Scoop on Internet Resources." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 November 1994, A28.

Ensor, Pat, and Thomas Wilson. "Public-Access Computer Systems Review: Testing the Promise." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 3, no. 1 (1997).

Jacsó, Péter. "Peter’s Picks & Pans." Review of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. ONLINE 27, no. 3 (2003): 73-76.

Jensen, Ann. Review of Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by Charles W. Bailey, Jr. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, no. 43 (2005).

Moothart, Tom. "Charles W. Bailey, Jr.: Editor, Publisher, Innovator." Serials Review 23, no. 1 (1997): 59-62.

Wu, Wei. "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Texas Library Journal, 74, no. 1 (1998): 36-38.

If you have never had to use a standalone FTP client, a standalone Telnet client, a Gopher client, or a standalone USENET client, it might be hard to imagine what the Internet was like before Mosiac, the Web browser that put the World-Wide Web on the map and transformed the Internet (and the world). Go dig up a copy of The Internet for Everyone: A Guide for Users and Providers out of your library’s stacks, dust it off, and marvel at how far we have come since 1993. You’ll also meet Archie, Veronica, and WAIS, the Googles of their day.

Another way to travel back in time is to read PC Magazine’s 1994 review of the NCSA Mosaic for Windows, and, if you really want a history lesson, download Mosaic from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (yes, it’s still available). Also take a look at the NCSA’s About NCSA Mosaic page.

To finish off your journey to the Internet’s Paleolithic age, check out the Timeline of Web Browsers and Hobbes’ Internet Timeline v8.2.

Of course, if you do remember these seemingly ancient technologies, you can easily imagine how primitive today’s hot technologies, such as Web 2.0, will seem in 14 years, and you may wonder whether future generations will remember them clearly or as a minor footnote in technological history.

Update: See "A Look Back at Nineteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher" for current information.

I’ve updated last year’s retrospective of my digital publishing efforts in "A Look Back at Seventeen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher."

Update: See "A Look Back at Nineteen Years as an Internet Digital Publisher" for current information.

It was sixteen years ago today that I became an Internet electronic publisher. Little did I know what would result from the apparently simple act of starting an early mailing list called PACS-L. Below is an abbreviated chronology of my electronic publishing efforts so far. They would not have been possible without the support of Robin N. Downes, the former Director of the University of Houston Libraries, and the efforts of volunteers from the UH Libraries and elsewhere. Thanks to all of them.

• June 29, 1989. Established the PACS-L mailing list, acted as list owner and, later, as its first moderator. Sent the first PACS-L message welcoming subscribers.
• August 16, 1989. Established The Public-Access Computer Systems Review (PACS Review), a free e-journal, and acted as its first Editor-in-Chief (announcement).
• January 3, 1990. Published the first PACS Review issue. Articles were selected by the editors. They were distributed as ASCII files using the LISTSERV software (see example); table of contents messages were e-mailed to subscribers. Authors retained the copyright to their articles. Liberal copying was permitted for noncommercial purposes.
• March 5, 1990. Established and acted as co-editor of Public-Access Computer Systems News, a free electronic newsletter (first issue). Acted as co-editor until the end of 1992.
• August 30, 1990. Published the first version of "Library-Oriented BITNET Lists," a directory of mailing lists.
• August 26, 1991. Published a special PACS Review issue on "Network-Based Electronic Serials," including Stevan Harnad’s "Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: The Fourth Revolution in the Means of Production of Knowledge."
• October 29, 1991. Adopted a more flexible PACS Review publication schedule that took advantage of electronic publishing capabilities and reduced article publication time.
• November 11, 1991. Changed the PACS Review to a peer-reviewed journal.
• November 15, 1991. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS-L moderator. PACS-L had over 3,100 subscribers at the time.
• January 13, 1992. Established the PACS-P mailing list to distribute the UH Libraries electronic publications and Current Cites (announcement). See the PACS-P chronology for more details.
• April 6, 1992. Published the first peer-reviewed PACS Review article.
• January 18, 1994. Published my last version of "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Subsequently, Ann Thornton and Steve Bonario maintained the document; Wei Wu maintains it currently.
• January 29, 1994. Made the PACS Review and PACS News available via a Gopher server.
• March 21, 1995. Published the first HTML version of the PACS Review and established a policy that allowed authors to update articles. This issue was composed of the first version of my "Network-Based Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Works: A Selective Bibliography." This article had 26 versions.
• September 12, 1996. Announced that I was stepping down as PACS Review Editor-in-Chief at the end of 1996. (See the PACS Review Wikipedia article for more details about it.)
• October 30, 1996. Published the first HTML version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), a free, updated electronic book (announcement).
• December 17, 1996. Created the first Acrobat version of SEPB.
• September 16, 1997. Published the first version of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (SEPR).
• March 2001. Started contributing reviews to Current Cites (reviews).
• June 7, 2001. Began the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) (first posting at bottom).
• September 22, 2003. Established the SEPW@LISTSERV.UH.EDU mailing list and distributed the first ASCII version of SEPW.
• July 13, 2004. Put SEPB, SEPR, and SEPW under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
• December 31, 2004. There were over 2,602,000 successful Gopher or Web requests for PACS Review files since January 1994; LISTSERV use was unknown (see the PACS Review use statistics). There were over 4.2 million successful Web requests for SEPB files since October 1996 (see the SEPB use statistics).
• March 2, 2005. The Association of Research Libraries published my Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals. The book was made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License in print and PDF formats (the PDF version was freely available).
• March 15, 2005. Added an RSS feed to SEPW.
• April 20, 2005. Established DigitalKoans (RSS feed), a Weblog that provided commentary on scholarly electronic publishing and digital culture issues (offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License).
• June, 10 2005. Published version 58 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography.

Articles about These Electronic Publications

Bailey, Charles W., Jr. "Brought to You By . . ." Interview by Carol Ebbinghouse. Research & Education Networking 2 (March 1991): 12-15.

———. "Electronic (Online) Publishing in Action . . . The Public-Access Computer Systems Review and Other Electronic Serials." ONLINE 15 (January 1991): 28-35 (preprint).

———. "Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 7 (December 2001).

———. "The Public-Access Computer Systems Forum: A Computer Conference on BITNET." Library Software Review 9 (March-April 1990): 71-74.

Crawford, Walt. "Talking About Public Access—PACS-L’s First Decade." Information Technology and Libraries 19 (September 2000): 112-115.

DeLoughry, Thomas J. "The Latest Scoop on Internet Resources." The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2 November 1994, A28.

Ensor, Pat, and Thomas Wilson. "Public-Access Computer Systems Review: Testing the Promise." The Journal of Electronic Publishing 3, no. 1 (1997).

Moothart, Tom. "Charles W. Bailey, Jr.: Editor, Publisher, Innovator." Serials Review 23, no. 1 (1997): 59-62.

Wu, Wei. "Library-Oriented Lists and Electronic Serials." Texas Library Journal, 74, no. 1 (1998): 36-38.