The University of Waterloo Library (in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) set up an Internet Resources Committee (IRC) in early 1993 to develop the Library area of UWinfo, the University of Waterloo gopher-based campus-wide information system. Over the next several months, the IRC created menus and text files of local interest, and searched for and made connections to interesting off-campus gopher resources.
In October 1993, the notion of creating a set of links to gophers of scholarly societies was discussed by IRC. 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 UWinfo made links. The IRC approved the project.
The project began with a collection of about a half-dozen resources. By February 1994, after several months of performing Veronica searches, and monitoring announcements of new gophers, the number of resources was increased to about twenty. 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.
At about the same time the IRC had begun to make serious progress in constructing a WWW version of the Library area of UWinfo; that webpage is called the University of Waterloo Electronic Library. By the summer of 1994, Project staff had begun to create a WWW version of the Scholarly Societies Project. Because of the flexibility of webpages, it was possible to make links to both webpages and gophers of scholarly societies. The fact that link information could extend to more than one line was much appreciated in the cases where a brief annotation was essential. Finally, the ability to have both discursive text and links on the same page meant that it would possible to create essays with direct links to other relevant pages.
After the first few months of the summer of 1994 (the beginning of the WWW phase of the Project), 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. In late November, the project was announced to the public over several listservs and newsgroups. 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.
Throughout all the above time, guidelines and other protocols for the Project were evolving; in fact even the goal of the Project shifted somewhat. More information on these issues will found in the other essays on the development of the Project.
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