College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

The choice of millions

Huge humanities website, directed by English's Geoffrey Sauer and based at Iowa State, is the most popular in the world.

In October more than 47,000 readers logged onto the EServer (http://eserver.org) website.

In just one day.

That's more than 1.4 million readers in a month.

So many that Alexa.com, a division of Amazon.com that tracks website popularity, says EServer is the most popular humanities website in the world, ranking above the National Endowment for the Humanities

Headquarters for the EServer can be found in limited office space on the third floor of Ross Hall - a room that doubles as the new ISU Studio for New Media.

The EServer was formed back in 1990 at Carnegie Mellon University by a bunch of graduate students - Geoffrey Sauer among them. Sauer is now an assistant professor of English at Iowa State, and when he came to campus in 2003 he brought along the EServer.

"The EServer attempts to provide an alternative niche for quality work, particularly works in the arts and humanities," says Sauer, who serves as the site's director.

The website offers 47 collections on such diverse topics as art, architecture, race, Internet studies, sexuality, drama, design, multimedia and current social issues. There are over 34,000 works in the collections.

Sauer and his 240 online colleagues publish short and longer written works in addition to offering streaming audio and video recordings. All on a budget of under $10,000 a year.

The complete works of Shakespeare are on-line. So is Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. The movie screenplay of Mulholland Drive is included.

The National Science Foundation has a funded site that looks at the public representation of nanotechnology. Seven different academic journals are also published from the EServer website.

One of Sauer's favorite new inclusions is the Antislavery Literature Project, which represents the origins of multicultural literature in the United States.

"It's important for people who study 18th century literature to have access to this type of writing," Sauer said. "But it's not popular enough to be published in commercial anthologies.

"We get a lot of submissions many of which we don't include on the site," he continued. "In the past month we received 63 poetry submissions."

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1979 (Thor Power Tool) changed the economics of the publishing industry, making it more expensive for commercial publishers to support works that wouldn't sell in a single year.

For bestselling authors like Stephen King or John Grisham that's not a big deal. But it began a trend that has put authors in the arts and humanities at a big disadvantage.

"Because of the ruling and changes in the tax laws, many publishing houses were not printing these types of books," Sauer said. "So we do on the EServer."

The EServer may have been born out of this court ruling, but the website's actual birth came about when a group of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon wanted to share literature used in 100-level writing and literature courses.

"We were all teaching the same courses," Sauer said, "and we wanted a place where we all could share articles that worked well in our teaching. We went to the English Department, and got a big Mac hard drive to share these items on the network."

With the advent of the Internet in the early '90s, the EServer boomed, to the point where it today publishes thousands of works, and millions read from the site every month.

"And the site just grew, to become as big as any scholarly website online - and one that employs the leading edge of web technology," Sauer said.