WELCOME | CONTENTS
WELCOME | CONTENTS
|
Welcome to the GLBT Bookshelf Restrospective and Memorial
For seven years, is grew -- rapidly at first and then more slowly, until at last it was a community of many thousands of people, attracting a couple of million visitors over the span of time. But always, at the core of the project, was the need for a whale of a lot of work to be done by volunteers, without which the wiki wouldn't "go" or, wouldn't go properly. And this was the insurmountable problem, in the end. The sheer volume of work needed to keep so huge a site in shape and growing would have provided a fulltime job for two or three people; and of course, it was always strictly a non-profit endeavor. In the beginning, a crew of five core staff worked it up, and one by one, due to the pressures of life and work, they drifted away from the project, leaving only the one for whom GLBT Bookshelf represented a brainchild, to take care of it virtually single-handed. Eventually, as you'd be predicting, Mel Keegan became unable to carry the burden of responsibility. Due to increasing personal problems, he was eventually forced to let it go, and the date was decided: May 31, 2016, representing the seven-year mark. We had a fantastic run, made some great friends, did a lot of good work -- had a few run-ins with less-than-lovely people, went through a few growing pains and even one or two 'power struggles' along the way. The memories will always be cherished, and we salute all the many people who played a part in building the community. Cheers to everyone, and good luck to all in your future works! We'd like to place online a permanent memorial to GLBT Bookshelf: a small site where the spirit of the wiki is recorded indelibly. On this Welcome page, you'll find a gallery of screen captures illustrating perfectly what it looked like, how it worked; and if you click through to the Contents you'll find a quicklist of around a hundred pages, rescued and reformatted to preserve the taste and feel of the site. All rescued pages were sourced from materials uploaded by our core members. If you would like to have your own wiki contributions added here, by all mean contact us, and we'd be glad to invite you. One proviso: we're not allowing external links pointing out from those pages -- with good reason. Links go dead very rapidly, while this little site is a permanent, standing exhibit: it won't be tended, edited, corrected, fussed over. What you see is what you get: 'it is as it shall be,' as someone somewhere once said, and in a year or two, we'd have pages riddled with 404 errors. So -- welcome to the party, guys, but no exit-links, please! Enjoy the materials presented here, and remember GLBT Bookshelf with a smile of sheer nostalgia!  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
|