FREEDOM, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

The Louisiana Slave Web site is a triumph of freedom: freedom of slaves from anonymity and freedom to pass on new knowledge, methodology, thought, and discoveries throughout the world widely, immediately, and free of charge. This achievement is a blow against the dead hand strangling advancement of thought and communications because of the growing curse of private ownership and control of knowledge and of communications technology.

I am personally grateful to ibiblio.org and to the Center for the Public Domain for seeing the possibilities of my databases about Louisiana slaves, freeing the databases from obstacles preventing their wide distribution, creating a search engine to facilitate retrieval of information based on some of the most important fields, and making the full databases as well as the software with which to use them available to the public free of charge. Laurie Racine, Director of the Center for the Public Domain, demonstrated great vision, boldness, patience, and persistence in overcoming the multi-facetted obstacles to this project. Tawnya Louder Reynolds, Public Relations Director of the Center for the Public Domaine, has been dedicated, skilled, and highly professional in all her work with the project. Paul Jones, Director of ibiblio.org, was the first to envision to project and took charge of overcoming the sometimes daunting technical obstacles. Andre Burton, programmer-in-charge, has become very dear to me although we met only once and very briefly. He is a very young man, and a technician to boot, who has learned to respect the competence of a septuagenarian female in a field still heavily dominated by young men.

I am also grateful to the taxpayers of the United States who contributed most of the money for the historical research and the creation of these databases through a contract from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I am deeply proud and happy that I have been able to give something back.

Gwendolyn Midlo Hall