Someday, so the dream goes, all the knowledge in the world will be on the Internet. In the spirit of "think globally, act locally," a great deal of knowledge about Cornell University is accumulating in an online repository called "DSpace" at http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/.

While DSpace was created in 2002 as a step toward "Internet-first" publication of scientific and scholarly papers -- an alternative to the expensive system of printed journals -- a grant from the Atlantic Philanthropies has enabled the digitizing of a variety of Cornell publications containing a wealth of university history.

Already online in DSpace are 102 issues of Cornell Engineering Quarterly, published from 1966 to 1994, containing 5,072 pages of history of the College of Engineering. Soon to be added are copies of the Cornell Chronicle from its first issue in 1969 to the present, and its predecessor, Cornell Reports (published 1967-68) and the Cornell Alumni News (now Cornell Alumni Magazine) going back over 100 years. Current issues will be added as they are published.

DSpace also offers a home for undergraduate publications, beginning with The Quad, a literary and art magazine celebrating its 10th year at Cornell, and The Visible Hand, a publication of the Cornell Economics Society.

Magazines and newspapers are posted as print-quality Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files. The full text is searchable.

Also being added to DSpace are university faculty minutes and memorial statements prepared by the dean of the faulty when faculty members die.

In addition to print publications, DSpace houses video and audio files, including retrospectives of Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, video of Messenger and other lectures, major speeches and video records of campus events and such symposia as the library's recent Janus Conference.

DSpace is home to Internet First Publishing, a venture launched by J. Robert Cooke, Cornell professor emeritus of biological and environmental engineering and chair of the University Faculty Library Board, who has for several years advocated for open-access publishing. It offers full-text books, which may be read online free or printed for a fee. Along with several scholarly treatises and how-to books, the collection includes histories of agricultural economics, animal science, animal husbandry, physics and computing at Cornell and a reprint of Carl Becker's 1943 classic, "Cornell University: Founders and the Founding."

As an early venture in Internet-first scholarly publishing, DSpace hosts the CIGR E-Journal, a peer-reviewed journal published by the International Commission of Agricultural Engineering.

DSpace was launched as a "superarchive," where just about anyone at Cornell can post just about anything, and has been shepherded through its early years by Cooke, Kenneth M. King, former Cornell vice provost for computing and later president of EDUCOM, and the late Ross Atkinson, associate university librarian for collections. It is organized into "communities" representing schools, departments and programs, although many units have yet to make use of the opportunity. The archive is managed by Cornell University Library, using free, open-source software developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Several other universities have created similar archives.