Our Donation Appeal

Why We Need Your Help

Last updated: December 29, 2024

The e.Lib, Inc. and its family of initiatives is dedicated to "Awakening Anthroposophy in the World." Starting in 1980, now more than 44 years ago, we have worked to raise worldwide awareness of Anthroposophy and to bring much-needed research material to the world. Since 1984 we have grown along with the internet (originally ARPAnet), and registered as a 501(c)(3), not-for-profit organization in 2004. After creating the Rudolf Steiner Archive & e.Lib and donating it to folks who pledged to continue the effort, we have shifted our focus to Anthroposophical Publications with the goal of translating and publishing as many as possible of the 3,000 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner that have until now been available only in German editions. We also offer anthroposophically-oriented works by a number of authors. Be sure to read our policy on 'literal' and AI-generated translations.

Donations of any kind help fund the creation and maintenance of our Intranet of servers/computers: spare parts needed to maintain hardware, and the upgrading of the software we use to make this all possible. Recurring donations provide a stable base, helping our planning. Here are some examples:

• while a PC Desktop computer costs about $800, it will not withstand the 24/7/365 running of a server that is handling 50,000 visitors each day! Server grade computers typically are $4,000 on up for a single CPU machine. One of the multi-CPU servers we have costs over $10,000!
• spare parts are also expensive: Xeon CPU's can cost as much as $2,000-$3,000 each; memory sticks are $1,000-$1,500 each; and hard disks, while the price is coming down, are mechanical devices that wearout ... we need to upgrade to Solid State Devices, SSD's last longer, but do have a limited lifetime.
• the database monitoring is $3,200 per month! Other software costs are anywhere from $5 to over $1,000 per month.
• the Internet lines we use are special. We need to have guaranteed and dedicated bandwidth along with equal upload and download speeds. Normal users are concerned with download speeds: How fast can you get the information? Whereas, we are the ones sending the information ... we are concerned with upload speeds: How fast can we serve our information? Two Internet lines are required to share the load, so that one cankeep serving information if the other has a problem.
• the cost of our backup generator that automatically takes over if/when we lose electrical power, is a monthly expense beyond a significant purchase investment.
• let's not forget dedicated backup machines! Saving complete backups of all the servers is vital to maintaing an on-line presence. Should anything happen, such as a power surge, or fire, or anything else that could destroy or seriously disrupt 2cwaccess to the information, having the ability to restore missing or corrupt data is a necessary part of what we do. Currently we have 35 ways of restoring data should something happen. If you think that is overkill, have we got a story for you!
• and utility bills are rising.
• our monthly outgo is around $5,000!

As you can see, it is an expensive proposition bringing this information to the world. We started offering our services on the Internet in 1984, some 40 years ago, before it was the Internet – it was ARPAnet back then. Everybody on the Internet, at that time, took it upon themselves to bring the information they had to everyone else, free of charge! We may have had costs associated with this, but so did everyone else. We agreed to incur the costs so that everyone could benefit from the free flow of information. This was a wonderful model, and we continue it today. All of the information we have is free for everyone in the world. Our visitors, the researches out there, come from every continent on Earth, including Antarctica. No one is turned away. No one at The e.Lib nor any of its component initiatives takes a salary or any compensation! We are volunteers in this effort. Currently the imajority of the funding for this initiative comes from a small yearly grant, and our personal savings and Social Security. We cannot afford to maintain this much longer! If you can, won't you consider helping to fund our initiative? Thank you, everyone!

Visit our Donations page at:
https://anthro.pub/#!/Recurring-Donations/c/170263003