The recent installment on the World Wide Web of John Stuart Mill's classic study On Liberty, which has been part of the Columbia College Core Curriculum for many years, has helped spread democracy in Eastern Europe.

Toomes Hendrik Ives, the Estonian Ambassador to the U.S.(CC '76) said in a recent e-mail message to AcIS editor-in-chief Steve van Leeuwen that he is recommending the Bartleby Library, Columbia's service featuring online textbooks such as On Liberty, as a way to provide Estonian students access to classic works that are otherwise hard to find in Eastern Europe.

Ives said that in the former Soviet Union, "there is, oddly enough, greater access to World Wide Web-connected computers than there is to say, physical copies of John Stuart Mill or Emily Dickinson."

Ives believes that Columbia's leadership in online technology and the College's Core Curriculum have played an important role in advancing the cause of democracy in Eastern Europe.

"Two years ago I published a brief piece in the 'Lions Den' column of Columbia College Today arguing that the best way to advance the cause of democratization in Eastern Europe was to export the Columbia Core Curriculum," he said. "Through the Bartleby project I think this is far easier to do than before."

On Liberty, the first Core text available online, is also one of three Bartleby texts the Modern Language Association (MLA) has requested permission to use as part of the manual for its new CD-ROM program Text Analysis Computing Tools, a program designed to help scholars in critically analyzing a text.

This week, van Leeuwen said, "One of Clinton's goals in his State of the Union address was to network every classroom and public library in the country by the year 2000. With Leaves of Grass, we became the first to put a book on the Web, and we just put a second Core text online today."

The Bartleby Library is produced in collaboration with the Institute on Research on Women and Gender, The Institute for African American Studies, and others.

The Web site address is http://www.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/.

Columbia University Record -- February 2, 1996 -- Vol. 21, No. 15