The People's Regime

Back in January of 2001 a bunch of alumni from Alfred University were e-mailing each other a lot. Fun stuff. A way to carry on conversations they might have had in college, a way to keep themselves and each other intellectually stimulated. But reply-all e-mails are bulky, there are tons of headers and it's just a pain sometimes. So we started a Yahoo! Group. Friends were added, friends left, the group evolved and changed, met in person, drank heavily, and persevered, always maintaining its way of keeping us all in touch.

Then an idea was kicked around in the background by a few members that centralizing things even more would be fun. A website. Hey, that's cool. A way to share our opinions and diatribes with others, if we'd like. The website was crafted and has been serving its purpose for many years now, forced by the mangled hand of a power hungry regimista into putting our works down for posterity instead of letting it drift off into the ether.

It turns out that we consume the written word with as much gusto as any other pack of literati out there. LibraryThing has become a natural extension of our need to collect, classify, annotate, organize, educate, and share. Today the Regime is bigger and broader than when it began, with professionals in a variety of fields, and a brain trust that relishes the quirky and the challenging.