Mission

Library Uranian strives to curate and take stewardship over English language literary works within the public domain that relate to the modern gay experience.

Curation

Library Uranian only deals with works that are in the public domain of the United States. Generally, this means that the source of the text that is found on this site must be at least 95 years old.

While there were no doubt many gay writers working within this time-frame, very few were able to successfully write about the gay experience, publish, and have their work survive. Many gay writers had to use extensive coding to provide cover from censors and law enforcement. While these works are still valuable, we favor works that use clear language, free from obscure references that the modern reader would miss.

What constitutes “gay experience?”

Although the term “gay” did not exist within the historical period that the collection is from, there did exist men who fit this modern description. We mean “gay” in this context as men who love men. Note that this specifically does not include pederasty.

Stewardship

Much of the content that has fallen into the public domain from copyright expiry only exists on the Internet as page scans. These page scans, while critical for preserving source material, are not very convenient for reading. Stewardship of the content in the collection comes in two layers:

1. Transcription. Transcribing page scans allows for better use of screen readers and machine translation. With raw transcription, the text is also much more easily transformed into different digital formats for reading.
2. Formatting. Existing transcriptions are generally formatted in very basic HTML to allow for the most broad access possible to the text. However, basic formatting tends to not create a very good experience for reading on modern platforms. We will work to format the material into modern eBooks.

When possible, these projects will be coordinated with Project Gutenberg for transcription and Standard Ebooks for formatting. These organizations have very well thought out guidelines and have the resources in place to help guide volunteers for these efforts.

Commitment to free content

The works in our public domain are for the use and enjoyment of everyone. They make up our shared cultural history. Library Uranian is committed to keep these works free for any use.

• All content within the collection must at a minimum be free for personal use.
• We will strive to release and promote content that is available under the Creative Commons CC0 license.
• All code for this website is available on Github under the MIT license.