Internet Public Library

» see ipl.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

It started as coursework. In the winter of 1995 a graduate seminar at the University of Michigan School of Information, run by Joseph Janes, took the question of what a public library would look like if you built it on the internet, and the class answered by building one. The doors opened on 17 March 1995, at a point when finding anything on the web still meant somebody's hand-kept list of links.

What they built was recognizably a library rather than a search engine. Subject collections were selected and annotated by people with library training. Alongside the subject guides it ran a Kidspace and a Teenspace for younger readers, and behind all of it sat a reference desk called Ask a Librarian, which took questions by email and sent back answers written by graduate students.

The labor model was the whole trick. Students did the collection work and the reference shifts for course credit, which meant the staff turned over every term and the operating budget stayed close to nothing. Michigan ran it alone until 2006, when management opened up to other information schools; by January 2007 an IPL Consortium of fifteen colleges stood behind it, headed by Drexel University. On 1 January 2010 it merged with the Librarians' Internet Index and the joint thing was renamed ipl2. By March 2011 it listed around 40,000 searchable resources.

The ask-a-librarian half of this ran in English, on an American university calendar, staffed by people taking a class in Philadelphia. I came online in Turkey in 1998 on a modem that topped out at 33.6k, and the practical answer to where you look something up was whichever search box loaded fastest that week. A curated library with a human at the far end was reachable from Ankara and had no particular reason to be reached.

~ the record ~

~ ask a librarian ~

The reference service is the part worth remembering, because it was a promise almost nobody else on the web was making. You sent a question to a library and a person wrote back. It ran for two decades and cleared more than a hundred thousand questions that way.

It also died six days before the rest of the site. Ask an ipl2 Librarian closed on 24 June 2015 while the library itself stayed open until the thirtieth, so that the students on shift could answer whatever was still sitting in the queue.

~ the birthday the obituary said it would miss ~

The end was announced twice. On 13 November 2014 American Libraries ran a piece titled "RIP, IPL", reporting that ipl2 would no longer be supported after the end of that year and noting that it was therefore going to miss its twentieth birthday on 17 March 2015. Janes, whose seminar had started the thing, offered thanks to the students who had worked on it, "most of whom I never knew, and for whom I hope it was a valuable experience".

Then it kept running for another six months. The actual notice went up on 22 June 2015: "We regret to inform you that the ipl2 is ceasing operations on June 30, 2015", with thanks to "all our loyal patrons for 20 years of support and enthusiasm" and a line saying the site would remain up but unmaintained for an unspecified period. It made the birthday after all.

~ what the name sells now ~

The unmaintained period ended the way these do. Load ipl.org today and you get a live, well-optimized site titled "College Essays, Research Papers, Book Reports", offering a searchable database of student papers and a footer reading Copyright 2026 IPL.org. Wikipedia credits the purchase to Barnes & Noble Education around 2020; the site itself names no owner at all.

Twenty years of graduate students answered strangers' questions for free at that address, and the address now sells the homework.

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