What is the Phoenix Library?
Information for the Future

In 1981, the Phoenix Foundation was chartered as a non-profit corporation in Tennessee, with the mission of providing the American people with the information they would need to survive and, hopefully, thrive in the coming millennium.

That mission led, first, to a printed newsletter, The Omega Report, that was circulated around the world, even though we had virtually no operating budget.

From there came The Omega Report television show, cablecast to over 1.3 million homes in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee.

As the legend of the Phoenix Foundation, fed by such popular TV shows as MacGyver, grew, so did the demand for the unique information we provided - but our budget did not allow us to meet those demands either in print or on video. The weekly production of an hour-long documentary was staggering.

Today, however, the Internet allows us to offer information in many forms - print, audio and video - at a much lower cost, making it available to the entire world ... at least until the global corporations commercialize the Internet for their own exclusive use and control.

As long as information yearns to be free and that freedom is a reality, the Phoenix Foundation will continue to fulfill its mission.

Because we are involved in many areas of research, the Phoenix Library - affectionately known as Alexandria II (after the ancient and vast but now-destroyed libraries of Alexandria, Egypt) - is the vehicle by which the Phoenix Foundation archives will be made available.

The economic realities dictate that we come up with a practical business model that will allow us to meet our basic expenses. To do that, we have created two or more levels of access to our information:

• The first access level is free membership in Alexandria II, which allows you to access all of the free information we have available.
• The second access level is out Silver Membership in Alexandria II, which provides paid members with a higher level of access and remarkable discounts on materials to which we have purchased reprint and/or resell rights.

But even if you have only a Free Membership, you can still purchase any material available in our library.

Because we currently rely on volunteer assistance only, with one part-time paid employee, our library will initially have only a small offering - but it will grow, as we have accumulated tens of thousands of works we will be adding to the library.

Many of our works are downloadable, even to those with dial-up connections - but some, especially some of our original works, are so large they must be shipped on a CD or, in some cases, a DVD or multiple CDs. For these, we must charge a modest production charge, which varies according to the size of the product.

The proceeds go in part toward a very modest salary for our director, Jim Moore (that's me!). I now spend nearly half my time as caregiver for my wife, who has suffered two strokes and is semi-invalid. I must be with her fulltime to care for her and so I must work from home if I am to make an income at all.

Your patronage is therefore greatly appreciated - much more than you know.

How It Is Organized

Our works will be placed in appropriate categories, much like any other library. But we will also be working with a New Additions Section, in which all of our new additions will first be placed before being categorized. After about a month, or as soon as they can be catalogued, they will be moved to the "stacks" - the regular, categorized library shelves.

As the library grows, we will follow the standard Dewey Decimal classification system used in public libraries throughout the Western world, but certain topics of current news events and of special public interest will be separately highlighted as seen below.

Each topic will include the available print, audio and/or video material as it is added from our archives. Most of the videos are linked directly to YouTube.com, Brightcove or Google Video and, if they have been removed, the links will not work. Others have been downloaded directly to our archives and are stored on our own hard drives.

The major topics (some have sub-topics) at this time are:

How You Can Help

We are in need of a volunteer to help us come up with the proper coding to display Flash Movie Files (FLV) within a Flash SWF file - one that will play within the browser on Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Opera. We are seeking that snippet of code which would allow us to simply replace the path and filename of the FLV file and insert it into HTML code, operating much like a Javascript does.

This would help us greatly reduce file size and bandwidth, and make our material more widely available.

We also need help in getting CubeCart to work on our Bluehost server so we can make sure our customers get their orders.

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Compiled and Edited by Jim Moore
Published by Phoenix Publishing
Music by Various Artists 

© Copyright 2006. All rights reserved.