The Internet Sacred Text Archive (ISTA) is a website

Website

A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...

 dedicated to the preservation of electronic public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

 texts, specifically those with significant cultural value. Works which fall into this category range from religious text

Religious text

Religious texts, also known as scripture, scriptures, holy writ, or holy books, are the texts which various religious traditions consider to be sacred, or of central importance to their religious tradition...

s such as the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

, the Qur'an

Qur'an

The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...

, the I Ching

I Ching

The I Ching or "Yì Jīng" , also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts...

, or the Vedas

Vedas

The Vedas are a large body of texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the oldest scriptures of Hinduism....

, to the classical literature

Classics

Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...

 of Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

, Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

, or Sophocles

Sophocles

Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides...

, and on to the more contemporary works of Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

, or the Brothers Grimm

Brothers Grimm

The Brothers Grimm , Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm , were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular...

.

The website was first opened to the public on March 9, 1999 by John Bruno Hare (July 8, 1955 - April 27, 2010), in Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz, California

Santa Cruz is the county seat and largest city of Santa Cruz County, California in the US. As of the 2010 U.S. Census, Santa Cruz had a total population of 59,946...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

, USA

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. Its texts are organised into 77 different categories, with several new texts being added each month. The maintenance costs for the website — which receives anywhere from five hundred thousand to two million visits a day — are funded by sales of the website on DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 or CD-ROM

CD-ROM

A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....

 and other monetary donations.

While the majority of visitors seem to recognise the valuable resource the website provides, the ISTA has still suffered several denial-of-service attack

Denial-of-service attack

A denial-of-service attack or distributed denial-of-service attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users...

s since its inception. The first major attack on the website came on March 13, 2002 and lasted for 10 days. After the site administrator successfully traced the attack to a university

University

A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...

 in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, and had the user responsible barred from using the computers there, he received an email from the attacker himself, an excerpt from which may aid in understanding his and others' motivations for attacking the website: "I surely can not agree with to mix up all the pagan cults, idols, witchcrafts (6. & 7. book of 'Moses'), esoteric, ocullt [sic], theosophic and even satanic views and the God that created heaven and earth that hates these former things with one another without distinction."

External links

• The Internet Sacred Text Archive
• "Online religious book publisher seeks growth", Santa Cruz Sentinel, 8/11/2009.