Large donations fund the building and maintaining of our Intranet of servers/computers, the spare parts needed to maintain failing hardware, and the upgrading of the software we use to make this all possible. Here are some examples:

• while a PC Desktop computer costs about $800, it will not withstand the 24/7/365 running of a server that is handling 50,000 visitors each day! Server grade computers typically are $4,000 on up for a single CPU machine. One of the multi-CPU servers we have costs over $10,000!
• spare parts are expensive, too: Xeon CPU's can cost as much as $2,000-$3,000 each; memory sticks are $1,000-$1,500 each; and hard disks, while the price is going down, are mechanical devices that wearout quickly ... we need to upgrade to Solid State Devices, SSD's do not wear out as quickly, but do have a limited lifetime.
• the database software needed to monitor all of the data we have and stabilize its running is $3,200 per month! Other software costs are anywhere from $5 to over $1,000 per month.
• the Internet lines we use are special. We need to have guaranteed and dedicated bandwidth along with equal upload and download speeds. Normal users are concerned with download speeds: How fast can you get the information? Whereas, we are the ones sending the information ... we are concerned with upload speeds: How fast can we serve our information? Two Internet lines are needed: should one of the connections have problems, the other one can handle the traffic.
• maintenance for our generator, in case power from the utilities goes out, is another monthly expense, not to mention the initial, upfront cost of the unit and its installation.
• let's not forget backup machines! Saving complete backups of all the servers is vital to maintaing an on-line presence. Should something happen, like a power surge, or a fire, or anything else that might destroy or seriously disrupt the serving of the information, having the ability to restore missing or corrupt data is a necessary part of what we do. Currently we have 35 ways of restoring data should something happen. If you think that is overkill, have we got a story for you!
• and utility payments are rising every month.

As you can see, it is an expensive poposition bringing this information to the world. We started offering our wares on the Internet in 1984, some 40 years ago, before it was the Internet — it was ARPAnet back then. Everybody on the Internet, at that time, took it upon themselves to bring the information they had to everyone else, free of charge! We may have had costs associated with this, but so did everyone else. We agreed to incur the costs so that everyone could benefit from the free flow of information. This was a wonderful model, and we continue it today. All of the information we have is free for everyone in the world to partake of. Our visitors, the researches out there, come from every continent on Earth, including Antarctica. No one is turned away. No one at The e.Lib nor any of its component initiatives takes a salary or any compensation! It is a volunteer group of dedicated individuals. If you can, won't you consider helping to fund our initiative? Thank you, everyone!