A Note from the UrantiaBook.org Webmaster Regarding
Urantia Foundation's Proposed Website Policy
David Kantor
August 2000
Urantia Foundation, the publisher of The Urantia Book, recently announced a new policy regarding the publication of the text of The Urantia Book on the World Wide Web. In this announcement it was indicated that Urantia Foundation's preferred method of web publication would be to have one copy of the text on Urantia Foundation's website to which all other websites would provide links, rather than storing the text itself on these various reader websites. A number of readers have written in to the website with questions about the feasibility of this policy. Here are a few of the reasons why this webmaster views the policy as ill-advised.
Utility:
First and foremost in importance on the Fellowship website is the provision of materials for the readership which encourage and facilitate study of The Urantia Book. The text which the Fellowship has on its website has been specially formatted to facilitate its use as an on-line supplement to study aids. For example, the study aid, "How Jesus Taught" which may be found at http://urantiabook.org/archive/studyaid/how_jesus_taught.htm provides hyperlinks into the text of The Urantia Book so that specific paragraphs may be displayed. The text of the book as it appears on the Foundation's website does not provide this capability to function as an on-line study support. Our ability to manage the storage, retrieval and display of the text is crucial to our ability to provide a wide range of online study aids to the international readership. A widely used study aid on our website is the comprehensive Topical Index which may be found at http://urantiabook.org/urantiabook/topical_index/ . This index also relies on the ability to locate specific paragraphs within the text, as does the Paramony which may be found at http://urantiabook.org/urantiabook/paramony/ . These are very popular study aids, used frequently by website visitors. They would be inoperable with the Foundation's proposed plan.
Multi-lingual Cross-referencing:
The Fellowship's formatting of translations of The Urantia Book is following the format of the English text. When this task is completed, it will be possible to display any selected paragraph from the text in any two languages in adjacent windows in the user's web browser. The ability to do this is critical for serious scholarship. In addition, this will make it possible to have easy-to-use multi-lingual versions of the Index and the Paramony, the two most frequently used study aids on the website. With Urantia Foundation's proposal, it would not be possible to provide this important service to the readership.
Proper Attribution of Quotes:
Many readers use the text on our website for the creation of study aids. Others use it in the development of essays and other works. These readers use cut-and-paste methods in which they highlight a section of the text, copy it to the Windows clipboard, and then paste it into their document. Our formatting of the text provides a reference number at the start of each paragraph which makes it very easy for the user to provide accurate references for the quotes used as well as proper attribution referencing for copyright maintenance purposes. This is not possible with Urantia Foundation's text. In fact, with the Foundation's non-referenced text it is very difficult for someone to provide an accurate reference, particularly someone not familiar with The Urantia Book. The way in which the Foundation has formatted their version of the on-line text is good for on-line reading, but it is not suitable for serious study or scholarship.
The "Inviolate" Text Issue:
The Fellowship continues to work to make sure that the text we display on the website is an accurate replica of the original 1955 printing. Over the years Urantia Foundation has made small but not insignificant changes to the text from printing to printing. While these changes may not be of significance to the casual reader, they are critical for careful scholarship -- particularly now that serious work is being done relative to "source" materials in which the revelators appear in some cases to have made very subtle changes to the wording of the original authors. In such studies it is imperative that the original text be available rather than one in which someone thought that some particular usage of a word might read a little better. Urantia Foundation's proposal includes the implicit assumption that whatever version of the text they happen to have on their website at any given time is to be considered the "inviolate" text. This is unacceptable for many reasons, accurate scholarship being only one of them. It is ironic that the Fellowship's website is the only place on the Internet today (August 2000) where readers may access a copy of the original text of The Urantia Book. There is additional discussion of this issue below under "Additional background on the 'inviolate' text issue."
Bandwidth:
Having everyone link to one published version creates significant technical issues which will make this very difficult to implement from a technical basis alone. This is particularly true with Urantia Foundation's present web text which exists as one paper per file. In this format, the entire text consists of 196 files which average approximately 50 kilobytes of data each. These are large files and the number of individuals able to simultaneously access these files--even over T1 lines--will be limited. The capacity of a T1 line--the maximum amount of data which it can carry--is 1.44 megabytes. This means that no more than 25 people would be able to access the text of The Urantia Book at one time from a website connected to the Internet via a T1 line.
In my conversations with other webmasters who operate websites which contain the text of The Urantia Book, I am able to estimate that on the Internet as a whole, there are peaks of 50 to 60 individuals simultaneously accessing the text of The Urantia Book. This exceeds the capacity of two T1 lines and would likely also require more than one server in order to avoid saturation of resources.
The website of The Urantia Book Fellowship alone currently has usage peaks of 25 to 30 individuals simultaneously accessing the website. The way in which we have stored the text gives us an average file size of only 7.5 kilobytes per file as compared with Urantia Foundation's average of 50 kilobytes per file. This allows us to accomodate a growing number of users while economizing on server resources. We need to remain free to experiment and develop innovative and creative ways of making the unaltered text available in this technologically complex environment with its rapidly developing means of reproducing the text.
Having one text on the Internet to which everyone is required to link is similar to having one book in a library to which everyone must come in order to read. Urantia Foundation controls the text which appears in books sold by bookstores by controlling the source which is used for printing--the master from which all copies are made. The same could be true for the Internet. If Urantia Foundation provided a master of the inviolate text on their website, webmasters and readers could download it and make it available on their own websites, formatted to fit local contexts and to be reproduced by a variety of technologies. Urantia Foundation would thus be propagating the inviolate text while minimizing the need to maintain complex technological resources.
Ideally, this one text would be the same one which was used for printing The Urantia Book. There would then be one central text, certified by Urantia Foundation, stored in a way which made alteration of the original impossible, from which all copies would be derived. This was originally proposed by Dan Massey over 10 years ago when the possibility of widespread use of digital media first began appearing on the horizon. Today it seems the only way to assure the integrity of the text in a rapidly changing environment of textual reproduction and transmission. Urantia Foundation could go one step further and develop a program which would allow any copy of the text to be compared with their original in order to ascertain conformity. Urantia Foundation could also use this program to test other copies of the text which might appear in various media to be certain that individuals were not changing the text itself, regardless of the media formatting which might be used to reproduce the text in various forms.
Urantia Foundation's new website policy prohibits caching. Yet caching is part of the way in which the Internet works. In fact, its use is growing as a means of increasing the efficiency of bandwidth. For example, if an AOL subscriber in New York accesses the text on Urantia Foundation's website, a copy of the accessed pages will be stored on an AOL computer which serves subscribers in New York. The next time someone from that region accesses the same text, it will be served from the AOL caching server, not Urantia Foundation's server. This is simply how the Internet works and cannot be controlled by a licensing policy.
Technology Development:
The Fellowship is making every effort to utilize new communications technologies for purposes of spreading the revelation and making it available to ever increasing numbers of our fellows. A critical element of this program is the ability to reformat the text of The Urantia Book to fit various uses. Examples include applications for wireless Internet devices and text-to-speech converters used by individuals with visual impairments. It is essential that we retain the ability to reformat, store and process the text as needed to accommodate changing technologies.
Internet Traffic Issues:
Urantia Foundation's proposed policy would create a situation in which anyone wanting to view the text of The Urantia Book would be redirected to the Foundation's website. Urantia Foundation would thus be exploiting all existing Urantian websites as a means of redirecting all Internet traffic related to The Urantia Book directly to their website. Because their policy specifically prohibits "framing," the user is transferred directly to Urantia Foundation's website. This is unacceptable to me for many reasons.
Additional background on the "inviolate" text issue:
In technical terms, one of the most basic operating principles governing the development of the website is that we have a duty to provide the inviolate text of The Urantia Book for access by the public. This means guaranteeing that the words of the original text, the paragraphs into which they are assembled, and their exact sequence will be accurately reconstructed by the medium of display. Since the text which the Declaration of Trust specifies be preserved inviolate is that which was contained on the original plates entrusted to Urantia Foundation, every effort has been made to make sure that the text as displayed on the website conforms to that which was contained on these original plates. The text provided on the web at urantiabook.org thus fully reflects the purposes and intent of those who drafted the Declaration of Trust, constituting an important source of support for the purposes for which Urantia Foundation was created.
This has resulted in two approaches to the electronic reproduction of the text: 1.) The entire original text is available as a photographic reproduction in pdf format and, 2.) A continuing effort is being made to assure that the web browser version of the text on the website conforms to this original, which the Declaration of Trust implies should be maintained free "from alteration, modification, revision, or change in any manner . . ." While it could be argued that this comment in Article 3.1 of the Declaration of Trust refers only to the maintenance of reference copies of the original text, The Urantia Book Fellowship's website acts on the side of conservatism and extends this apparent concern of the founders to apply to the text which is provided to the public via the website.
A distinction should be made between the preservation of the original text and its preservation in the form of a book, which would imply that the text should not be adapted to any other medium. That is, the injunction to preserve the text cannot be taken to apply to such secondary elements as the particular type face cast as part of the original plates. Urantia Foundation's audio tape version of the text provides a good example of preserving the original text while transferring its storage to a medium other than paper, to be reproduced by a machine other than a printing press. The hypertext environment of the web is yet another medium with its own unique requirements for formatting, storage and reproduction. We are providing the text in this new medium while retaining the sequence of words, sentences and paragraphs which constitute the original text.
In addition to certain statements on the public record made by Urantia Foundation trustees, Urantia Foundation's treatment of the Table of Contents over the years would lead to the conclusion that the Table of Contents does not constitute a part of the original text with whose inviolate preservation they are concerned. For example, Urantia Foundation's Folios reproduction of the text contains no Table of Contents at all while the Foundation's website version has a Table of Contents appropriately designed for access to the text via the web. It should also be noted that Urantia Foundation's web version of the text does not faithfully preserve even the paragraph structure of the original text--something which is of great significance to serious readers engaged in a study of source materials. Providing a mechanism enabling scholars and researchers to quickly and accurately make proper paragraph attributions in their work is a critical element of protecting the text.
Because much of the design of The Urantia Book Fellowship's website is geared toward study of the book, the original paragraph structure of the text has been carefully preserved. In addition, we have restored the Paper:Section.Paragraph numbering scheme used by the Seventy prior to publication. This has proven essential for accurate attribution of The Urantia Book paragraphs in the creation of study aids.
That the "inviolate" text is something which exists independently of the formatting demands of it's storage or reproduction medium is illustrated by the following reproduction of a portion of the supposedly "inviolate" text as taken from Urantia Foundation's website:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"><!-- saved from url=(0042)http://www.urantia.org/papers/paper42.html --><HTML><HEAD><TITLE>PAPER 42 - ENERGY--MIND AND MATTER</TITLE><META content=text/html;charset=iso-8859-1 http-equiv=content-type><META content="MSHTML 5.00.2919.6307" name=GENERATOR></HEAD><BODY aLink=red bgColor=white link=blue text=black <HR><P></P><H1>THE URANTIA BOOK</H1><H2>PART II - THE LOCAL UNIVERSE</H2></CENTER><P><HR>Page 467 <HR><P></P><CENTER><H2>PAPER 42 - ENERGY--MIND AND MATTER</H2></CENTER><P>The foundation of the universe is material in the sense that energy is the basis of all existence, and pure energy is controlled by the Universal Father. Force, energy, is the one thing which stands as an everlasting monument demonstrating and proving the existence and presence of the Universal Absolute. This vast stream of energy proceeding from the Paradise Presences has never lapsed, never failed; there has never been a break in the infinite upholding.</P><CENTER><H3><A name="1. PARADISE FORCES AND ENERGIES"></A><STRONG>1. PARADISE FORCES AND ENERGIES</STRONG></H3></CENTER>
Clearly the text which we are concerned with preserving is independent of the characters inserted into the text to control formatting. Formatting the text for display on a web browser is controlled by settings within the browser software on the user's machine. These settings can take precedence over the author's specifications contained in formatting code such as that in the above paragraph. On most browsers these formatting factors may be controlled by the user--which font is used, its size, the margins of the page, etc. The only part of the process fully under the contol of the publisher is the sequence of words and spaces sent to the user.
This is similar to the situation which occurs with the use of Urantia Foundation's audio tapes of The Urantia Book. In this case the user also controls the way in which the text is reproduced -- loudness, varying amounts of bass and treble, even the speed of the tape may be controlled in some playback situations. Here also, that which is stored on the tape is only an analog of the original text, requiring interpretation and formatting by a machine for accurate reproduction.
Urantia Foundation's Folios version on CD is another example of the way in which the inviolate text may be formatted for reproduction in a medium other than that of a book. Here Urantia Foundation has completely omitted the Table of Contents. This version also contains an internal paragraph numbering scheme created by the software, inserted into but not part of the original text.
Current research suggests that The Urantia Book itself is merely an index to a vast collection of additional texts in the fields of philosophy, science and religion. Serving the needs of a growing readership during a phase of revelation development during which our understanding of the nature of the revelation itself is undergoing radical change cannot be accomplished with the same tools which served appropriately in the paper-text dominated information environment of 1950. Thus we are currently migrating the text into XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and WML (Wireless Markup Language) formats which contain even more coded insertions within the body of the text. WML technologies will force us to utilize even smaller file sizes than those for which we strive today -- single sentences stored in a database
Finally, it should be noted that there are strong currents of religious development present in the website activities of The Urantia Book Fellowship. Echoing sentiments contained in the mission statements of each of our organizations, the website exists to foster a religion "commensurate with Man's intellectual and cultural development . . ." The website of The Urantia Book Fellowship now contains examples of marriage ceremonies, funeral services, prayer circles, child dedication ceremonies and worship activities which are all based upon the text of The Urantia Book. This clearly indicates the evolution of The Urantia Book from a mere book to the status of a sacred text which forms the core religious document of a growing number of spiritually active men and women from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds around the world. This website will continue to provide access to this important text and to publish the writings of individuals comprising the growing international community of revelation believers.