The Online Library of Liberty

In the Goodrich Seminar Room in the Lilly Library at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana the limestone walls are engraved with the names of the political and legal documents and authors which Pierre Goodrich, the founder of Liberty Fund, believed had most contributed to our understanding of what it means to be free and responsible individuals. At the center of the large room is a circular table around which the seminar participants sit and discuss these ideas. The room was an attempt to demonstate through space and time the inter-relationships that exist between individuals and the ideas they hold, based upon the innovative design of the central circular discussion table and the arrangement of the names engraved on the walls of the seminar room.

An early effort to depict this relationship electronically was the Virtual Tour of the Goodrich Seminar Room. The OLL continues this experiment here. Links in the essay itself are to the Library so that readers can read for themselves the texts under discussion. Links in the box in the top right hand corner are to other essays about the individuals and documents whose names are engraved on the Seminaro Room walls.

The tables below roughly approximate the layout of the names on the walls. The links take you to additional infomation about the authors and to works by them in the Online Library of Liberty.

The symbol in the middle of the East Wall is the cuneiform script "amagi" which is believed to be the first written expression of the word "liberty." It appears in a reform of a legal code by the Sumerian Urukagina in around 2350 BC.

EAST WALL

										2000	1000
										Ur-Nammu Code	Hammurabi Code
										Urukagina	Rigveda
										Gilgamesh	Moses
											Mahabharata