www.odessa3.org/about.html:

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Since late 1993, a small group has been considering ways to apply state-of-the-art networking technologies to the problem of conducting genealogical research. Already in 1993 the developers recognized that finding information distributed across thousands of personal websites would pose considerable difficulties. Three main approaches to search are common today; personal websites offer authors control over their information at the risk of obscurity, centralized libraries offer superior search capabilities but offer contributors less control over their data, and webrings seek a compromise between the distributed and centralized approaches.
This digital library differs from a paper library in two main respects...the index is hierarchical instead of flat like a card catalog, and much of the collection can be searched electronically. The article on retrieval and copyright is recommended. Library size as of December, 2006 is about 360 Mbytes