By 1993 her gopher file had grown to 750 bookmarks and was put on the City of Berkeley's web server and became known as the Berkeley Public Library Index to the Internet. Within the next two years the Berkeley Library became involved in the Info People project. This was a project that's goal was to "improve the quality of information access to the people of California by upgrading skills, resources and tools available through libraries" (www.infopeople.org). Leita was hired as the internet librarian to coordinate the project, administer the system and to train the staff. In 1995 she met Roy Tennant who was manager of the Digital Library Sun SITE based out of the University of California, Berkeley. Tennant wanted to get her index more exposure and by 1997 arranged it to join the Sun SITE. Having her index on this allowed her to "add a search engine, Library of Congress Subject Headings, and develop a virtual workspace to facilitate team-based record creation and maintenance."(www.lii.org/search/file/about#history) A couple of months later the site was re-named The Librarians Index to the Internet.
HOW IT IS FUNDED.
Since October of 2000 most of the funding has come from the library of California, giving $192,000 annually to help fund the site. There are also other sub grants that are provided to lii.org. These grants along with the Library of California bring in a total annual budget of $215,000 .
HOW IT WORKS.
Every site that is entered in the database is reviewed at least twice before it is even considered to be put on the site. There is also a weeding program that goes through the sites to make sure that they are up and active. This is a good tool because many other search engines bring you back results of sites that are not up and running anymore, having the weeding program will not let that happen. Many other search tools have spiders that go out and look for the information throughout the World Wide Web but lii.
