Firegivers

What, exactly, is Firegivers? Firegivers is a list on Yahoo!Groups. Membership on Firegivers is available to all members and subscribers of The Prometheus Society. It is not a discussion group; rather, it is a place where copies of the articles in our journal, Gift of Fire, are posted in text format for all who have access to the group to read.

Here's the group's description, found on the Firegivers site:

Do you want to read the latest issue of Gift of Fire? Look no farther. I've used the Hebrew letter Aleph because it is a homonym of "alluph", a title given in Hebrew to scholars who have attained great knowlege and understanding. I hope these articles will take you a few steps farther in that direction. All articles contained herein have appeared in the printed edition of Gift of Fire, the magazine of the Prometheus Society, and are subject to the same copyright protection. This group is open only to members and subscribers of the Prometheus Society. For information on how to join, go to the society's website:

http://prometheussociety.org

Firegivers was founded on January 27, 2004 by the Prometheus Society Treasurer, Brian Schwartz. Brian had a great idea, here! Yes, issues of Gift of Fire do get posted to our website, where members and subscribers can access them. However, each issue is accessed individually, and the issues of the journal are in PDF format. This format has its advantages, certainly. For one, the online journal looks identical to the print version of Gift of Fire. These days, that's certainly the trend, as we can see in Science and other online journals, where PDF "copies" of the original journal (or, in the case of larger journals, individual articles) can be accessed and downloaded. However, the Firegivers list has some interesting advantages.

When accessing Firegivers, members can use the search capability of Yahoo!Groups to find articles based on keywords. These keywords can be related to an article's subject, or a member can use the keyword search capability to find all articles by a particular author. If an individual wishes to quote or respond to a given article, they have only to cut-and-paste the text from the article in Firegivers. Though this can be done with PDF files, it's much simpler a process with a plain text file.

If you are a member or subscriber of Prometheus, I urge you to visit the Firegivers site if you haven't already. Brian does an excellent job of keeping it up-to-date and posting new articles as they are available.

If you are not a current member or subscriber and are interested in reading Gift of Fire, please visit the Prometheus Society website for more information. Online journal subscriptions are only $10.00 per year and include access to the protected areas of the website as well as the Firegivers site.