General Information

Contact Information. ROA is managed by Eric Bakovic. All correspondence should be directed to him at <roa@ruccs.rutgers.edu>.

History. The Rutgers Optimality Archive began life in 1993 as a command-line ftp server. In 1996 the web interface was put together with the help of Mike Strickland (then a high-energy graduate student, now a high-energy physicist), who wrote the original search, delivery, and upload scripts. Document files were archived in the server-cluster of the Rutgers University Cognitive Science Center (RuCCS) and all scripts were hosted by webslingerZ, an internet business solutions provider. Markus Walther independently fashioned a mirror site at Marburg University in Germany. In the Spring of 2001, spurred on by difficulties in the RuCCS system, ROA received its first major overhaul. In 2002, the ROA hardware was replaced, and in 2003 Paul de Lacy rewrote much of the software and added bibliographic and author-related functions.

The current incarnation is a MySQL server running through PHP3 scripts. The basic groundwork was put down by Jesse Fischer. The current site was engineered and is maintained by Paul de Lacy. The graphics and user-interface were designed by Graham Horwood. All data and executable files of the new Archive are hosted on the webserver of the Rutgers University Linguistics Department.