Owner Fred Trafton Registration None | Created by various contributors Commercial No | |
Type of site Progressive rock encyclopedia | ||
Gibraltar, also called The New Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock, is a web site devoted to presenting news and reviews in the world of progressive rock. Gibraltar is well respected in the progressive rock community, and citations to it can be seen in numerous progressive rock related articles on Wikipedia. The encyclopedia is not freely editable by the public, but contributions may be submitted to the maintainers via email.
History
Gibraltar started in 1991 as a moderated electronic mailing list, issued in weekly digest form. The original moderator was Michael Lamoureux, and the list was for discussion of anything related to progressive and psychedelic rock, including art rock, symphonic rock, and electronic music.
In 1991–1992, list member Dave Markfield compiled The Progressive Music Survey, an A-to-Z listing of progressive rock bands, with discographies, reviews, interviews, etc., with most contributions provided by 15 list members. This plain text document was available by email and FTP.
In 1993, Mike Taylor took over moderation of the mailing list and compiled a new, expanded version of the The Progressive Music Survey, again offering it as a plain-text file by email and FTP, but also in the form of a printed, bound version he published himself. The 1993 version had over 1100 artists covered, with contributions authored by over 100 list members and readers of the Usenet newsgroup alt.music.progressive (now rec.music.progressive). From this point on, the document was periodically updated.
By 1995, with the help of Phil Kime, an HTML version was made available on the web, and the title became Gibraltar Encyclopedia of Progressive Rock.
In 2000, maintenance was handed off to Fred Trafton, and the gepr.net domain became the encyclopedia's home, after years of hosting in student web accounts at various universities.