The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO)  has moved to a nodal structure through new partnerships with the University of Iowa and the University of Illinois—Chicago. UI and UIC are the first of many anticipated "nodes" in an expanding network of institutions and universities committed to promoting and facilitating the writing, publishing and reading of electronic literature.

Home to the storied Writers' Workshop, the University of Iowa is already considered to be the best writing university in the country. The University of Chicago--Illinois hosts an important online journal on electronic literature and theory, ebr: The Electronic Book Review. Partnerships with the ELO expand the dimensions of all three organizations.

Thom Swiss, a professor in the University of Iowa English Department with a shared appointment in the Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry (POROI), was recently elected president of the ELO. Swiss said the arrangement between the University of Iowa and the ELO will be a visible, international signal that Iowa, the nation's premier writing university, is also a leader in the digital age.

The ELO is also developing a relationship with the University of Chicago—Illinois. Under the editorial leadership of ELO board member Joseph Tabbi, UIC's online journal ebr: The Electronic Book Review has become a strong voice in the digital writing community. Tabbi considers that as the home of ebr, the University of Chicago—Illinois is a natural fit with the ELO.

For the first joint ELO-UIC project, Tabbi worked with a number of ELO board members to develop a "stream� of a dozen panels on eliterature at the 2005 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference at UIC.

In addition to new nodes at UI and UIC and its headquarters at UCLA, the ELO now has a reading series, "Machine,â€? in association with Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. The ELO also organized readings at the recent Boston Cyberarts Festival  in association with Turbulence.

With support from UCLA, the University of Minnesota, the University of Maryland's MITH project, Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, and ELINOR, the ELO is also launching a major new publishing program. The Electronic Literature Collection will be a web and CD-ROM collection of innovative works of electronic literature distributed under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license. Individual works included in the Collection, and the Collection as a whole, will be freely available for students, teachers, libraries and readers to copy and distribute.

The ELO recently redesigned its website, www.eliterature.org; it now includes a showcase of innovative works of electronic literature you can link to right off the front page, and a regularly updated listing of news and events.

Three publications are currently available from the ELO: State of the Arts, a book and CD collecting keynote addresses, papers and works of electronic literature from the 2001 Electronic Literature Awards and 2002 State of the Arts Symposium; Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature; and Born-Again Bits: a Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature. Printer-ready versions of Acid-Free Bits and Born-Again Bits are available on our website under "Publications.� Printed copies of both State of the Arts and Acid-Free Bits are available free of charge as long as supplies last, and printed copies of Born-Again Bits will be available soon. To request copies, write Carol Wald at wald@eliterature.org.