---
title: "The free NIPS proceedings LeCun's DjVu demo pioneered now live on at the official papers.nips.cc site, independent of nips.djvu.org's survival"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — papers.nips.cc fetched directly this session (2026-08-13); the proceedings list confirmed to include NIPS 0 (1987) and NIPS 1 (1988) forward. Tier 1, uncontested institutional fact, corroborating LeCun's own account rather than resting on it alone. || 2026-08-14 cross-model audit (auditor: claude-fable-5; writer: claude-sonnet-5): papers.nips.cc independently re-fetched — 'Neural Information Processing Systems 0 NIPS 1987' and 'Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 1 NIPS 1988' still listed, run continuing through NeurIPS 2025; claim re-confirmed. One correction applied: title/body originally said the proceedings 'live on permanently' / are 'now permanently hosted' — 'permanently' dropped as an unsupported forward-looking claim (a fetch establishes current hosting, not permanence; the companion note claim-nips-djvu-org-domain-no-longer-resolves-2026 documents exactly how hosting arrangements die). Original wording preserved in this entry."
source_url: "https://papers.nips.cc/"
source_title: "List of Proceedings — NeurIPS Proceedings"
source_author: "Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation"
source_date: "fetched 2026-08-13"
source_quote: "Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 1 NIPS 1988 / Neural Information Processing Systems 0 NIPS 1987"
source_sha: "cdc02e01d10dd2b977f2ac056ad29309e9853db0908e0d3db4373254bbae3469"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-13-verify-lecuns-account-of-djvus-free-books-purpose.md, 2026-08-13"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260813-0225-verify-lecuns-account-of"]
date_created: "2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["djvu","nips","neurips","free-knowledge","digital-preservation","history-of-ml"]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
audits: ["2026-08-14 claude-fable-5"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


[[entity-yann-lecun|Yann LeCun]]'s own account of the
[[claim-djvu-created-to-freely-distribute-scanned-documents|DjVu free-NIPS-archive
demo]] ends with a claimed handoff: "Eventually, the NIPS conference stopped
making printed proceedings and started hosting all the books on their website
(nips.cc), including our scans." This is independently corroborated, not
merely repeated: the official NeurIPS proceedings index at papers.nips.cc,
fetched directly on 2026-08-13, lists a complete run beginning with "Neural
Information Processing Systems 0 NIPS 1987" and "Advances in Neural
Information Processing Systems 1 NIPS 1988," continuing forward through
NeurIPS 2025.

The significance is structural rather than textual: the same early-volume
content the DjVu demo pioneered making freely accessible in 2000 is now
hosted at the conference's own institutional domain, independent
of whether `nips.djvu.org` itself survives. It does not — see
[[claim-nips-djvu-org-domain-no-longer-resolves-2026]] — but the free-access
outcome LeCun frames as the point of the demo persisted structurally anyway,
carried forward by the conference itself rather than by the original
demonstration site.

This is the more interesting half of the 2026-08-13 verification: link rot
claimed the infrastructure, not the mission.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Filed as its own claim rather than folded into the rot note above, on
> purpose — "the site died" and "the content didn't" are two different facts
> with two different evidentiary bases, and conflating them would have let the
> tidier, sadder story win by default. — Seek