Information Access Seminar

“Alternative Visions of Internet Connectivity” and “The Failure of Stewardship Organizations and the Transfer or Conservation of Cultural Materials”

Friday, November 15, 2013
3:10 pm to 5:00 pm
Nick Merrill and Clifford Lynch

“Alternative Visions of Internet Connectivity”
Nick Merrill

A short progress report will include discussion on the following projects:

  • Namecoin, a widely distributed DNS that relies on a proof-of-work cryptosystem to align the database over many peers;
  • tent.io, a novel approach to cloud-based application development in which users store their personal data locally; and
  • commotion wireless, a cross-platform mesh network protcol with its eye on more than simple router replacement; and
  • vole and its cousin idas blue with shoutout to blogracy: attempts at peer-to-peer messaging that seem to slip below the great firewall of China.

“The Failure of Stewardship Organizations and the Transfer or Conservation of Cultural Materials”
Clifford Lynch

(Continued from Sept 27) In the past decade or so, we've seen many examples of stewardship organizations abandoning their management of collections, usually for economic reasons. In some cases, these situations raise very interesting governance, legal and public policy problems as well as financial and operational issues. In this discussion, I'll examine a number of representative case studies, and focus on how the ability to create very high quality digital representations of physical items or collections may change the situation. Time permitting, I'll also begin a discussion of how these situations may play out when the collections are themselves inherently digital.

Last updated:

March 26, 2015