Media Berkman :: Aaron Swartz on the Open Library Project

Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit.com and Tech Lead for the Open Library project, spoke at this week’s installment of the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Listen to the MP3 or view the MOV (time: 1:03:39)

Aaron spoke about how, thanks to new technology, the grand vision of a library containing every book in the world is now within our grasp. He discussed how the Open Library Project, a loose collection of technologists, publishers, librarians, and book-lovers, has taken up this challenge by trying to create a website collecting everything we know about books — including library records, publishers’ blurbs, full-text and scans, reviews, and more

Aaron was previously a co-founder of Reddit.com, which was purchased by Condé Nast in late 2006. He was worked on Internet specifications for RSS and RDF and was one of the early team members of the Creative Commons project. He is the author of a number of free software packages and a co-founder of Jottit.com.

+ Open Library vision
+ Aaron Swartz’s website

Berkman Fellow David Weinberger live-blogged the lunch, and you can check out his comments and summary here.

David Weinberger :: Metacrap and Flickr Tags: An Interview with Cory Doctorow

Originally posted on David Weinberger’s Wired News Podcast on May 3, 2007.

In this new series, which is cosponsored by Wired News and the Harvard Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, David Weinberger, author of the new book Everything Is Miscellaneous, talks with some of the leading businesspeople, scientists, and thinkers who are coming up with innovative new ways of putting ideas, information and knowledge together. Now that the digital age has blown apart traditional ways of organizing information, what’s next? Suddenly, everything is miscellaneous.

David kicks off the series by interviewing novelist, BoingBoing co-editor, digital rights activist and entrepreneur Cory Doctorow. For Cory, piling up information without strict organizational rules can be workable provided that we have sufficiently reliable metadata. The problem is that people don’t all use metadata the same way or use tags consistently, and that can be a real obstacle to making coherent sense of piles of information.

David and Cory discuss the advantages and pitfalls of explicit and implicit metadata, tags and the rules governing the use and re-use of content in commerce and culture.

MediaBerkman :: Teresa Hackett on Digital Libraries in Developing Nations

Originally posted in MediaBerkman on May 2, 2007.

The role and mission of libraries is to collect, organise, preserve and make available the world’s cultural and scientific heritage for current and future generations. Publicly funded libraries operating for the public benefit support access to knowledge, as well as education and training, critical to developing nations whose human resource is central to their advancement. Digital technologies are transforming the way that libraries work. What new opportunities are being created? What challenges do we face and how is eIFL.net addressing them?

Teresa Hackett runs eIFL-IP “Advocacy for Access to Knowledge: copyright & libraries”, a programme to raise awareness in copyright issues for libraries in 50 developing and transition countries. The goal is to build capacity and expertise amongst the eIFL.net library community and to represent the interests of members in key international policy fora such as WIPO, UNESCO and the WTO. Previously, Teresa was the Director of the European library association (EBLIDA), provided technical support to the European Commission library research programme and was part of the team to establish electronic information centres at the British Council Germany. Teresa is currently an Expert Resource Person on the Copyright and Other Legal Matters Committee of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA-CLM). She is a chartered librarian and in 2004 completed a post-graduate diploma in legal studies at the Dublin Institute of Technology.

AudioBerkman is a production of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.5 license. Download the audio podcast (time: 1:14:10). Also available as a QuickTime video (Runtime: 1:14:10, size: 320×240, 208MB, QuickTime .MOV, H.264 codec).

MediaBerkman :: Gavin Yamey on “Opening Up to Open Access: What Can Other Disciplines Learn from the Sciences?” (part 2)

Originally posted by MediaBerkman, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society Podcast, on March 17, 2007.

Gavin Yamey on “Opening Up to Open Access: What Can Other Disciplines Learn from the Sciences?”

Download part two of the audio podcast (time: 23:10).

What can academics do to ensure that their research results are included in the growing “knowledge commons?” Gavin Yamey MD, Senior Editor of PLoS Medicine and Consulting Editor of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, shares his experiences in the open access movement and explores possible avenues for its expansion to other fields, with a focus on the social sciences and humanities.

MediaBerkman :: Gavin Yamey on “Opening Up to Open Access: What Can Other Disciplines Learn from the Sciences?” (part 1)

Originally posted by MediaBerkman, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society Podcast, on March 17, 2007.

Gavin Yamey on “Opening Up to Open Access: What Can Other Disciplines Learn from the Sciences?”

Download part one of the audio podcast (time: 1:17:38).

What can academics do to ensure that their research results are included in the growing “knowledge commons?” Gavin Yamey MD, Senior Editor of PLoS Medicine and Consulting Editor of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, shares his experiences in the open access movement and explores possible avenues for its expansion to other fields, with a focus on the social sciences and humanities.