Category — General

Australian report endorses open access archives. John Houghton, Colin Steele, and Margaret Henty, Changing Research Practices in the Digital Information and Communication Environment, Department of Education, Science and Training, Commonwealth of Australia, August 2003. Excerpt: “We find that there is a new mode of knowledge production emerging, changing research practices and bringing new information access and dissemination needs. Adjustments will be required to the existing research information and scholarly communication system to accommodate these changes, but new opportunities are emerging for more cost-effective and sustainable information access and dissemination….Open access digital repositories, operating in parallel with existing commercial publishing mechanisms, may provide a major opportunity to develop a sustainable information infrastructure for both traditional and emerging modes of knowledge production. Together, they provide the foundation for more effective and efficient access to, and dissemination of scientific and scholarly information.” (Thanks to Charles Bailey's Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog.) [Open Access News]

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australia is getting into the fray here, that is good. the larger the academic community involved and the more state involvement in the issue, the more likely that this will take positive steps for knowledge distribution.

Free Culture!.

I helped put together the new Creative Commons CD featuring all sorts of great licensed music, and it's all available for download.

Now that the pool of CC-licensed music has grown, we had a great deal of choices and as a result there are all sorts of songs in the mix. I've been listening to these songs for months and it's hard to pick favorites, they've all got some strengths. Don't miss the bonus remixes too, the creativity there was amazing.

[A Whole Lotta Nothing]

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there is some interesting music here….

Guide to Institutional Repository Software.

http://www.soros.org/openaccess/software/

Really helpful report from George Soros' Open Society Institute that looks at the currently available open source institutional repository systems that comply with the Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocols. (Note these aren't 'learning object' repositories per se – these are typically more focused on archiving scholarly publishing and other institutional materials, though through things like z39.50 and the IMS digital repositories interoperability spec it may end up that your searches go against these repositories and more.)

You'll have seen this already over at OLDaily (you do read Stephen already, don't you?) – this post was more a personal note as this was one of those 'just in time' nuggets that float through the blogosphere and land on your desktop seconds before you knew you needed them. Hurray!. – SWL

[EdTechPost]

Warfare at the speed of light. After sinking 40 years and billions of dollars into beam weapons, defense scientists are on the cusp of what could be a military revolution ÉÉ warfare at the speed of light. [Gyre.org]

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danger danger danger danger danger

What is Internet infrastructure?. Stratton Sclavos of Verisign distills the essence of the SiteFinder controversy in his CNet interview:

There is a subtle but essential misunderstanding here.  Innovation
can and should happen in Internet infrastructure, but there are a
handful of core elements that must remain open and radically simple if
the Internet is to remain, well, the Internet.  These include
TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, BIND, BGP, and the DNS (especially the .com
registry).  Any change in these protocols should be very carefully
vetted through a consensus-based process. 

The key issue that Stratton misses is that a few simple and
non-proprietary core connectivity protocols make innovation possible
elsewhere.  Take Internet routing, for example.  Akamai and
its competitors built content-delivery networks that fundamentally
changed the way a high percentage of Internet traffic moves through the
network.  But they did it on top of the core protocols, which
remain unchanged.  Innovation took place, but without breaking the
fundamental underpinnings of the open Internet.

The debate about spam, where many people are proposing mandatory
authentication as a solution, illustrates the same confusion. 
Breaking email to fix spam is like breaking the DNS to “fix” mistyped
domain names.  That's why I like Tim Bray's suggestion to use relay servers for spam prevention.  Like Akamai, it leaves the basic infrastructure unchanged. 

Lack of innovation at one level promotes innovation at another
level.  As long as the global Internet community knows that SMTP,
IP, and the domain name system will remain stable, it can build
wonderful new things that leverage that base.  At the same time,
the guardians of the core infrastructure, which includes large network
owners, Verisign, and standards bodies, can focus their energies on
ensuring that the infrastructure can scale.  Because the DNS today
does do something different than it was designed for: it supports a
global network used by billions of people and facilitating billions of
dollars in economic activity.  And that's the greatest innovation
of all.   [Werblog]

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Kevin is precisely right here. you cannot build a house that will last without foundations, and you cannot have interoperability without stable protocols, and while you can develop those protocols, random isolated enclosing moves are not innovation as much as transformation, transformation with the purpose of seizing territory and limiting access to others.

Top Ten Activist Campuses. Mother Jones reports on the Top 10 Activist Campuses: Number one is the University of Tehran, followed by California community… [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]

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at least one virginia campus carries on the tradition of the fathers(and mothers) of our country.

Jon Maddog Hall. 22 Oct 2003: Newsforge interviews Jon Maddog Hall.”Either we should bring the laws regarding software into the twenty-first century so a reasonable software programmer can reasonably respect ownership rights (or defend them) without unreasonable time and legal costs, or only large companies will be able to create software in the future. It becomes too complicated otherwise.I believe that “the common good” in a world-wide software development can not tolerate software patents, needs a shorter time frame [RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix]

How Not To Install Computer Hardware. On [NewsIsFree: Popular Items] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

The Open video project is

A shared digital video collection. The purpose of the Open Video Project is to “collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities”.

The Project is sponsored by and developed at the Interaction Design Laboratory at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

With a good search facility

Thanks Blueblog

(Acc. to Smart Mobs.) [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

happy blogiversary to me. One year. Four hundred and thirty-nine entries. One thousand, five hundred and forty-six comments. (Thanks for being the first, Joi!) Over fourteen thousand page views per month. An entire world of new friends and colleagues. A changed life…. [mamamusings]

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congratulations on a 1 year old, my blogiversary is the 28th of dec. not too far off