Tuesday, September 12, 2000

U. of North Carolina Gets $4-Million to Expand 'Public Library of the Internet' By FLORENCE OLSEN The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's MetaLab, one of the busiest digital libraries on the Internet, on Monday received a $4-million gift and a new name, ibiblio.org. Its benefactor says the gift will help the site develop its unique character as "the public library of the Internet." The Red Hat Center, a private foundation in Durham, N.C., made the gift and announced a five-year joint project with the university to expand ibiblio. Robert Young, who is one of the founders of the Linux software company Red Hat, says ibiblio demonstrates the value of free public libraries and exemplifies the ideals of the open-source movement. The movement maintains that knowledge, unlike real property, should be free. Linux is an open-source computer operating system -- created by volunteers from all over the world. Consisting of computer code that is publicly available, it has attracted a considerable amount of interest as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows products. The university's enormous library server, which handles an average of 1.5 million transactions daily, is one of the largest repositories of Linux software and software documentation. "Developers and programmers around the world take this stuff for granted -- but value it highly," Mr. Young says. The server also is the repository for digitized historical collections that include Documenting the American South, a series of book-length narratives of life under slavery, and the folk-music collection of the songwriter and musician Roger McGuinn, who cofounded the Byrds. Paul Jones, the director of the online library, says the gift will enable ibiblio to award research fellowships and develop the software infrastructure for expanding its collection of digital materials. Mr. Jones is an associate professor of information and library science who also teaches in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. From its beginnings as SunSITE.unc.edu, the digital library has grown by permitting people to share songs, software, and other intellectual property, Mr. Jones says. Anyone with something valuable to share could upload the material to be added to the library's collection. "All they had to do was fill out the equivalent of an electronic card-catalog card," he says. Up until last week, the library's only online self-promotion was a small label that read: "Serving your Internet needs since 1992." During the next six to eight months, Mr. Jones says he expects to introduce user-based rankings and ratings of ibiblio library materials, adopting some of the methods and open-source software used by slashdot.org, another popular Internet site. "We want it to be Jacksonian, noisy, and participatory," he says. Mr. Young, a prominent proponent of open-source software, says Congress, in recent years, has been too protective of patent and copyright holders at the expense of the public's interest. "If all knowledge was owned by some megacorporation, and if copyrights were indefinite as some people in Congress are proposing," he says, "the world's most profitable corporation today would be Ancient Greek Mathematicians Inc." He says ibiblio is proof that "extending patents and copyright rules to the satisfaction of Disney or Time Warner is not necessarily in the interest of all of us as citizens." Western scientific progress has been made by sharing knowledge, Mr. Young says, "and that's what the MetaLab and the University of North Carolina have always stood for." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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