Technology Used to Trade Pirated Music Could Help Faculty Members Share Teaching Tools

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Loukas Kalisperis has collected more than 5,000 images of buildings, blueprints, and architectural drawings in his 16 years as a professor of architecture at Pennsylvania State University at University Park.

"That's actually a small collection," he says. "Many architecture professors typically have 30,000 to 40,000 slides."

These days most of those "slides" are stored digitally, on computers, rather than in slide trays. And Mr. Kalisperis and many of his colleagues are looking for easy ways to share their collections with each other and with their students.

"To an architect, you can describe a thousand words, but if you draw them a picture, they understand it much better," says Mr. Kalisperis, a native of Greece. "One of the major problems that we have is organizing this type of resource and also being able to share this type of collection."

Researchers at Penn State are keeping professors like Mr. Kalisperis in mind in developing open-source software called LionShare. The peer-to-peer file-sharing system will allow users to search their own and one another's digital collections of documents, images, and other material to find a specific image -- say, a picture of the new Olympic stadium in Athens. LionShare is named after Penn State's mascot, the Nittany lion.

Although peer-to-peer file sharing is usually associated with networks like KaZaA, which many people use to download music and movies illegally, developers say the technology can be used for legitimate academic purposes as well. The technology is called peer-to-peer because it allows files to be shared directly from one person's computer to another, without passing through a central server.

Some professors are still uneasy about trusting their life's work to a technology whose most popular use is illegally trading Britney Spears songs and other copyrighted material. Developers, however, expect those qualms to ease once the faculty members see the benefits that can come from the technology.

LionShare, paid for in part by a $1.1-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is still a long way from being introduced as a final workable program. Version 0.2, a prototype, was released to a chosen group of users in June. Developers don't expect to announce a finished product until September 2005. John T. Harwood, senior director of Penn State's office of Teaching and Learning With Technology, and Michael J. Halm, the senior strategist in the office, are in charge of the project.

Mr. Halm says LionShare will do more than just let people trade files. It will also help users keep track of and organize their own materials.

Say a professor is looking for a paragraph among the hundreds of articles he's written. LionShare will be designed to let him find it by searching for a few key words. For images to be found, users must first label them using key-word descriptions, known as metadata, so that others can type in search terms to find a match.

"With this digital explosion, how do I keep track of my stuff?" Mr. Halm says. "I have about 30 gigabytes of content on my hard drive. Finding something when I need it sometimes can be problematic."

Developers plan to include other features, like software for group discussions and instant messages, and databases to hold material from academic journals.

One of the drawbacks of peer-to-peer systems, Mr. Halm says, is that a user's computer has to be online in order for someone else to search his or her collection of resources. Developers are designing LionShare so that the metadata will be saved separately, on a central server. If the person who has the file is not online, users seeking it can log on again later to retrieve it or e-mail a request for it -- but, in the meantime, at least they know it exists.

The test version of LionShare has been demonstrated for faculty members at Penn State. And the professors there, including Mr. Kalisperis, are excited about the technology.

Mr. Harwood says the faculty members' input early in the process can shape what the technology will eventually become. "As with any technology innovation, you have to look at the early adopters and see what their needs are," he says.

Henry Pisciotta, arts-and-architecture librarian at the university's libraries, conducted a survey in which he asked professors what resources they used for their work. To his surprise, many responded that the most useful collections of data were their own private stashes. He says he found widespread interest in a program that would help faculty members look through their own collections, as well as those of their peers.

But Mr. Pisciotta says some professors are uneasy about trusting peer-to-peer networks with their personal collections. Some faculty members have expressed concern that they won't be able to safeguard their files if it's easy for other people to look through their computers and pass information on to others. "With some people, it just immediately alarms them," he says. "That is an interesting part of the problem."

He tries to reassure the professors that people in academe tend to work by an honor system and would not readily pass along images. The developers themselves try to use synonyms, like "collaborative software," instead of the tainted "peer-to-peer."

Developers are also putting in safe-guards to help prevent unauthorized access to and downloading of private collections. A user won't be able to log on without providing an institutional ID, revealing the user's true identity. And professors will be able to decide who can gain access to their collections.

Still, Mr. Halm says, nothing will be completely safe. "The technology is neutral; how people use the technology is not neutral," he says. "The culpability of what you're sharing always comes back to you."

Mr. Kalisperis says security must be adequate before professors will use a peer-to-peer system. "That is very much a concern to all of us," he says. "These images are very important to us."

But he doesn't believe it will take long for professors to warm up to the idea of sharing on a peer-to-peer service after security has been demonstrated.

"Dissemination is important as long as protection is given," Mr. Kalisperis says. "In an academic institution, it's very much part of our understanding, the idea of sharing."