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idea for digital libraries
- To: schwartz@cs.colorado.edu
- Subject: idea for digital libraries
- From: Carl Malamud <carl@trystero.malamud.com>
- Date: Sat, 23 Oct 93 10:06:20 -0400
- Org: Internet Multicasting Service
I think I've got the answer for the digital library grant. The idea is a bit from left field, but I think its just crazy enough we can get it together.
The project is called "the commons" or "the village green" or some other corny name that makes it through focus groups. The basic idea is to link a dozen core sites (e.g., mine :), sunsite, archie.au, wuarchive, *.parc.xerox) together with a high speed backbone. This backbone is *NOT* a transit net, but a single multicast-capable IP virtual LAN.
The simplest application for this is mirroring and FTP. If you have 10-100-155 Mbps on a cross-country virtual lan in the US (and I believe I've found one looking for a mission in life ;), you can link a lot of the big FTP servers together and let them be fairly exact mirrors. That takes the load of FTP traffic off of the transit networks, plus makes data distribution a much more systematic affair.
This thing could also be a video/audio spigot: you can get a high-quality multicast backbone in place, and if you have a production facility like mine, can simply turn it "on" for affairs like the National Press Club Luncheons.
Basically, by layering a dedicated LAN on top of the Internet, you can stretch out *much* more from the existing transit backbone in place, which is great as a web for one-to-one communication. We place this core of mirrored sites on top of it, and all of sudden your national or regional network can concentrate on adding and maintaining end users instead of trying to become publishers.
The trick with the commons is to make it a library created by people. We come up with rules on how to check things in and out of the library and we make this resource a global common space, kind of like creating a civic square. Instead of parks and museums, we'll have ADPCM-encoded audio streams and http-tagged documents.
Want to give it a try? Bet we could convince Cliff Lynch or some other library person to go in with us. I can bring MFS Sprint, and Sun to the table with some pretty hefty donations, and could probably get Chairman Markey to take some honorary position in the affair. Bet that would be of assistance in the review process. ;-))
We have three months to put this together, so we're still in the "is it worth tossing around a bit more" stage.
Carl
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