Osprey | An Open-Source Permaseed and Metadata Management Project

Okay, so this is really, really cool and it's coming out of iBiblio and the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina. It's called Osprey and it's a two part, server-side system that could ratchet this whole BitTorrent distribution process up a notch or two.

From their Project Overview:

Osprey is a peer-to-peer enabled content distribution system. A metadata management system for software and document collections enables local and distributed searching of materials. Items are available for download directly via URL or indirectly via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer protocol.

Two components exist: the Osprey web application and permaseed (permanent seed). The web application includes metadata management for finding and exploring available content, as well as a BitTorrent tracker. The latter is a BitTorrent server application, which links content on a server to a BitTorrent swarm. Permaseed addresses the typical transience of BitTorrent file distribution by providing a daemonized service that functions more like a server than a BitTorrent client.

Cool, huh?

For more info check out this .pdf which will be presented at the 2005 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Regarding libraries, community media has been tied to libraries on a number of fronts so its encouraging to see that we're working in parallel on new technological ventures as well.