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Paul Jones named an "Internet Maven" of the Southeast


Aug. 31, 2009 - In the summer issue of TechJournal South, readers will find Paul Jones on the cover next to others from the southeast "who have played roles in shaping today’s Internet cyberscape or are making it more effective, easier to use or commercially viable."

Those featured in the article are considered Internet pioneers and entrepreneurs. Jones is listed as the only academic among the movers and shakers selected for the article such as Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution who co-founded, America Online; Vinton “Vint” Cerf, “father of the Internet,” Google “chief evangelist;” Hooman Radfar, co-founder and CEO of Clearspring; and others who have had a significant impact on the World Wide Web as we now know it.

Jones, a clinical associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, directs ibiblio.org, an open source digital library and archive. ibiblio.org is one of the world's first Web sites and largest "collections of collections" on the Internet. It is a conservancy of freely available information, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politics and cultural studies.

ibiblio.org was formed as a collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's MetaLab, formerly known as SunSITE, which was founded in October 1992, and the Center for the Public Domain in September of 2000.

"When I started writing GNU software in 1987, the universe of free and open source software easily fit on a 140MB 9-track tape," said Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Redhat. "As that universe expanded, and the Internet with it, file servers and FTP became the preferred method of distribution, but a new problem arose: which server hosted which project? How many servers would one have to query to build a complete system? Paul Jones solved that problem by creating a well-organized, scalable platform called SunSITE that basically became the Library of Congress for free and open source software. I still remember when SunSITE hosted the GNU C++ compiler (and the rest of the GNU compiler collection) and my feelings of pride that my work had been selected by an Internet maven for inclusion into that significant archive."

At UNC at Chapel Hill, ibiblio is supported by the School of Information and Library Science and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. The collaboration has multiple components including, but not limited to, programs to:

In addition to directing ibiblio, Jones teaches in both the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the School of Information and Library Science. He is a poet and the editor of the Internet Poetry Archives, published with UNC Press.

Photo by Dan Sears.