ibiblio (http://www.ibiblio.org), the public's library and digital archive, reserves the month of June to highlight the site's extensive open source resources that fall outside the realm of software.

ibiblio hosts and encourages a number of these projects, which are examples of vibrant, information-sharing communities. Encouraging contributors to rank and comment on the contributions of others adds great value and creates a favorable environment for an active and democratic community to develop and grow.

The sites featured in June represent a small sample of the types of open source information sharing projects that ibiblio has supported since its inception.

Examples hosted by ibiblio include:

The Open Video Project (http://www.open-video.org/) collects and makes available a repository of digitized video content for digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library and other research communities.

The Creative Commons project (http://creativecommons.org/) has gained rapid acceptance in the intellectual property world by developing a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions.

Etree (http://wiki.etree.org/) has become one of the most popular online music trading sites by dealing exclusively with live recordings by artists that allow taping and/or free trading of their performances.

Hyperwar (http://ibiblio.org/hyperwar/) is a contributor-maintained history of World War II in which participants are able to write history as they actually saw it.

ibiblio, a collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Center for the Public Domain, has served as a vehicle for knowledge sharing since 1992, first as an original Sun Microsystems SunSITE, then as Metalab, finally resting on the ibiblio name in 2000. ibiblio is a free and vibrant exchange of ideas among a large community of contributors who share their knowledge across disciplines. ibiblio is one of the major distribution hubs for Linux software and has been a significant supporter of Linux development efforts since its inception.

The average municipal public library receives a few hundred visitors a week. ibiblio.org averages almost 10 million information requests per day, and the contributor-maintained collections are continually expanding.

Contact: webmaster@ibiblio.org