Are any libraries or archives officially seeding torrents of open material?

BitTorrent is a very efficient and network-friendly way of sharing large files.

When a library or archive makes available digitized holdings, data sets or something similar of course it will make them available for download from its web site, but I wonder if any are also seeding torrents so that the files will be available, reliably, over BitTorrent.

If so, what materials are being made available this way? How was the decision made to use this delivery mechanism? Has it been effective in helping distribution and lowering bandwidth demands? How is the seeding implemented?

(I do see that there is a Gutenberg torrent.)

wdenton

• digital-archiving
• torrent

Comments

• wdenton: I can't create a bittorrent tag but this question needs one, so perhaps someone can create it?
• KatieR: Is a BitTorrent tag really needed or would something like "torrent" be better and more widely used?
• wdenton: That would be fine.
• Ashley Nunn: This is just going to be a list question of places that do such a thing, if any. Is there anything specific you are looking to know about the process or anything?
• wdenton: I edited the question to add some more specific points.

Answer by Matt Stephenson

Ibiblio maintains Terasaur, providing torrents of content you'll find in their catalog.

Comments