Aaron Swartz is remembered most for his campaign to liberate articles from the academic database JSTOR. That effort led to his indictment on federal hacking charges, which his family blamed for his January suicide. But years earlier, in 2008, Swartz liberated millions of documents from PACER, the paywalled website for federal court records.
In 2009, a group of researchers at Princeton created a Firefox extension called RECAP to help users redistribute PACER documents. (Disclosure: I was a RECAP co-creator but am no longer actively involved in the project.) Swartz's document liberation efforts were crucial to the success of RECAP because the RECAP team seeded its databases with the 2.7 million documents Swartz had downloaded.
A few days after Swartz's death, the entrepreneur Aaron Greenspan announced the Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants, two $5000 grants to improve RECAP. On Tuesday, the RECAP project announced the winners of two grants. One recipient ported the RECAP extension from Firefox to Chrome. The other extended RECAP to capture documents from the appellate courts as well as those at the trial court level.
Read 9 remaining paragraphs | CommentsIn 2009, a group of researchers at Princeton created a Firefox extension called RECAP to help users redistribute PACER documents. (Disclosure: I was a RECAP co-creator but am no longer actively involved in the project.) Swartz's document liberation efforts were crucial to the success of RECAP because the RECAP team seeded its databases with the 2.7 million documents Swartz had downloaded.
A few days after Swartz's death, the entrepreneur Aaron Greenspan announced the Aaron Swartz Memorial Grants, two $5000 grants to improve RECAP. On Tuesday, the RECAP project announced the winners of two grants. One recipient ported the RECAP extension from Firefox to Chrome. The other extended RECAP to capture documents from the appellate courts as well as those at the trial court level.
DIGITAL JUICE
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank's!