Digital Public Library of America

The Berkman Center will convene a large and diverse group of stakeholders to define the scope, architecture, costs and administration for a proposed Digital Public Library of America. This initiative was launched in December 2010 with generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Interoperability

In early June 2012, Urs Gasser and John Palfrey released Interoperability: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems. The book is inspired by their 2005 study and paper—“Breaking Down Digital Barriers: When and How Information and ICT Interoperability Drives Innovation”—which examined the relationship between interoperability and innovation in the ICT environment. The book builds a theory of interoperability, and then illustrates how that theory works and why interoperability is relevant for consumers, companies, governments, and the public.

Cybersecurity

Since spring 2010, under the guidance of Professor Jack Goldsmith, the Berkman Center team has been developing and maintaining the Cybersecurity wiki, which houses an evolving set of more than 350 foundational articles, annotations, literature, and other resources on cybersecurity, broadly-defined.

E-Publishing Models

With the generous support of the Revson Foundation, the E-Publishing Models Project is focused on exploring current issues associated with digital publishing business models and access to electronically published materials in libraries.

Privacy Initiatives

Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data

Led collaboratively by Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), and Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with support from the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program at the National Science Foundation, the Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project seeks to develop methods, tools, and policies to further the tremendous value that can come from collecting, analyzing, and sharing data while more fully protecting individual privacy.

Privacy Initiatives

The Berkman Center has long been home to a number of cross-disciplinary initiatives that investigate privacy and privacy-relevant questions in the digitally networked environment. To this end, we offer research, resources, workshops, and other outputs focused on key privacy issues, aiming to pinpoint novel solutions to privacy problems that reconcile technological, legal, political, economic, and behavioral tensions and maximize capacity for innovative and effective uses of data and communications. Our most recent work in the privacy space includes the Student Privacy Initiative, the Youth and Online Privacy Initiative, and the Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data project.