... After beta testing since November, with 200 testers, [biblios.net] was unveiled just before the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting. More than 1000 people have signed up in a week. A presentation Monday by LibLime CEO Joshua Ferraro drew a curious audience.
The ‡biblios.net record database is licensed under the Open Data Commons license, with some 35 million records, most from OpenLibrary, which aims to build one web page for every book ever published and has drawn on major universities and the Boston Public Library. Ferraro acknowledged to LJ that OCLC’s WorldCat has some 135 million records ...
Ferraro said ‡biblios.net grew out of an idea he had "when I came to libraries in 1999, that libraries should have a free repository of metadata—it really just meshes with the whole philosophy of libraries, access to open ideas and information. It doesn’t make sense that we’re freely making materials available, but the stuff we’re creating ourselves is not available freely."
Does LibLime face legal constraints? "There are records that were donated by libraries to the OpenLibrary project that are also in OCLC. Those records were uploaded to the Internet Archive in MARC format, forever placing them into the public domain according to U.S. law," Ferraro said. ...
... [I]n much of [OCLC Vice President Karen Calhoun's] presentation Monday at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Denver, she firmly defended the intent of the policy, suggesting that critics in the blogosphere had an unrealistic view of the library ecosystem. In response, some panelists suggested that OCLC itself was failing to modernize. ...
A revision is expected by the third quarter of 2009. Calhoun acknowledged that “OCLC is caught, along with many other organizations, in this painful transition,” one in which new business models emerge and potential competitors like the upstart ‡biblios.net provide similar services.
Calhoun said the factors driving the policy change included documented efforts to systematically download and copy the entire database; commercial entities reselling records without helping support the shared data creation system; and the need for a legal mechanism to encourage organizations outside the cooperative to negotiate with OCLC.
She likened OCLC records to a swimming pool, a shared community asset supported by the community at large but open only to those who contribute. ...
OCLC’s study group noted that the prevailing opinion in the blogosphere is that data should be free and open. However, she noted, “nearly every organization has terms and conditions for data sharing.” (She cited a presentation at IFLA.) ...
John Mark Ockerbloom, of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, suggested the policy posed another cost, that of missed opportunities for librarians to create new features, for example, expanding on work he’s done on subject maps. He noted some tough language in the policy, which cited “reasonable use,” and noted that the policy was subject to unilateral change by OCLC.
He suggested, by contrast, taking cues from the world of open source, which does include terms and conditions for sharing. He acknowledged that he hadn’t done a fiscal analysis. “There is a significant cost to coordinating a high quality knowledge base,” he said, “but there’s also a substantial cost in keeping our metadata closed off from full access and use”—a cost that is hard to quantify. ...
One way to handle the messy situation is to put the data out in some kind of open data license, said [Peter Murray, of OhioLINK], nothing that “anything other puts up roadblocks.” ...
No one in the audience was particularly happy with the policy; one called it draconian ...
Last month, Huddersfield University’s Dave Pattern announced that he was sharing usage data derived from circulation transactions held in their Library Management System ...
Within a matter of days Patrick Murray-John from Mary Washington University had taken a copy of that data, transformed the data to RDF and published it in a Semantic Web form.
In this conversation we explore the motivations behind Dave’s work and the benefits to the sharing process of the Open Data Commons license he chose to release the data under. Patrick then takes us through how he worked with the data and demonstrated how simple it was to produce and RDF version.
We then explore how the principles demonstrated by their work could be expanded upon to add wide value to the library scene ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 1/29/2009 09:43:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
