... Historically, libraries haven’t had openly-licensed, community-maintained sources of library metadata. What we do have are:
National libraries, and the Library of Congress, that create records and make them available freely via Z39.50 or on CD-ROM. These types of databases are openly-licensed in the sense that they are often public domain and free. However, the databases themselves are tightly managed in a top-down fashion, and often don’t contain metadata for many of the materials libraries own.
Membership-driven organizations, consortia, and ILS vendors often provide subscription-based access to their comparatively large metadata databases, and let members add and maintain the database. This solves the community-maintained piece, but the underlying data is typically not available to non-members and is viewed as the intellectual property of the organization hosting access to the platform, rather than collectively owned by the users.
The philosophy behind an Open Data movement scarcely needs an explanation to a library audience. The mission of most libraries is to provide open, free access to ideas and information. Certainly that same mission applies to the metadata created BY libraries. If we can’t freely share the stuff we’re creating among ourselves, how effective can we possibly be at sharing with our communities? ...
2007 saw the launch of the Open Library project, with a goal of creating ‘a page for every book’. Libraries responded by donating over 30 million of their MARC Bibliographic Records, making them freely available by uploading them to the Internet Archive, thereby placing them forever into the public domain. Notable additions to the effort were data sets obtained from the Library of Congress (over 7 million records) as well as UK ILS vendor Talis (over 5 million records). Around the same time, The Library of Congress Authority file surfaced publicly in MARCXML format. And LoC itself opened up access to their records via an XML web service (MARCXML) using LCCN as an identifier, making it possible to access newly created and modified records records more easily. ...
[Rich Internet Applications] were all the rave when LibLime was selected as a 2007 Google Summer of Code mentor, and thus was born ‡biblios, an open-source web-based metadata editor. Last year LibLime released ‡biblios under the GPL and the software is freely available for download from http://biblios.org. ...
‡biblios the editor provides one part of a technology framework for community-maintained data. The other part, a web-scale, production-ready platform where librarians can search, create, share and collaborate, is where ‡biblios.net comes in. ‡biblios.net is the world’s first community-built and maintained database of freely-licensed library records. It’s more than a cataloging editor, it’s a comprehensive cataloging productivity suite ...
Perhaps best of all, not only does ‡biblios.net contain freely-licensed library records, the service itself, including the cataloging editor is made available for use at no cost. ...
And I have the slides and remarks I prepared for “Open Records, Open Possibilities“, a presentation for the ALCTS panel on shared bibliographic records and the future of WorldCat. In that one, I argue for more open access to bibliographic records, showing some of the benefits and sustainability strategies of open access models.
Talis, the UK market leader in providing academic and public library solutions, and LibLime, the leader in open solutions for libraries, are pleased to announce a partnership to make available over five million bibliographic records to the library community on the ‡biblios.net platform.
‡biblios.net is LibLime's free browser-based cataloguing service with a data store containing over thirty-million records. The database is maintained by ‡biblios.net and uses a similar model to Wikipedia. Cataloguers can use and contribute to the database without restrictions because records in ‡biblios.net are freely-licensed under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License.
Talis is providing data from the Talis Union Catalogue; the open shared core of records from the Talis Base service, to ‡biblios.net, including over 5 million bibliographic records, catalogued by public and academic libraries in the UK over the last 30 years. ...
Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist at Talis adds "The open sharing of data, the default motivation for most librarians, has often been stifled by confusion and fear about ownership and licensing. Open Data Commons helps clarify and dispel those fears, opening up data that can confidently be shared. ‡biblios.net is a great example of the innovation that results when data is really open.” ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 2/02/2009 06:42:00 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.
