Archive for the ‘open library’ Category

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Open data and the Future of Bibliographic Control

We’ve got until December 15th to submit comments on the draft report produced by the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.

No—keep reading! This is important. People in the library profession need to be involved in this stuff. Further, people outside the profession need to be involved too. As the report notices, library data is used by many outside the library world, starting with library patrons, and extending even to Amazon.com. It shouldn’t go unnoticed, for example, that draft report mentions LibraryThing four times. For while LibraryThing uses library data, it was invented by and is mostly used by non-librarians.

Aaron Swartz, the dynamo behind Open Library, sent me a note about one important aspect of the draft report, namely what it’s missing: It doesn’t mention open data. There is serious discussion about sharing, but also the alarming proposal that the LC attempt to recoup more money from the sale of it’s data. That’s a shame. I’m not alone in believing that open access to library data is the future. A report about the future should confront the future.

The economy of library records is a complex one but not primarily a free one. By and large libraries pay the Dublin, Ohio-based OCLC for their records, even if the records were created at government expense. That model looks increasingly dated. And it is killing innovation.

It hasn’t killed LibraryThing yet, but the specter has always hung over our head. It’s why LibraryThing has—so far—not pitched itself to small libraries. OCLC doesn’t care about personal cataloging, and the libraries we use are—in every conversation I’ve had—enthusiastic about what we do. They want their data out there; they’re libraries for Pete’s sake! But if we offered data to public libraries we’d be cutting into the OCLC profit model. That could be dangerous.

Aaron invited me to sign onto a list of people interested in the issue. I did so. I invite you—any of you—to do so as well. The text says it perfectly:

“Bibliographic records are part of our shared cultural heritage and should be made available to the public for re-use without restriction. This will allow libraries to share records more efficiently, but will also make possible more advanced online sites for book-lovers, easier analysis by social scientists, interesting visualizations and summary statistics by journalists and others, as well as many other possibilities we cannot predict in advance.”

“Government agencies and public institutions are increasingly making data open. We strongly encourage the Library of Congress to join this movement by recommending that more bibliographic data is made available for access, re-use and re-distribution without restriction.”

The petition is here: http://www.okfn.org/wiki/OpenBibliographicData .

Labels: library of congress, open data, open library, Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

Google in the NYT; Aaron Swartz at Berkman

I just returned home from doing a talk in NYC*, so I only just read the front-page NYT story about libraries spurning Google’s scanning effort, and turning to the Internet Archive and the Open Content Alliance instead.

You may now insert five paragraphs of incisive discussion of this vexed topic. I’ve got opinions a-plenty. But why bother? I can’t do anything about them.

Aaron Swartz, the tech lead for the IA’s Open Library project, is a guy who can. And I’m going to see him tomorrow! Aaron is dropping by the Berkman Center to talk about Open Library.

Berkman scholar and regular on this blog, David Weinberger, gave me a heads-up, and I snagged a spot for myself and for Abby. I’m all keyed-up over it. I was involved in an early Open Library meeting and have followed it closely. Our recently-introduced “Common Knowledge” feature owes something to the Open Library vision, and has given us some insight into the promise and the problems Open Library will face as it grows.

Anyway, the event is at 12:30 Eastern Time. I don’t know if they still have spaces, but the whole thing will be webcast live (directions here), and archived for later viewing.

*NFAIS, it was fun.

Labels: aaron swartz, berkman center, open library, weinberger

Monday, July 16th, 2007

Open Library

The word is finally out about Open Library, the Internet Archive’s open cataloging project:

http://demo.openlibrary.org/

It too late in the evening to get into what it’s about. You can read about it. But I can tell you it’s a big deal. Open Library is going to change book data forever. It’s not clear to me how all the ideas will shake out—the wiki idea will be a particularly hard sell to many in the library world!—but I know this: the genie is out of the bottle. Book data is opening up.

It’s a relief to talk about it. I was one of the people at the first meeting too, and, before that, I had some role in developing one of the central ideas—an open source alternative to OCLC, building from the LC records.* I missed a second meeting, and I ticked off some with my insistence that Open Library be developed openly as well. In retrospect, I was too hard on them.

Well, it’s all out now, and it’s wide open. The developers are eager to find out what you think. You can download the code. Congratulations to Brewster Kahle, Aaron Schwartz and the rest for bringing Open Library so far so fast.

I can’t wait to see where it takes us.


*From my email, it looks like Casey Bisson had this idea around the same time as I did. Either way, I never went beyond talking, and Casey pushed it forward. (See this Talis podcast.) I don’t know what his roll in the final product was, but he deserves a big share of the praise.

Labels: internet archive, open data, open library