I think you could do it with a lean model like Wikipedia, which has
only five actual employees. All together the storage, processing and
bandwidth requirements are not greater than theirs.
Of course, OCLC does a lot of other things, which require people and
resources, but keeping a central repository of records is separable.
IA is my nominee. They know how to move the bits, and they've got
openness in the blood.
Tim
On 4/24/07, William Denton <wtd_at_pobox.com> wrote:
> On 24 April 2007, K.G. Schneider wrote:
>
> > I wonder how many of us are conceptually on board with the concept of a
> > national catalog, and yet hesitate to endorse this concept (or even
> > argue for a functional model we realize is not working for us now, if it
> > ever did) because the only functional model remotely available to us
> > (and not that remote any more, either) would place us under the control
> > of the Big O.
>
> National catalogues mean lots of catalogues! There are lots of nations.
>
> I met Thom Hickey, Chief Scientist at OCLC, a couple of years, and have
> never forgotten that he said he'd take the WorldCat database home on his
> iPod. WorldCat's grown a lot since then, but so has iPod storage.
>
> So disk space isn't a problem, but running something as big as WorldCat
> does require a lot of resources. On the other hand, it seems to be mostly
> a matter of implementation. What a large union catalogue does is mostly a
> solved problem.
>
> Is it the sort of problem where someone outside, like a Google or an
> Internet Archive, would look at the requirements and say, "That's not that
> much, actually--we have the disk space and bandwidth, and it's not much
> work to build some basic tools and APIs"?
>
> Maybe someone will treat building a freely available global union
> catalogue as a corollary to their main business.
>
> Bill
> --
> William Denton, Toronto : www.miskatonic.org www.frbr.org www.openfrbr.org
>
Received on Tue Apr 24 2007 - 19:58:04 EDT