Hahn, Harvey wrote:
> "pristine"--unless they redownloaded for some reason.) The LC bib
> database could be included, too, since it's freely available to
> Americans--but I believe there are restrictions to allowing access to
> non-U.S. libraries, since it was created with American tax money and not
> funds from other countries.
The issue is not whose tax dollars created it. The issue is that US
Copyright law specifically exempts works created by the US federal
government by copyright---they are not copyrightable at all under US
law, are simply not protected by copyright in the US. However, other
country's copyright laws have no such exceptions, so they ARE protected
by copyright in other countries (with the US government being the
copyright holder).
Copyright law ends up being enormously complex. But this is one aspect
of it I'm fairly certain of. In general though, you can't count on
something being true in copyright law just because it makes sense to
you. It's not about what makes sense, it's about a complicated set of
laws (statutory and case law) built up over time little by little to try
and meet and balance certain needs and interests, to become the mess
that it is.
Jonathan
> (You'd have to check on how to deal with
> that.) Anyway, that combination ought to give a good start to such a
> cooperative project. Of course, other considerations come into play
> beyond what have already be mentioned: if two or more libraries (in
> different shared cataloging cooperatives) created bib records from
> scratch for the same item, which record goes into the repository?
> What's the process for correcting errors, and who has authority to do
> so? Or is the repository like a wiki, where anybody can change records
> willy-nilly? How would duplicate records, if any, be handled? Just
> read any shared cataloging cooperative's manual(s) to get an idea of all
> that's involved. It's easy to look at big pictures, but (in a digital
> world) little pixels all have to fit together correctly for the big
> picture to exist. I'm rather sure the wished-for repository is quite
> possible, but it won't be large unless *lots* of libraries (especially
> big ones) participate. For example, the current typical rate for local
> creation (from scratch) of book bib records in OCLC is about 2% (AV is
> around 10%-20%)--at least in a public library environment. That's not a
> lot of books that any one typical local institution can contribute (for
> us, that would be only around 7000-7500 titles). Compare that to the
> 4-5 million or more records (I no longer know how many LC MARC records
> exist) created by the Library of Congress since 1968. Without the LC
> bib database, you're likely talking a piddly-sized repository--nothing
> approaching OCLC's 70+ million bibs without all the other article
> records using up numbers. FWIW.
>
> Harvey
>
> --
> ===========================================
> Harvey E. Hahn, Manager, Technical Services Department
> Arlington Heights (Illinois) Memorial Library
> 847/506-2644 - FX: 847/506-2650 - Email: hhahn(at)ahml(dot)info
> OML & Scripts web pages: http://www.ahml.info/oml/
> Personal web pages: http://users.anet.com/~packrat
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Thu Apr 26 2007 - 07:48:26 EDT