Yeah, it's frustrating to me that due to the current confluence of
organizational commitments, tradition, and business needs, we (the
library community) are more likely to share and make our metadata
accessible to _non-library_ partners, then we are to share it with each
other! The OCLC agreement sharing things with Google that OCLC won't,
for instance, give the University of Michigan permission to share
publically with us, is just another brick in the wall.
This is NOT the way to ensure the continued relevance of libraries and
library metadata!
Jonathan
Kyle Banerjee wrote:
>> Giving such abbreviated catalog records certainly does not help our users
>> much, and much less than it could, while it makes a mockery of our pleadings
>> to others to share, share, share your metadata. But from another point of
>> view, I believe this provides an excellent example of just how controversial
>> this "sharing" can be.
>>
>
> It is also totally out of whack with libraries letting Googlebot and
> other spiders will crawl their catalogs. Why allow/encourage slow,
> resource intensive, and less effective means of sharing this
> information while throwing bricks at anyone who wants to do it the
> efficient way?
>
> This situation reminds me of z39.50. That was supposed to be the
> original Napster for libraries. Libraries clamored for it, but no one
> (including the libraries) really used it for much beyond trivial uses
> such as downloading citations. As soon as people started trying to do
> actually useful with the data, it suddenly became controversial, words
> like "record nabbing" starting getting tossed around. Meanwhile, we
> started figuring out how to display Amazon cover art and reviews in
> our catalogs...
>
> kyle
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Wed May 28 2008 - 13:23:48 EDT