Recent discussions featured Alexander and I arguing—nearly alone—that
closed attitudes and librarian standards, particularly metadata
standards, were hurting libraries. As I stressed, library metadata was
once dominant, but is now used exclusively within libraries. The
ground was ceded to Amazon with its openness, commonsense format and
REST interface. Library data was marginal outside of libraries and
losing ground.
Libraries just lost more ground, as Google has released its own
book-data API. The Google API has what Amazon lacks--coverage of
out-of-print books. It's blindingly fast and it return results in
sensible XML, including a bit of Dublin Core. To people who need
basic, high-quality, fast book data, it is a boon. It even has covers.
And you don't have those nasty rules about funneling sales to Amazon.
Google Booksearch Data API
http://code.google.com/apis/books/docs/gdata/developers_guide_protocol.html
I've got a simple tester up at LibraryThing, while we figure what to do with it:
http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=46336
To those of us who promoted the use of library data outside of
libraries, it is another setback.
Indeed, I can tell you that I was helping one of the major swap site
get on it feet with respect to MARC, so they could have more reach and
be Amazon-proof; they are now dropping the MARC effort in favor of
Google.
The irony here is that some of the data is actually coming from OCLC.
This is apparently why it's thin—so you can't use it to replace them.
But Google doesn't need OCLC that much. It's getting a lot from Google
Book Search partner libraries, as many of the identifiers attest. And
they're now getting feeds from all the major publishes. You'll notice
that "subjects" are a random mix of LCSH and BISAC. Lovely.
So, it's not just Amazon, but now Google serving up high-quality book
metadata to the world—data that libraries refuse to provide, except to
each other and in antiquated formats. Another step down the long path
to irrelevance.
Tim
--
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
Received on Sun Sep 28 2008 - 12:18:42 EDT