I'm not sure what point I'm making in the following, but...
I just read about Clicker, described as a video search engine that
"relies on structured data to organize and present content."
http://is.gd/3nvvH
And elsewhere on the web you'll discover things like hCard (contact
info)[1] and Google Base (products http://is.gd/3nw5f and events http://is.gd/3nw8t
). And even Facebook is driving web content producers to use
explicate markup ( http://is.gd/3nww6 ).
Some of these examples are rather trivial, but I believe they show a
strong (or at least growing) interest among non-librarians in
structured data...just not book data[2].
[1:] Google recommends RDFa and Microformat representations of a bunch
of stuff http://is.gd/3nzq4
[2:] Though I'd bet that many of the large number of early adopters of
the Amazon API were actually interested in book data. What happened to
the API since then is instructive in a few ways.
--Casey Bisson
http://maisonbisson.com/
http://about.scriblio.net/
On Sep 16, 2009, at 12:00 PM, B.G. Sloan wrote:
> (Granted, there are non-librarians who value library data. And there
> are librarians who don't hold library data in high regard. But I
> couldn't put all that in the subject line...so I took the simplistic
> approach. :-) )
>
>
> Jane Jacobs has said: "As for the rest of the non-bibliographic
> world, perhaps the data is perceived as lacking in value BECAUSE it
> is largely free!...I really think that it may be the availability
> NOT the inaccessibility of MARC records that make some people ignore
> them or question their value!"
>
> I think there's a different reason why some of those in the "non-
> bibliographic world" undervalue or ignore library data. They
> perceive library data as being created *by* librarians, *for*
> librarians, to help manage library collections. To the outside
> world, that's a pretty narrow focus. That may well be why Google
> views the OCLC data it gets as just one of more than 100 sources of
> metadata.
>
> Bernie Sloan
Received on Thu Sep 17 2009 - 21:09:24 EDT