That's good. I don't understand the statement "surprisingly few
libraries have so far set free the data they produce themselves." There
are hundreds of libraries offering free direct Z39.50 access to their
bib records. Just because you don't like MARC doesn't negate the fact
that the information is easily available and free.
Michael Mitchell
Technical Services Librarian
Brazosport College
Lake Jackson, TX
michael.mitchell at brazosport.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Adrian Pohl
Sent: Monday, February 01, 2010 6:33 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: [NGC4LIB] The CERN Library publishes its book catalog as Open
Data
Good news. The CERN library has published its data under a public domain
license and works on migrating it into linked data. Hopefully lots of
libraries (and at best OCLC with its forthcoming metadata policy) will
follow this example.
Adrian
The CERN Library publishes its book catalog as Open Data
Librarians are in general very favourable to the principles of Open
Access, but surprisingly few libraries have so far set free the data
they produce themselves. As one of the first scientific libraries in the
world, the CERN Library offers now the bibliographic book records, held
in its library catalog, to be freely downloaded by any third party. The
records are provided under the Public Domain Data License, a license
that permits colleagues around the world to reuse and upgrade the data
for any purpose.
Jens Vigen, Head of the CERN Library, says: "Books should only be
catalogued once. Currently the public purse pays for having the same
book catalogued over and over again. Librarians should act as they
preach: data sets created through public funding should be made freely
available to anyone interested. Open Access is natural for us, here at
CERN we believe in openness and reuse. There is a tremendous potential.
By getting academic libraries worldwide involved in this movement, it
will lead to a natural atmosphere of sharing and reusing bibliographic
data in a rich landscape of so-called mash-up services, where most of
the actors who will be involved, both among the users and the providers,
will not even be library users or librarians. Our action is made in the
spirit of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the
Sciences and Humanities; bibliographic data belongs to the cultural
heritage.All other signatories should align their policy accordingly."
The data of CERN Library will be used by the Open Library Project to
provide a webpage for every book and allow users to add content like
table of contents, classifications and summaries.
For massive reuse of data, the data will be provided soon by an open
Z39.50, SRU and OAI interface via biblios.net, a repository of open
bibliographic data.
The whole dataset can be downloaded from
http://cern.ch/bookdata
The press announcement is accompanied by a YouTube Video that can be
found at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CSmieTXbsk
Received on Mon Feb 01 2010 - 09:01:42 EST