Weinheimer Jim wrote:
>
> ... imaginative attempts presuppose open data however, and this has
> not been forthcoming from the library community. For example,
> while I applaud the id.loc.gov project, it was much too late,
> and we are still stuck with textual strings that must be browsed
> to be understandable, and therefore, we are still stuck in the
> 19th-century. If these incredible files had been put out 10 years
> ago for open development, they could very well have served as the
> backbone for the Semantic Web, but now, this will probably shift
> to something such as dbpedia, where I think we must get on board.
>
For that reason, I have now merged German WikiPedia titles into the
recent free database of subject headings by DNB Frankfurt. Some 64.500
Wiki titles exactly matched DNB headings. Since the stuff is all
German, it will be useless for most on this forum to look at, but
DNB themselves had already collaborated with Wikipedia to get
links for personal names included in it, pointing into the Frankfurt
OPAC of the German National Bibliography. Now, the same could
be done for topics.
Something like a ...pedia, i.e. something open, would be needed
for RDA as well, instead of the black box we'll be getting now.
At a time when there are voices that the future of free reading is at
stake (Richard Stallman), the library world itself, historically the
citizen's resort for free knowledge resources, will not have
free access to the text of its (allegedly) most important
code of rules. How credible can we be if this happens? It bodes ill
for the success of RDA, I think, but it may be just as well because
RDA doesn't seem to be a blueprint for next generation catalogs
anyway. The fact of this happening, however, is a bad omen.
B.Eversberg
Received on Tue Apr 27 2010 - 06:50:20 EDT