A Source of value
I’ve blogged before on the importance of libraries - and those who provide them with their systems - doing more to minimise the barriers to use and reuse of the publicly funded data they hold. This is an issue that is currently exercising the Technology team over at The Guardian, with their ‘Free our Data‘ campaign, and it is an issue with which we grapple here at Talis.
With Source, we’re sweeping away the frankly ridiculous model whereby libraries pay to share basic data about the books they hold with one another, and then pay again for the privilege of being allowed to look in the shared pool; a tradition that has held sway for far too long, and one that we are encouraging people to raise questions about. With research prototypes such as Whisper, we go a stage further and demonstrate ways in which everyone stands to benefit from access to such a pool of data; it has value beyond the facilitation of interlending of books between libraries. With the TDN, we are facilitating a community around shared innovation atop the Talis Platform, and the extensive documentation about to be released around our first set of Platform web services will enable anyone to begin realising some of that potential for themselves.
Over on our new Source blog, my colleague Fiona Leslie discusses the public release of scripts that will allow any library with one of our library systems to painlessly and regularly export data for sharing with a data pool such as that underlying the growing Talis Platform. In the same post, she highlights our engagement with our peers elsewhere in the industry, and trails the welcome news that many of those peers share our view on that which is right and that which is so clearly wrong here. Sadly, some with a vested interest in grimly hanging on to their unfair and innovation-stifling practices of charging, charging, and charging yet again are less willing to contemplate change. We look forward to continuing the debate, and welcome further opportunities to assist customers of these dinosaurs in persuading them to change their ways. You may very well have sound reasons for selecting them and their systems to meet other needs in your library, but there can surely be no reason for such restrictive practices to be tolerated in this day and age.
Keep an eye on the Source blog for further announcements as we work with like-minded organisations across the library space to ensure that the public funds spent on procuring library materials and the data recording them have maximum impact, and that any library - anywhere - is able to share public information such as that pertaining to their holdings with any third party they wish, certainly without penalty and ideally with the assistance of their software supplier.
Technorati Tags: Libraries, Platforms, Talis Platform, Talis, Talis Library System, Talis Source, TDN
