A revolutionary Bisson
Casey Bisson of the Lamson Library at Plymouth State University, and occasional contributor to the Library 2.0 Gang series of Podcasts on Talking with Talis, has won the prestigious Mellon Award for Technology Collaboration.
Apart from posting the press release announcing the award on his blog last week, Casey has been quiet about the matter - although the title of that posting Woot! Woot! gives me the impression he is quite pleased about it.
The award was presented for his ground-breaking software application known as WPopac. WPopac “It’s an OPAC - a library catalog, for my readers outside libraries - inside the framework of WordPress the hugely popular blog management application.” - A mashup between OPAC functionality and a blogging platform that has been an example I have been using in my Library 2.0 presentations for several months
Casey may have been a bit quiet on his award, but others have not been so quite on the subject. Buried in one of those blogs is the following tantalizing morsel of information:
The revolutionary part of the announcement, however, was that Plymouth State University would use the $50,000 to purchase Library of Congress catalog records and redistribute them free under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license or GNU. OCLC has been the source for catalog records for libraries, and its license restrictions do not permit reuse or distribution. However, catalog records have been shared via Z39.50 for several years without incident.
Run that past me again - purchase Library of Congress catalog records and redistribute them free - now that’s a radical step. A step that initially almost snuck under the library blogosphere radar. Others, such as Tim Spalding have now picked up on this - as he says ‘So, three cheers for Casey, Mellon and “free as in freedom”! I can’t wait to see where this all leads.‘
There has been much discussion on many mailing lists about freely distributing catalogue records, and maybe using them to seed a collaborative cataloging exercise.
This announcement could be the beginnings of a major shift in the way such records are obtained, modified, added to, distributed and used. I would quibble with the licensing that is being suggested - Creative Commons Share-Alike license or GNU. I suspect that detailed analysis will show that neither of these are ideal for sets of bibliographic records. Looking at the available open licensing possibilities in this area led to us [at Talis] proposing, and offering to the community for discussion, the Talis Community License, which may well be [or be the basis for] a better solution in this area.
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Another part of the announcement I would be interested in a clarification for, is the way these records are to be made available - will it be via WPopac only, or does Casey have a Search/Web service in mind.
I won’t be the only one who will be watching this with great interest - maybe the police car behind Casey and his sign in the picture above had more meaning than was initially apparent when Jenny took it a few months back 
(Photo taken by The Shifted Librarian displayed in Flickr)
Technorati Tags: Talis, Wikicat, Cataloging, Library, Library 2.0
December 11th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
I would hope any data would be available:
1. In bulk. Given the size, that might be an issue.
2. Via an API, providing MARC
3. Via an API, providing Amazon-like simplified data (for “regular” people)
Providing it with a Z39.50 server would be nice, of course.
December 12th, 2006 at 6:05 pm
This may be a shocking bit of news, but the United States is no longer under British law. So while the Talis Community License may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, it is not an appropriate choice for a US-based project (and let us be frank here, if Casey gets sued for doing this — and if he’s ambitious and revolutionary enough with what he does with the data, he will — it’s going to be by an American company). Both CC and GNU have stood up in American courts.
December 12th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Licenses such as CC and GNU may well “have stood up in American courts”. The premise is not that they are bad or flawed licenses, but that as currently written they do not provide adequate protection for data. CC licenses apply to creative works protectable under copyright. GNU applies to software. Neither, we believe, would protect a catalogue record.
December 13th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
Er, hang on a minute — aren’t the LC catalogue records in the public domain anyway? (Like all content created by the US government.) And as for wishing there was a Z39.50 service for obtaining the records as MARC and XML, what is z3950.loc.gov:7090/voyager if not that?
What am I missing?
December 13th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
The lack of database protection under US Law is interesting. Under EU law we have a ‘Sui Generis’ or sweat-of-the-brow protection of databases that required significant investment to produce, a Supreme Court Judgement (http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=499&invol=340) in the US made it clear that’s not the case there.
The Library of Congress claim copyright over their records outside of the US (where they’re in the public domain as they’ve been created by federal employees).