Earlier this week, Richard blogged about Casey Bisson’s award from the Mellon, joining Tim Spalding, myself and others in speculating about the announcement that Casey intends to use his award to purchase and distribute bibliographic data from the Library of Congress.

On Wednesday night, I sat down with Richard, Tim, Ross Singer and Rob Styles to have a chat about some of the implications, and the resulting conversation is now available as a podcast for your listening pleasure.

Listen Now or Download MP3 [57 mins, 39 Mb]

Casey’s doing some great work, but to a degree the purchase and dissemination of this data could be seen as simply working within the existing system. The existing system is actually fundamentally flawed, and needs some concerted pressure to ‘persuade’ the incumbents to change.

With a commercial model dependent to some degree upon revenue from our UK-focussed Talis Base and UnityWeb services, Talis could be seen as one of those incumbents with a pretty substantial vested interest in the status quo. However, we recognised that things had to change, and set about doing something about it. When the UnityWeb contract came up for renewal last year, we quite deliberately stated our intention not to re-tender. Instead, we offered Source. We swept away the old model of subscription access into a closed club, and instead offered an indication of what was possible if you were prepared to think differently. Free contribution of data by anyone who wants to share it. Free access to that data, governed by the terms of a flexible and permissive license designed to protect the rights of the contributing library rather than Talis.

And even Source is an intermediate step - a small move in the right direction whilst remaining sufficiently familiar that there is zero pain for those users of UnityWeb making the transition. The Platform with which the data for Source are shared is capable of so much more, as it consumes large bodies of data, indexes them rapidly, robustly and scalably, and offers those data up for use, reuse, and orchestration via a suite of enterprise-strength web services. Project Cenote shows yet another view onto those same data, rapidly assembled to demonstrate the ease with which an ‘OPAC’ might be placed atop the Platform by staff at Talis… or by anyone else who wants to. Richard’s work with Greasemonkey and browser extensions, too, leverages the same power. Share data - once - with the Platform. Then consume it in your own applications, see it in Cenote, see it in Google, see it in Aquabrowser, see it in Amazon. See it sliced, diced and grouped in ways that make sense to your users rather than just to you. See it anywhere you want it seen. Easily, Reliably, Affordably, Repeatably.

These ideas can clearly be seen to work. They work even better, for even more institutions, when the underlying catalogue data held by those institutions around the world can be exposed by them and shared with a common set of infrastructural services such as those found on the Platform.

Whose interests are served by obstructing the free movement of these data? On its own, the value of an individual catalogue record is surely low. The value lies in what you do with these records in aggregate, not in the string of numbers and letters comprising the record itself.

Whose interests are served by obfuscating the picture with contracts and legalese of questionable morality… and even more questionable enforcability?

Roll on 2007 - the Year we all wake up and put our data to work? Put it in the Platform. Put it on your site. Do what you like. Just let it out of its box and invite people to do something amazing, something interesting, or just something a little bit useful to one particular individual. At Talis, we’re committed to Open Data, and we’re hard at work to ensure that the data for which we are the custodians is opened up and shared with all of you.

‘cadena rota’ image shared on Flickr by trackrecord, with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives licence.

Technorati Tags: Free Our Data, Libraries, Library 2.0, LibraryThing, OCLC, open data, Participation, Platforms, Podcasting, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, Talis Platform, Talis Source, TDN

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