"The idea of allowing ordinary people to edit library catalogues"
The BBC’s Giles Turnbull has picked up on the launch of the Open Library that I posted about a couple of weeks ago.
An ambitious project to create an online catalogue of every book in every language ever published is under way. Public goodwill is not in doubt, but some libraries remain to be convinced.
It is a balanced article containing many quotes from the Open Library creators, discussing what they are trying to achieve.
“This site will become the place where you can find interesting books and information about them, whether they’re in print, out of print, out of copyright or whatever.”
“There are tons of books out there and tons of information about those books. There’s no way even a large group of librarians is going to be able to collect it all. We think of it as an analogue to Wikipedia. There are some great encyclopaedias written by small groups of experts, but to get something as wide-ranging and varied as Wikipedia, you need to let everyone in.”
Giles also discussed the project with Stephen Bury, head of European and American Collections at the British Library. The following couple of quotes made me sit back when I read them:
“In the short term, I don’t think we will send them a copy of our catalogue. We only have limited resources and we need them to concentrate their efforts on our own digitisation projects,”
It is great to see that the BL is investing in digitisation projects, but I can hardly see how such a worthy endeavor would be thrown off course by popping a CD of the BL catalogue in the post to the Open Library guys.
Mr Bury was not keen on the idea of allowing ordinary people to edit library catalogues themselves.
“I think there’s a need for balance and some degree of control. You might get people maliciously changing things.”
The fear of ordinary people changing things - it is a good job Jimmy Wales, Tim Spalding and others didn’t let that stop them.
Mr Bury also raises another concern - “… there’s some scepticism as to whether one day the Open Library might become a commercial site with adverts and so on.”
A couple if thoughts on that - would it be so bad if the occasional advert appeared alongside catalogue records? I’m sure the public gaining the benefit from those records would not mind or even care as long the advertisers couldn’t influence search results; or is the real fear that a commercial company, if that’s the way the Open Library ever goes, may well take the freely contributed records lock them away and make money from them.
As with the rest of society, the fear of something nasty happening can be far more corrosive that the possibility of it happening. If the fears implied by Stephen Bury’s comments become a widely held assumption the Open Library may have difficulty in attracting altruistic libraries willing to contribute their catalogues towards their endeavor.
Unless of course those records could be contributed under a license that would not only protect the Open Library from misuse of them but also the rest of us from the Open Library misusing them - and that was the point of my comments in my post License for Open Library?, which was far more eloquently explained by Rob Styles in his follow up post The Open Library, and keeping it open.
I don’t want what happened with CDDB to happen with The Open Library, and to stop it requires a clear license that protects the community from The Open Library as well as The Open Library from anyone else.
This is the area we developed Talis Community License to cover (and yes, the name is draft too, it will change). We’ve been using it to protect contributions to our platform data services for over a year. It protects contributors from us as it prevents us, or anyone else, from locking the community’s data away at a later date. It’s an Open License, anyone can use it to protect their users contributions in the same way.
Licensing can be a double-edged sword, not only protecting the Open Library from misuse of its data collection by the community, but also instilling confidence in the community that the records they openly contribute will not be hijacked by a future incarnation of the Open Library.
