If you’re small, open data MIGHT be the point

2006 December 18
tags: , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been reading, with interest, the conversations around the recent Mellon Award bestowed upon Casey Bisson and its possible implications for the landscape of bibliographic data. Tim‘s been talking about it some, which is great. But the most substantive comment comes today from Dan Chudnov:

First off, the LC bibliographic data is not exactly being held captive. Anybody can go buy a copy of this data now right from LC or from third parties today. The cost of this data is not in any way prohibitive for a medium- to large-scale institution that is already used to doing Big Deals in the six and seven figures. As I understand it many largeish library institutions *already* have access to the whole dataset and use it regularly for cataloging. I know this because I have a copy of some of it on one of my workstations, a copy I was allowed to use for research purposes. Granted, this came while I was working at Yale, but I assure you, Yale’s not the only place where this might be true.

[Emphasis mine.]

There is a HUGE digital divide among the libraries of the world. To the 12-hour-per-week operation in Northern NH, the fact that Yale, UNH, or even Plymouth already have the bibliographic data they need does no good – they don’t have the time to fool around trying to hack out their data from other libraries – there are story hours to plan, reference questions to answer, board meetings to attend… They need a quick and easy way to represent their collections only. If Casey and wpopac have the potentional to bring it to those who’ve been priced out of the bibliographic data market, I wish him all the luck there is.

There’s no reason for rural librarians to work for the technology they need, it should work for them.

2 Comments leave one →
2006 December 22
thesecretmirror.com » Blog Archive » Is Open Data the Point? permalink

[...] I wonder how interesting all the bibliographic data of LC is to begin with. What’s in the dump paid for by the Mellon Award money? I’d guess monographs and serials, and probably audiovisual materials. What about archival records? What would anyone do with those? Those won’t be interesting to the small libraries that could benefit the most from this altruistic move, and in fact I believe that the biggest problem other than maintaining the records for changes will be separating the wheat from the chaff, which is ultimately and institutional (departmental, consortial, individual …) decision. I’d love a dump of all the archival records, but I don’t know what I’d do with them all; it’s much easier for me to wade through them using their OPAC for the time being when I do institutional surveys. [...]

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2006 December 23
Remaining Relevant » Blog Archive » Open Data is not the point | One Big Library. permalink

[...] Thanks to Art for his thoughtful comment on Dan Chudnov’s post last week. Art says it far better than I: I really believe that humanity’s ability to share information and narratives is a large part of the metric for any progress in the future, and I think your vision would enable this in ways that would make many of the current technology initiatives in libraries seem small in retrospect. But I do think that there is a disconnect between the mechanisms built by libraries for fostering sharing and the need to extend the reach of these structures globally. [...]

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