I'm happy to announce that the Barton Catalog dataset, once made
available and later removed is now back online. Find it at

 http://simile.mit.edu/rdf-test-data/barton/

Regarding the speculations that appeared on various web sites and
podcasts about OLCL complains being the reason behind us pulling the
plug on the public dataset, I can officially state that this was NOT the
case: the reasons where internal and have now being resolved.

MIT maintains copyright of the dataset as a whole and grants a license
of use that is Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial.

As for the individual records, most of the data is factual, therefore
not-copyrightable.

For the non-factual data (such as, for example, subject headings), the
individual cataloger and/or the institution that paid her/his salary
owns the copyright of that work. If such work was performed by a US
government employee (such as, for example, employees of the Library of
Congress or employees of municipal libraries), the data is in the public
domain.

The full license, along with some disclaimers and requirements can be
found at

 http://simile.mit.edu/rdf-test-data/barton/LICENSE.txt

                                   - o -

You will notice that the dataset now contains two formats instead of the
previous three: the MARC 21 version of the dataset is *not* being made
public at this time because MIT considers some of that information
contained in there sensitive.

Would sufficient demand emerge, we might consider performing a
cleanup/filtering of the MARC 21 data to make it publicly available, but
for now, we release the MODS and MODS/RDF data only (which should be
sufficient for both RDF triple-store testing needs and for open OPAC
usages).

                                    - o -

We would also suggest people to avoid mirroring and/or bittorrenting of
these files: we would much rather trade bandwidth for more realistic
download stats of the data (which we are committed to make publicly
available).

If you make any use of this data, please let us know.

Thanks for your patience and enjoy our 1 million records (~50 million
RDF statements)!

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi
Digital Libraries Research Group                 Research Scientist
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
E25-131, 77 Massachusetts Ave               skype: stefanomazzocchi
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307, USA         email: stefanom at mit . edu
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