I sent this only to Lars, resending to list:
Quoting Lars Aronsson <[email protected]>: I learned last week that the British-based Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) runs a project with similar goals as OpenLibrary. It looks to me like this is quite different from OL, but an exchange of data would be great. This appears to be all types of works, not just books, and it seems that the idea is to gather a list of what is in the public domain. Also, they only cover what would be the FRBR work level (there's nothing to inform you about any particular edition, some of which may not be free of copyright). It would be great for OL to link from its works (coming soon in the new version) to this so users could see that the text is in the public domain. However, "public domain" is a bit iffy when you go across country borders, so I'm not sure how useful this is unless you can ask for public domain within your country. I tried to figure out what their criteria is for making the assessment, but the link was broken. Is it possible that they detect the user's location and calculate from that? I'm afraid I can't tell. The OKFN bibliographic data project is intended to spotlight bibliographic metadata that has been released for open use. Generally these are files of records from library catalogs. I don't think anyone is quite sure yet what can be made from them, and there are many issues, like different formats of data, different cataloging decisions, and that often the files aren't updated. I hope we figure out something useful to do with this data before the trickle becomes a flood and it all seems overwhelming. kc It is in an early stage and available under several different domain names. One of them is http://publicdomainworks.net/ One of their library records, http://publicdomainworks.net/work/KVrlzeFaQzCvS7rhhYVN9A/Fribytaren_Pa_Ostersjon--%5BProf%5D%28Abraham%29_Viktor_Rydberg Same title in OL, http://openlibrary.org/b/OL17016106M/Fribytaren_pa%CC%8A_o%CC%88stersjo%CC%88n. Both are begging volunteers to fix the broken data, but they aren't using each other's improvements. (The records are very often totally broken because both projects are run by monolingual English-speakers.) When I heard of this, I tried to ask what's the purpose of yet another parallel project, but I can't say I understood the answer. Tomorrow is OKFN's Open Knowledge Conference. I'm not going there. Apparently, Mathias Schindler of the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation is giving a presentation about open bibliographic information, http://www.okfn.org/okcon/programme And apparently, OL's Karen Coyle is on OKFN's working group for bibliographic data, http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/bibliography What are all the connections I don't know about? Does anybody have a plan for where this is going? -- Lars Aronsson ([email protected]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected] -- Karen Coyle [email protected] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 1-510-435-8234 end_of_the_skype_highlighting skype: kcoylenet _______________________________________________ Ol-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-discuss To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
