The Dortmund University Library is releasing its 1.2M catalog records under a public domain Creative Commons 0 license. It is available for download. Yay!
Read more of "Dortmund University opens its bibliographic records"The Dortmund University Library is releasing its 1.2M catalog records under a public domain Creative Commons 0 license. It is available for download. Yay!
Read more of "Dortmund University opens its bibliographic records"This is promising. OCLC and Cambridge are experimenting with ways to make bibliographic data openly available. Having a reliable, open, set of bibliographic records would encourage the development of innovative applications. Or, put differently, not having a standard way to refer to books and other works has inhibited innovation. The main impediment has been the prohibitions in the licenses for this data. Perhaps this new project indicates a willingness to let an open, public catalog be created.
Read more of "OCLC and Cambridge experimenting with open catalog formats"[Note: As always with posts on this blog, authors speak for themselves. - dw]
HarperCollins has changed its agreement with the main distributor of e-books to libraries: e-books will now become inaccessible after 26 checkouts.
Read more of "Has HarperCollins lost its mind or its soul?"(via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing)
Wikipedia is looking for volunteers to answer some questions as they try to understand why researchers and experts do and do not contribute to Wikipedia.
Read more of "Why do you, or don't you, edit Wikipedia?"Harvard’s Library Lab has announced the first projects it will be funding. It’s an exciting group, and we’re proud that three of our projects made the list
Read more of "Library Lab kicks off round of innovation"Personanondata reports on a study of how ISBNs are being applied to ebooks. It’s not, um, the picture of order.
Read more of "ISBNs and ebooks"A couple months back on the airplane, I made a version of this list. Some loose observations/questions about the Lab, what we’ve been focusing on, what we could be looking at…
Read more of "Reflections on the Lab (about one year in for me at LIL)"RSS4Lib has a useful list of innovative library projects. (We just submitted our own humble home page.) (Hat tip to Peter Suber for the pointer.)
The Open Biblio folks want to know what you would do with open bibliographic data? What would you build?
Great question.