Lars Aronsson wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I don't see where copyright is an issue with
this. The Library
of Congress is an arm of the United States Congress whose
primary purpose is to serve U. S. legislators. That would put
its work in the public domain. Is there any reason to believe
otherwise?
Why don't I see any downloadable dump of their entire database?
Providing that would be a great goal for the Wikimedia Foundation.
Here we're freeing the encyclopedia, news reporting, pictures, and
why not the library catalog. Just think about being able to
importing it to MySQL or PostgreSQL on your own computer, and then
do things like "select count(*)" to find which people translated
most works from Croatian to Hungarian, and make a [[List of
translators from Croatian to Hungarian]], so we can make sure we
have encyclopedia articles for the 50 most active ones.
Currently there is only one entry in
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hungarian_translators
Today I can download the LoC catalog one MARC record at a time
through a Z39.50 interface. So far, I'm not aware of anyone who
copied the entire catalog this way and provided it for free
download. If we had a copy, would the Wikimedia Foundation
provide it for download? What does the legal councel or
foundation board say? Do we need a written permission as a legal
security, or can we simply trust that these U.S. government data
are in the public domain? Are they in fact U.S. government data,
or were they licensed from other sources, and under which terms?
There are benefits in asking nicely.. there are benefits in cooperation.
Needing permission and asking for permission and cooperation makes the
other organisation a party to what we want to achieve. When you select
the translators from Croatian to Hungarian, you get a result where you
want to disambiguate the translators. This is what Wikiauthors will
bring you..
Indeed cooperation is a good thing..
Other
libraries may have different views concerning their
material, but how much of their material is not in the LoC
catalogue.
While the LoC catalog is huge in the number of records, and
providing it for free download would be a great achievement, the
assumption that it could replace every other library catalog is
naive. For the example above, the LoC rarely catalogs which
people translated between which languages. That information (for
Croatian-Hungarian) is probably only in the catalog of Hungary's
national library. For Hofstadter's famous "Gödel, Escher, Bach"
LoC only finds three hits for three English editions, but none of
this book's many translations to other languages. The German
national bibliography shows 2 English editions, a dozen German
printings, and 1 each in Dutch, Danish, and Spanish. The Dutch
Royal Library lists two English and five Dutch printings, but the
last one is documented as being the 9th printing, so the catalog
in fact only covers half of what's been published. Many Dutch
Wikipedians are likely to own copies of the other printings, and
could provide the missing information if the database was Wikicat.
And these are only languages that are close to English and well
represented at the Library of Congress.
This takes us back to explaining the basics of library &
information science. We should have a mailing list specialized on
Wikicat and how to free the bibliography.
Indeed cooperation is a sweet thing..
Thanks,
GerardM