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?
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.