You're probably right that nobody has probably asked
them for the database
dump before. They may not be in a position to
conveniently or reasonably
give it to someone who asks. But it can't hurt to
ask. Has anyone found
contacts in the LOC organization and followed up on
it?
Either Wikipedia or the Internet Archive would be
good host locations for
the data; possibly both.
Sorry for not chiming in earlier as I am in some ways the instigator of this altercation ;)
In any case I too would tend to think that information from the Library of Congress's Voyager server is not copyrighted (almost all of the records ARE authored by the LoC, not imported) and since in any case the goal is not to store the exact MARC records, but to extend their content through collaborative editing/annotation, I don't see how copyright laws could apply, even if in the future we supported MARC export. With that said, other libraries like the British Library do enforce copyright on their records even though they maintain an open catalog server. I have started to document these issues here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikicat_OPAC_Targets
Despite being generally optimistic about the Library of Congress, I have noticed that they do not divulge all their data and in fact charge for complete database dumps in certain cases. This applies to even very basic things like authority records:
http://authorities.loc.gov/help/auth-faq.htm#2
In any case this is all speculation and we should simply ask them. I know of someone to contact however I have refrained from doing so as I do not have any particular organizational standing within the Wikimedia Foundation and in any case have not gotten much of a response to the project after its initial announcement over a month ago. I could ask as only myself, but it would be nice if someone from the Foundation could do so so that our request would be taken more seriously and other data possibly opened up to us.
Also, in regard to some earlier points about citation, I have already gotten the Cite.php/<ref> extension working with the Wikicat data import function I've been coding- notice that the user needs only provide a key in the <ref> body:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Wikicat_Cite_screenshoot.png
This is ready to go live now, except that without a place to store the bibliographic data we would be banging on the Voyager server with every save/preview- not a very neighborly way to introduce ourselves :/ Transclusion into the wiki-text could be an option, though...
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