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...
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
