[Wikipedia-l] Central bibliography

[Gerard Meijssen]

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