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.
I think that the answer may be quite innocent. Until Wikimedia came
along who would have wanted the entire database? If the demand didn't
exist, they would have no reason to make it available.
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.
Again before such a task was undertaken someone had to imagine that it
could be done. As long as the list had to be created manually, the task
was for all practical purposes impossible. There are surely many other
databases that need freeing, and they could be just as free if someone
else were doing the freeing. If that other databse allows you at no
cost to search in such a way that you can find the information you want
is it not effectively free?
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?
While it's a good thing to investigate these questions more thoroughly,
it would be pointless if proposal were technically impossible. I have
been looking through
http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/ where LC is
indicated as the maintenance agencey for Z39.50/ISO 23950. Nowhere have
I yet found any mention of copyright for the standard on the site.
This may cover the standard and formats, but what about the content of
any particular entry? I would venture to say that it is not
copyrightable. Copyright applies to the expression of information, and
not the information itself. If the form of expression is predictable,
as in conforming to a public domain standard the result would not be
copyrightable.
One of the greatest threats to open access is the belief that something
is protected by copyright when it isn't. Any fair use claim presumes
that the material used is copyright protected in the first place. If
the underlying material is not protected a fair use claim is redundant.
Things that I have looked at while trying to answer this
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-06.htm#collateral
http://www.loc.gov/standards/relreport.pdf
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march00/coyle/03coyle.html
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.
The Hofstadter example is a good one in that it warns us of the dangers
of simplistic reduction. Many of our online colleagues seem to be
motivated by some desire to make tasks easier. This is often done by
ignoring embarassing complexities.
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.
Perhaps, although I'm not sure we're ready for yet another mailing
list. Full scale freeing of bibliographies can easily lead us into what
amounts to a Union Catalog of private holdings.
Ec