Finally some Open Data
Or at least the possibility of some in library-land. I’ve thrown around the idea back when code4lib’ers were discussing the possibility of a non-profit status for the group, that it might be worthwhile to build some web services/APIs for various things libraries could use such as records, relationships, artwork, etc. Nothing came of it but it looks like I don’t have to bother with the records anymore. I missed it in the initial release but from a Open Libraries post:
The revolutionary part of the announcement, however, was that Plymouth State University would use the $50,000 to purchase Library of Congress catalog records and redistribute them free under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license or GNU.
I have high hopes that it will be published in some sort of downloadable format so people can do experiments or build value-added services on top of it. Tim is definitely happy. Some of the things I’d like to see:
- Torrents of the data, available in chunks if needed
- Web service with access by keyword, isbn, subject and other fields
- Wiki-version where people can augment or fix the record data. Hopefully an API on top of this as well. WikiD maybe?
- Maybe other data formats/conversions.
Here’s hoping.
No Comments Yet