[okfn-discuss] University of Ghent Library Catalogues: Open or Not?

Thu Feb 25 23:26:42 UTC 2010

The other day someone registered two very interesting packages on CKAN:

<http://ckan.net/package/ugent_biblio> - tab delimited file of all
Ghent University publications
<http://ckan.net/package/ugent_catalog> - dump of complete Ghent
University library catalog

The second of these is particularly interesting as open bibliographic
metadata is hard to come by!

On the CKAN pages the packages have been listed as public domain.
However, following the provided project url:
<http://lib.ugent.be/info/en/exports.shtml> one finds a nice "Open
Knowledge" button but also, unfortunately, the statement that: "This
work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Belgium License."

Non-commercial licenses are obviously not http://opendefinition.org/
compliant (and a CC license isn't a good idea for data either!). This
seems like a good opportunity to do an http://isitopendata.org/
request but before starting on this I wanted to ask:

  * Does anyone out there had any ideas what was going on here?
  * Is there anyone with good Belgium (or Library) connections who
could make the request (they usually work better from someone in the
"scene")

Regards,

Rufus