[open-bibliography] comprehensive bibliographic database of "open" resources?

Tue Aug 17 11:26:52 UTC 2010

for showing terms, Z3950 has a pretty commonly implemented feature
called scan that can be used to iterate over the terms found in an
index, listing frequency too, which can be useful for planning and
optimising large scale distributed queries (If you're really into that
kind of thing). Not sure that the data is public from the irspy site,
but it's easy to grab the source and hack it around.

AFAIK (I'm not a marc expert by a way) you're right that there's no
obvious way to discern the license for a record (Or indeed the license
for the resource pointed to by the record). Of course the tech
predates that particular question. It's kinda sad that the sheer
weight of this legacy resource seems to prohibit going back and
"Fixing" the absence of any license fields. TBH I think the lack of a
consistent unique identifier is more of a problem for a generic
solution. If there were a consistent unique identifier, we could
always just stick the license statements in an ancillary store and
look up the details after we've retrieved the bib data (Heck, some of
those old timer coders might even be able to mash-up servers that
present a unified view). I guess coding such solutions on a
case-by-case basis is OK tho. Come to think of it, a useful feature of
a Z3950->OAI tool might be to add such license statements.

Cheers,
Ian.

On 16 August 2010 20:11, MJ Ray <mjr at phonecoop.coop> wrote:
> Ian Ibbotson wrote:
>> I know it's *terribly* old fashioned... and I hate to sound like a
>> broken 8 track... but index data still maintain an amazing registry of
>> all the openly searchable bibliographic databases using IRSpy at
>> http://irspy.indexdata.com/. The data is open in the sense that anyone
>> can search it, [...]
>
> which isn't really open at all in a useful way for Open Knowledge IMO.
> It might only be "look but don't touch".  From what I remember, MARC21
> doesn't contain a tag that specifies the licensing terms of a record,
> does it?
>
> If I've forgotten/overlooked it, can we build something on top of
> index data's registry to search/show which terms have been found in a
> database?
>
> Thanks,
> --
> MJ Ray (slef) Webmaster and developer for hire at | software
> www.software.coop http://mjr.towers.org.uk        |  .... co
> IMO only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html |  .... op
>
>
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-- 
Ian Ibbotson
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