[open-bibliography] BL data available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

Thu Sep 2 08:41:27 UTC 2010

On 1 September 2010 10:40, Mathias Schindler
<mathias.schindler at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Edmund Chamberlain <emc59 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Apologies if this has been posted and missed:
>> http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displaytext.pl?RC=15024
>>
>> Sample of data here:
>> http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/rdfdcsample.xml

Here's the main link I know about:
<http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html>

>> Granularity issues aside, its a great development.
>
> I sent an email to BL and asked them to provide the bibliographic data
> under a free license as well (i.e. to get rid of the -nc restriction).

I meant to respond straight away but things move fast on this list :)
You are quite right that this data isn't yet open. However I'm
optimistic some real open data is on the way.

As people know from Peter Murray Rust's announcement to this list, the
JISC OpenBib project [1] (in which I am participating) is making
aiming to make available a reasonable set of *open* bibliographic data
in linked open data form.

[1]: http://openbiblio.net/p/jiscopenbib/

As part of the project we had commitments from 3 specific sources
(we're looking for more!) to provide some "raw" *open* bibliographic
data:

a) Cambridge University Library
b) the British Library
c) International Union of Crystallography

In the last 2 months JISC OpenBib have been talking in detail with
British Library and we're hoping to get an initial set of data from
them quite soon. I don't know whether these discussions (and the
original discussion of the project with them -- which took place in
the Spring) has prompted this free data service but there should
definitely be a set of real open data coming from them in the near
future (though I should emphasize that, at this point at least, it
certainly won't be their whole catalogue in MARC form!)

> In other news, the university libraries of Tübingen and Konstanz have
> recently released their data under cc-by-nc-sa and we had a fruitful
> exchange on changing the license to cc-by-sa or cc0. I am expecting
> the change any time soon.

This is really great news. BTW if they are thinking of share-alike
they really want the ODbL (http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/)
rather than CC by-sa.

Rufus