[open-bibliography] OCLC's license for FAST

[Karen Coyle]

Thad,

The advantage of FAST is that it is (more or less) LCSH taken apart.  
So instead of:

Police -- Italy -- Rome -- Fiction

you have:

Police
Italy -- Rome  [and I'd rather see this separated or handled with a  
relationship]
Fiction

The FAST headings look more like tags, and you are more likely to be  
able to connect "Police" alone to a term in another vocabulary than  
the full heading. Non-librarians are also more likely to want to use  
the FAST headings since the full LCSH headings are gawdawful. So I see  
it as a possible way to connect from library data to non-library data.  
Something like:

tags --> FAST --> LCSH --> library record

That said, LC is working to get most of the individual facets defined  
in LCSH at id.loc.gov. Open Library has already done its own  
break-down of the ugly LCSH headings, but doesn't have the thesaurus  
structure that you can find in id.loc.gov. OCLC's FAST has that  
structure and will be kept up to date.

I'm not sure that FAST is essential. I just think it's better than  
LCSH and may be a friendlier link to the library bibliographic records.

kc

Quoting Thad Guidry <thadguidry at gmail.com>:

> So, they say Contents ("data" part of database) are available... however we
> cannot give you the structure ("base" part of Database).
>
> Karen, I honestly STILL do not see the value in OCLC Fast.
>
> http://experimental.worldcat.org/fast/556581/  Why is the data here, more
> valuable then these 2:
>
> http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n81050796.html
>
> http://www.freebase.com/edit/topic/en/tallinn_university_of_technology
>
> ??
>
> Please explain, I am interested to know more.
>
> --
> -Thad
> http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry
>



-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
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