[open-bibliography] OCLC's license for FAST

Wed Jan 4 22:59:02 UTC 2012

On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 5:10 PM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:
> 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.

I think the decomposed structure is more user-friendly and useful, but
scraping the OCLC site strikes me as an unnecessary level of
indirection.  You're still at the mercy of OCLC's proprietary
processing script and hosting.  If they decide to pull the plug,
you're left out in the cold.

Why not go straight to the source and process the LCSH  in the same or
similar fashion and cut the OCLC out of the loop?  Then you could
publish not only the data, but the script used to derive it.

Tom

>
> 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
> ph: 1-510-540-7596
> m: 1-510-435-8234
> skype: kcoylenet
>
>
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