[open-heritage] OCLC recommends Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY) for WorldCat data

Wed Aug 15 07:38:38 UTC 2012

Hi Joris,

At the Archives Hub we've gone with CC0 for our Linked Open Data, and intend to implement this for our data generally. It makes it easier if leading players do the same, as it helps our case to show that this is the best, and agreed, way forwards. We think it important to encourage attribution, but necessary to remove any barriers to re-use. Our data has always been openly available through our APIs anyway....with no licence one way or the other. Its funny that once you start to say 'we know its essentially open anyway, but we will now make explicit that its open' some people get nervous. But for us, because it is just the metadata, and intended to promote archive collections to the best possible degree, we think making it fully open is the best way forwards.  Maybe its more of a problem for library catalogues, with the whole deal about commercial interests in the data? Archives have never been in the business of selling metadata, 'cos it doesn't make much sense to try to get financial benefit from a description of a collection that is unique. 

I'm not sure how we would enforce attribution anyway, so surely the best way is to encourage the idea of attribution as an important part of trust and something important to researchers (although I'm not sure how true this is - the recent JISC/BL report on PhD students indicates that they aren't much interested in provenance - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2012/researchers-of-tomorrow.aspx). 

cheers,
Jane.

Jane Stevenson
The Archives Hub
Mimas, The University of Manchester
Devonshire House, Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9QH

email:jane.stevenson at manchester.ac.uk
tel: 0161 275 6055
website: archiveshub.ac.uk
blog: archiveshub.ac.uk/blog
twitter: twitter.com/archiveshub

On 8 Aug 2012, at 09:54, Joris Pekel wrote:

> Dear list,
> 
> OCLC announced yesterday that they are recommending the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY) for member institutions that would like to release their library catalog data on the Web. 
> 
> http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displaytext.pl?RC=17111
> 
> Although the move towards open sounds great, I am personally a bit skeptical about the license they have chosen. Why not go CC0/PDDL with their metadata catalogues? What would this for example mean for collaborations with Europeana who are now in the proces of licensing all of their metadata under a CC0-license. 
> 
> Love to hear your thoughts,
> 
> -- 
> Joris Pekel
> Community Coordinator
> Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://okfn.org
> http://twitter.com/jpekel
> 
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