[openbiblio-dev] Collections in Bibliographica

[Karen Coyle]

Quoting Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.Berkeley.EDU>:


> Arent there issues with Dewey being proprietary? Cant we use LOC or  
> other more open
> classification schemes?

LCC is legally open but functionally closed. Either you buy all 41  
volumes, or you subscribe ($$, but I can't find the price) to it  
online, or you buy it as a file for $4000.

Plus it's damned complicated to use.

DDC is "open" only at the summary level (3 digits), and in theory you  
cannot even use it in a library unless you pay a license fee. UDC  
(based on DDC) may be more open than DDC but I have a hard time  
figuring out what their license verbiage means:

http://www.udcc.org/licence.htm

One option that I've chatted with folks about is that of taking a  
whole lot of library records and extracting class numbers from them in  
relationship with subject headings and keywords in titles. That would  
create a topical "correspondence" even though we wouldn't have the  
taxonomic structure. If it is taken from actual bibliographic data, I  
don't think it would be subject to the license terms. ??

kc


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