Wading in to the OCLC openness debate
I see there are a few people who are criticising OCLC for not going far enough in opening up their datasilos, either through worldcat.org or current offerrings.
It seems especially crazy to charge a data contributor when they are wanting to give it away free anyway! Are they really going to pay you OCLC, to take their data?
In Herefordshire we jumped at the chance of giving our holdings data to Talis Source, Talis do all the hard work, and we can start to find ways to reap the benefits, play with the Talis Platform, and come up with ’stuff that works for us’. Why we would ever want to shell out money to a company that wants to charge us for taking our data off our hands I will never know. Perhaps I am young and not versed in the inner workings of the business world, but even I can see that some things are money for old rope.
With Talis Source, I am confident that the data will become more useful as UK (and other) institutions make their holdings available.
Worldcat.org seems somewhat out of place and perhaps a couple of years out of date, as though OCLC have only just noticed that things like flickr, google maps, and user centered servcies have suddenly sprung up.
In fact, I could take holdings data for a book from Talis Source, find a set of locations where it was available, look up the geolocation using either the lat/lng from the Silkworm Directory, or geocoding the postcode from the directory with the Google Maps API. I could then ask the user where they lived, and center a map on their location, with all the locations of the books displayed using amazon jacket images. I could even throw the LibraryThing thingISBN service into the mix, and find similar books to the one I was originally searching for, paperbacks, other editions etc. The only thing I don’t have at the moment is a searchable index… but hey, I could write it as a plugin for firefox and use it when I was on amazon, abebooks, google, or anywhere else with an ISBN. Why do I need an index?
It looks like I don’t need worldcat.org, as I could get the information that I want in my browser at the point where I ask the question, “I wonder If I can borrow a copy before I buy it?”
If I had time I would put this all together and enter it into the Mashing Up the Library Competition!