Biblios.net, “the world’s largest database of freely-licensed library records”, is now beta-testing. From their website:
‡biblios.net is a subscription-based, hosted version of the open-source ‡biblios metadata editor that we released earlier this year. In addition to the editor, ‡biblios.net includes some extended community features such as integrated real-time chat, forums, and private messaging.
‡biblios.net also provides access to the world’s largest database of freely-licensed library records. The database will be freely available to ‡biblios.net subscribers and non-subscribers alike via Z39.50, OAI, and direct download.
Furthermore, the database itself will be maintained by ‡biblios.net users similar to the way that Wikipedia’s database is maintained by users.
We’re now looking for enthusiastic participants to help shape the final production release of ‡biblios.net.
How open will the database be? They state:
Through the ‡biblios.net network, you can share your record creations with the rest of the ‡biblios.net community, under the terms of the Open Data Commons, which ensures that anyone may freely use, modify and share your records.
We’re glad they are using Open Data Commons project (presumably the PDDL) which is developed by Jordan Hatcher, who is part of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Executive Group. We also hope that they will make the database available for download at some point in the near future! We’ve created a new package on CKAN:
Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.
This sounds great. I am not yet clear where they are storing the data and how I can get hold of it if I wanted it — it mentions archive.org but does this mean openlibrary or something else?
In any case a big well-done to Jordan for all his work in producing the PDDL.
“subscription-based” != “open” … this looks like a shell game to me.