Open Bibliographic Data : The State of Play is a post by Rufus Pollock at the Open Knowledge Foundation which examines a variety of sources for cataloging and database information.  He makes the observation, which I think is on target, that when it comes to bibliographic data

You might even think, given the public-spiritedness of librarians, that this is the kind of area where not only could it be openly available but it would be openly available….

There is a movement out there working to create an open repository.  It would make everyone’s job easier, especially if this repository could incorporate some type of authority checking by the users.  Imagine leveraging the same type of error checking that Wikipedia uses, but on our catalog information.

One can dream…

found via Open Access News

Read this post on Thingology, the blog for LibraryThing, then check out the OpenBibliographicData petition on the Open Knowledge Foundation Wiki. If you agree with the petition, I urge you to create an account and add your name to the list.

How important do I think this is? I was online only to get a phone number to call in to work, and checked my overnight e-mail messages. I decided that it needed to be blogged, and that it couldn’t wait (especially since I seem to have misplaced the original e-mail – my apologies to the person not getting credit for passing this information along).

The Open Text Book blog was started a few days ago by the Open Knowledge Foundation. In their first post, they describe the blog as:

a place to list and keep track of news about textbooks that are open in accordance with the Open Knowledge Definition – i.e. free to use, reuse, and redistribute. While in the future we may post text book content, for now the site will be mainly used as a registry.

I like how this is gaining momentum. There are certain subjects that would benefit greatly from open texts, and I suspect we shall see more of these over the next few years.

found via Open Access News