Open Data : What Would Kilgour Think? is a post by Jay Datema about the recent settlement between the New York Public Library and iBiblio regarding the latter’s harvesting of records from the NYPL catalog.
I am increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of metadata being copyrighted. This includes, but is not limited to, Dewey Decimal Classification and MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) records. These are tools that follow shared rules, developed and honed by communities and experience, that we use to store information about our collections.
We use these metadata systems in order to have a shared method of storing, finding, and retrieving what we have. They should not be confused with the resources we make available, the software we use to search for them, nor should they be considered intellectual property, as they exist solely to describe something else.
The standards behind each of these systems is important to the library community. It does not increase the value of our collection if we lock our MARC records using copyright; it only keeps other libraries from sharing our information, which decrease the value of libraries in general.
As with all good standards: the standards themselves should be well-defined, controlled, and updated as frequently as necessary. Their benefits should be available to anyone who can put them to good use. The library community (including companies and corporations) should recognize the value of the commons, and strive to make our metadata available for the benefit of everyone.
from Librarian.net
