There’s a lot of exciting activity going on around libraries at the moment. One of them is the OpenBiblio Principles, which are:
- When publishing bibliographic data make an explicit and robust license statement.
- Use a recognized waiver or license that is appropriate for data.
- If you want your data to be effectively used and added to by others it should be open as defined by the Open Definition (http://opendefinition.org) – in particular non-commercial and other restrictive clauses should not be used.
- Where possible, explicitly place bibliographic data in the Public Domain via PDDL or CC0.
Happily, our co-op has decided to support these principles. I feel that the third one is particularly important: non-commercial clauses lock out many cooperatives and social enterprises from sharing and helping.
If you’ve got an idea for an app using open bibliographic data (you can enter the idea or a prototype app), you’ve just about got time to enter the OpenBiblio Challenge before it closes on 17 February and win some money. Good luck!