The "right" to contribute
An interesting point has been raised recently by a library, around their right to contribute data to the Platform. Their concern, as I understand it, was based on the premise that at the moment they derive many of their monograph MARC records from "alternative" sources, in addition to their own cataloguing effort. So do they therefore have the right to contribute those records to the Platform?
There are a number of considerations here, which I will try and address individually. It is understood that libraries will often derive records from other sources as well as creating original records. Those records may frequently be derived from commercial sources. In the case of these derived records, a library may well strip out fields that are not deemed of value to their own local catalogue, or indeed add fields that have been identified as being of value. So do those records lose their provenance during that process of local rationalisation? In the case of Talis Base - the service where we have the most familiarity with this issue - we always advocate that records that are downloaded from Talis Base into local catalogues by libraries always retain the indicator of provenance, no matter how much they may be altered for local purposes, before resubmission to the Talis Base union catalogue.
What does this mean therefore in the context of submission to the Talis Platform? Well, submission to the Platform means that the record is retained in its entirety including its provenance. And obviously if we, or others, wished to launch a MARC record download service from the Platform, we would ensure that the originating parties' rights over those records were observed.
For libraries that are involved in originating catalogue records on a non-commercial basis, there is a similar requirement to understand the circumstances in which these records could be re-used and re-purposed. We want re-use from the Platform to be understood and indeed advocated, and so to that end we have recently published a draft for a Community Licence on which, we would welcome comment.
In the context of Source, a full contribution of MARC records to the Platform from a library means that we will use the record as an incidence that the library holds the item and therefore attach a holding record to a previously existing and licensed bibliographic record. (We use the British Library as our core bibliographic dataset.) In this case, the holdings record is purely a statement of fact, that the library in question holds that item. And of course, a statement of fact is not a property issue. Just as a table of contents from a book cannot be copyrighted, because it simply states the order in which chapters appear.
As mentioned in a previous blog entry, we are increasingly loading bibliographic records for items from libraries, where no BL record exists. These records tend to be originated locally, because they are itemising local studies materials, which do not have ISBNs - and are therefore not catalogued within the BL programme or any commercial process. We can't underestimate however, how important these records are, constituting as they do the "long tail" of items that libraries are synonymous with holding.
In summary therefore, I would make three points:
1. The MARC records that are submitted to the Platform retain their provenance and their ownership will alway be respected.
2. In Source, the records are used simply to enable a match to be made and are not visible or downloadable.
3. A holdings record is a statement of fact and does not present any licensing or copyright issue.
This whole area is of course virgin territory, which means that we like others are finding our way. But the locking away of data in proprietary silos will not ultimately provide us with the solutions we need for building new applications, so let's ask the questions and hopefully there is a way forward through this morass of concerns.
Technorati Tags: resource sharing, resource discovery, Talis Platform, Catalogues, metadata,