WorldCat May Become Available as Library Linked Data under ODC-BY

“On the second day of the OCLC Global Council meeting [agenda PDF] there was a presentation by Robin Murray (VP, OCLC Global Product Management) and Jim Michalko (VP, OCLC Research Library Partnership) called “Linked Open Data”. The title of the presentation was an understatement because the real heart of the matter was WorldCatdata as linked open data. Robin Murray’s first half of the presentation walked through OCLC’s thoughts about how their implementation of linked data is evolving along side their programatic API offerings. (Almost as an aside, Robin said that use of the WorldCat API has been growing steadily and is now up to 15 million hits per month — or 347 hits/minute. Wow!) He had a really slick diagram that showed the exposure of data through linked data services and API services across a half-dozen OCLC products. He called library linked data the ‘Data Exposure Service’ of the WorldShare platform... ‘IF, collectively we can re-envision cataloging as ‘registering nodes in a global web of data’; AND we can position WorldCat as the trusted, global web of library data; THEN this dramatically increases the global value and utility of metadata management with WorldCat.’ Robin went on to say that he sees publishing the OCLC cooperative’s data assets as linked data is more opportunity than threat. That doing so grows the possible base of funding support for WorldCat... Jim Michalko’s second half of the presentation walked through the history of the cooperative’s Rights and Responsibilities document, past discussions about publishing WorldCat data, and lead up to a recommendation that OCLC leadership had for the Global Council and the Board of Trustees: publish WorldCat data as linked data with an Open Data Commons “BY” attribution license (a.k.a. ODC-BY). In fact, Jim explicitly said “no restrictions on commercial reuse” of individual records. This discussion at Global Council about WorldCat data follows a similar announcement from Thom Hickey about the Virtual International Authority File being published with an ODC-BY license with attribution to VIAF. Jonathan Rochkind posted his appreciation and approval of the VIAF move but predicted a couple of pain points with the ODC-BY licensing. What he says there is also true of an ODC-BY licensed WorldCat. There was also a discussion about whether WorldCat data could be given by members toEuropeana, which announced it is using the CC0 public domain dedication. There is an important mismatch between CC0 and ODC-BY — notably the attribution requirement in the latter that isn’t in the former. I can’t faithfully recall direct quotes from the discussion — you’ll have to watch the video archive — but the summary I remember was that doing so would be okay as long as the member was being reasonable about what was being shared with Europeana. And that the same would hold true for the Digital Public Library of America...”