30 January, 2009. Talis, the UK market leader in providing academic and public library solutions, and LibLime, the leader in open solutions for libraries, are pleased to announce a partnership to make available over five million bibliographic records to the library community on the ‡biblios.net platform.
‡biblios.net is LibLime's free browser-based cataloguing service with a data store containing over thirty-million records. The database is maintained by ‡biblios.net and uses a similar model to Wikipedia. Cataloguers can use and contribute to the database without restrictions because records in ‡biblios.net are freely-licensed under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (http://biblios.net/pddl).
Talis is providing data from the Talis Union Catalogue; the open shared core of records from the Talis Base service, to ‡biblios.net, including over 5 million bibliographic records, catalogued by public and academic libraries in the UK over the last 30 years. The Talis Union Catalogue is a treasure trove of rare, old and out-of-print items which will complement the existing ‡biblios.net database. The sharing principles of Talis Base, established over the years, are now being supplemented by reciprocal sharing with other open sources such as ‡biblios.net.
The Talis contribution to ‡biblios.net goes beyond the data being made available to the project. The Open Data Commons license itself was originally created by Talis in collaboration with Creative Commons. It represents a milestone for sharing data on the Internet, supporting innovative projects such as ‡biblios.net.
"Talis has made two important contributions to pave the way for freely-licensed, community-maintained sources of library metadata" explains Joshua Ferraro, CEO of LibLime. "We're excited about the value that the Open Data Commons license, as well as the Talis data set bring to ‡biblios.net. We're looking forward to future partnership opportunities with Talis."
Richard Wallis, Technology Evangelist at Talis adds "The open sharing of data, the default motivation for most librarians, has often been stifled by confusion and fear about ownership and licensing. Open Data Commons helps clarify and dispel those fears, opening up data that can confidently be shared. ‡biblios.net is a great example of the innovation that results when data is really open."
To find out more information about Open Data Commons visit www.opendatacommons.org. You can visit ‡biblios.net at http://biblios.net.
