I Still Love Meta-Information
I haven't posted anything for months to this blog while dealing with piles of writing, research, and baby holding. But I'm still thinking about the bigger issues of book information information.
I'm starting to think more about how to build a Wiki-based repository of book details. There are a huge number of problems with such a project, but I do know how to seed the data. The Library of Congress's Cataloguing Distribution Service resells the vast data that the LOC has compiled on books, which include their holdings and general catalog information. The information is not copyrighted (per se) for use in the U.S. U.S. citizens have certain copyright interests when it comes to information created by the government. NASA, for instance, holds the copyright for images it takes, but releases them for use by U.S. citizens without advance or specific permission or licensing fees. Both the LOC, NASA, and other agencies can charge cost-recovery fees for distributing and maintaining data, which is why the CDS charges many tens of thousands of dollars for a complete set and subscription.
This information is available from other sources. Some libraries and other groups have purchased, say, Books All, the full set of book data, and could re-distribute it for free to a Wiki-bibliographic project. (Wikibib? Wikilibris?)
If the project were set up correctly, there would be an API that would allow publishers and other parties to import massive amounts of data in the right format into the project, too. So there would be many inputs that would have be monitored and contended with.
As I've written previously, corrections are a particularly troubling problem. Authoritativeness has to be an aspect of correcting information, but who decides who is authoritative? That's a problem that the Wikipedia contends with (some say) or thrives upon (others say).