1.) David Weinberger poses exactly the right question concerning OCLC’s efforts to “webbify Dewey”:

“There’s lots of info packed into Dewey’s system. How can we best liberate that info?”

Maybe this is still not enough. I’d like to add another question:

How can we liberate Dewey while maintaining not only the information itself, but also the function to classify objects with Dewey, and distribute this functionality as broad as possible?

But I doubt that the Dewey classification will ever be liberated. As long as OCLC is keeping the current licence terms up, you’re not even allowed to display most of the DDC captions or summaries alongside the DDC numbers. Let alone granting Open Access to Dewey…

As a sidenote: Many german libraries won’t gain much from those efforts anyway, because for some reason they’re in favor of developing their own classification system, the “Regensburger Verbundklassifikation” (RVK, Regensburg union classification). From my point of view, RVK has some disadvantages over DDC, but at least it’s free. Or at least it seems to be free, as I’ve never seen anyone declaring “terms of use” or something similar.

(Netbib about Weinberger and OCLC.)

2.) Lorcan Dempsey, OCLC, macht in seinem Weblog darauf aufmerksam, daÃ? OCLCs Entwicklungsprojekt Worldcat Identitities übers Wochenende im Open Worldcat freigeschaltet worden ist. Sehr interessant. Die Worldcat Identities waren im vergangenen Monat übrigens Link des Monats der UB der FU Berlin und wurden bei dieser Gelegenheit vorgestellt. Aus Lorcans Blog-Beitrag über die Integration in den Worldcat:

It is currently linked to from under the ‘details’ tab. We will be interested to see how it is used and review other integration options over time.

One nice feature is that the Tag Cloud (these are FAST headings derived from Library of Congress Subject Headings in the records) sends searches back into Worldcat.

Thom discusses the implementation over on Outgoing.

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