What Talis did next

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.

Interesting development. It highlights one of the strategic issues facing libraries from now on. What's best done at the local level? And what's best done at the network level?

Link.