Free the Data: Discussion Panel at IFLA 2008

I participated in a panel sponsored by the Libraries and Web 2.0 Discussion Group at the recent IFLA annual meeting in Quebec.  Here is some background and the means to access my presentation and speaker notes, for those who asked. The session attracted about 80 or 85 people. First, the description of the panel from the IFLA programme:

"The Open Knowledge Foundation (ONF) has criticized the draft report of the Working Group for Bibliographic Control of the Library of Congress because there is no provision for the access, re-use and re-distribution of bibliographic data without restriction. The ONF published a petition that all bibliographic data should be free which is supported by users and Web 2.0 services like Library Thing and the Open Library Project. What does that mean for our practice?

We would like to discuss this with representatives of the projects, national libraries and other major data providers. We think that we need to start the discussion as soon as possible and therefore invite all interested delegates to this first meeting of the Library and Web 2.0 Discussion Group."

Patrick Danowski (State Library of Berlin), chair of the Discussion Group, convened the panel and introduced the session. Panelists included Stephen Abram (SirsiDynix), me, Sally McCallum (Library of Congress), and Patrick Peiffer (National Library of Luxembourg and project lead for Creative Commons in Luxembourg). Karen Coyle (consultant--of late to Open Library) submitted a brief video called "free the data" to start off the panel. My presentation followed. 

For those who asked, I've put my presentation plus my speaker notes up on SlideShare.  During the upload to SlideShare, something strange happened, and the speaker notes for slide 2 are actually at the very end of the notes, so watch out for that. (In SlideShare, speaker notes show up as comments.) 

Here's a brief summary of what I presented:

--Information seekers expect seamless connections between metadata and content, regardless of source
--The information industry is being driven to a data sharing model based upon the value in the exchange and linking of data
--Nearly all organizations have terms and conditions for data sharing (documented or not)
--There is no such thing as "free" content or metadata
--There is no such thing as "free" content or metadata services
--"Where the money comes from" directly impacts data sharing policy
--This is a painful transition, esp. for those organizations directly dependent on revenue from content, metadata, or content/metadata-based services
•--The present landscape is rich in contradictions