Bisson Wins Mellon Funding

The worlds of technology and libraries drew closer together as Casey Bisson, information architect at Plymouth State University, NH, was presented with a $50,000 Mellon award for Technology Collaboration at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) annual gathering in Washington, DC, in December. Bisson's project, WPopac, is seen as the first step in allowing library catalogs to integrate with WordPress, a popular open source content management system. “Libraries' online presence is broken,” Bisson asserted. “Users are looking for an online presence that serves them in the way they expect. The intention is to bring together the free or nearly free services available to the user.”

The awards honored those who “used open source to solve problems,” said Tim Berners-Lee in presenting the award to Bisson. The awards committee also included Mitchell Baker, Mozilla; Vinton Cerf, Google; Ira Fuchs, Mellon Foundation; John Gage, Sun Microsystems; Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media; John Seely Brown, visiting scholar at University of Southern California; and Donald Waters, Mellon.

Open data?

The revolutionary part of the announcement, however, is that Plymouth State would use the $50,000 to purchase Library of Congress (LC) catalog records and redistribute them free under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license or GNU. OCLC has been the source for catalog records for libraries, and while catalog records have been shared via Z39.50 for several years without incident, a number of librarians have indicated that its licenses limit reuse or redistribution. (OCLC disputes this, pointing to guidelines here, that state, Each member and nonmember library may use records without restriction, and may transfer records of its own holdings without restriction to other libraries.)

Bisson said Plymouth is committed to supporting WPopac and will be offering it as a free download from its site, likely in the form of sample records plus WordPress with WPopac included. “With nearly 140,000 registered users of Amazon Web Services, it's time to use common solutions for our unique problems,” he said. The internal data structure works with iCal for calendar information and Flickr for photos and can be used with historical records. It allows libraries to go beyond LC subject headings. Microformats are key to the internal data, and the OpenSearch API is used for interoperability. Bisson is looking at adding unAPI and OAI in the future. WPopac can be seen in action at beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu.

At this time, there is no connection to a University of Rochester, NY, project for a new extensible catalog, also funded by Mellon (see “Baker's Smudges,” LJ 9/1/06).