The OCLC Members Council has a Digital Library Research Interest Group that we in OCLC Research meet with three times a year. I gave a short talk about our plans for a WorldCat Wiki, a new project involving several groups here at OCLC.
The idea is to have a Wiki that complements WorldCat. People could add reviews, cover art, comments, etc. and relate these to bibliographic records (maybe at the FRBR work-level too). We hope the system is flexible enough so that people do (good) things we're not expecting. We'd like the Wiki to be available anywhere WorldCat records are.
The DLR interest group had some good suggestions about how this sort of capability might fit into their local situations. Some of the ideas might take a little more structure in terms of group membership than we had been planning. There certainly is a lot of effort being expended within and with libraries that isn't being shared very well and this might help with that.
I've mentioned the MetaWiki software we're using to build the Wiki part of this.
--Th
This sounds great... what do you mean by "the Wiki [being] available anywhere WorldCat records are" ? Under what license would the wiki content be placed?
There has been some discussion among Wikipedians of separating out a freely-licensed citations database, in structured format. This would ideally support metadata like comments about cites, and allow for cleaner and more detailed references in bibliographies and footnotes.
See the Wikicite project purpose and the broader Wikicite meta-proposal.
Cheers,
SJ
Posted by: SJ | June 02, 2005 at 22:39
We haven't worked out the details, but the intention is to make the content as widely available as possible.
Thanks for the links.
--Th
Posted by: Thom | June 03, 2005 at 02:46