When I last wrote about Casey Bisson’s apparent plan to use the money from his Mellon award to pay for Library of Congress catalog records which he would then turn around and make freely available, you will recall that I was scratching my head a bit. Can he do that? And if he does, so what?

Since that post, there have been at least two interesting discussions of the issues.

First is the Talking With Talis podcast, The Mellon rewards WPOpac… and opens an Open Data door?, wherein Paul Miller, Ross Singer, Rob Styles, Tim Spalding, and Richard Wallis hash it out and decide that, wherever this is going, it is good and likely important.

Then there is Dan Chudnov at One Big Library who says that Open Data is not the point and believes that the enthusiasm around this idea is mostly “gushing” and “fawning.” For various reasons (librarians have been working on sharing data for generations, the LC data isn’t necessarily all that interesting) he believes this development may not be all that interesting or exciting.

If you are interested in this topic at all, I highly recommend the podcast and Chudnov’s post (and the comments on Chudnov’s post).

In the Talis podcast, Ross Singer says,

I think the problem with the Library of Congress data announcement is that it’s a little difficult for people to make heads or tails of what they are going to be able to do with that….To just your average librarian at your average library, what does that actually mean to you? A huge binary file of MARC records, what exactly are you going to do with this?

And one of the Talis guys (sorry, podcasts make it difficult to tell who is speaking) points out that for the average librarian, a project or service that can be demonstrated to work with our existing infrastructure is probably what we will need before we get excited.

And, for my part, I agree. When I hear that someone as obviously sharp as Casey Bisson is making library data more open and available, I have to assume it is a Good Thing. But I’m still having a problem wrapping my head around what this is really going to mean to anyone.

Bisson, for his part, seems to be awfully quiet about all this. I’m sure he isn’t really having second thoughts. (So apologies for the cartoon. My new Mac Mini arrived yesterday with Comic Life pre-loaded. I couldn’t resist.) But it would be nice to hear just what he really does have in mind.