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Submission + - Stanford AI Class "Beta" for Commercial Launch? (dltj.org)

Submitted by
Lyrdor
Lyrdor writes: "The Terms-of-Service for the Stanford Artificial Intelligence class points to how the free class this fall will be used for "developing and evaluating the Online Course prior any commercial release of the Course" by a startup called KnowLabs. Although all of the press accounts so far have pointed to how the course would be a new example of Open Educational Resources from Stanford, the terms of service point to something else going on. On the LinkedIn page of David Stavens, Co-Founder and CEO at Know Labs, the startup is described on his profile as an “angel funded startup to re-envision and revolutionize education using the social web and mobile apps. We launched www.ai-class.com and attracted over 130,000 students in 190+ countries.”"

Comment Re:How curious... (Score 1) 174

by lamona (#36840078) Attached to: Aaron Swartz Indicted in Attempted Piracy of Four Million Documents
According to JSTOR "130 Public Libraries in 32 countries participate in JSTOR." According to the American Library Association there are about 16,000 public libraries in the US. So the actual number of public libraries that provide access to JSTOR is very, very low. SOME people who live close to PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES may be able to access JSTOR, but most of the US public (much less the rest of the world) is SOL.

Comment Re:ASIN (Score 1) 152

by lamona (#25753885) Attached to: Non-Profit Org Claims Rights In Library Catalog Data
It isn't hard to get the Amazon data out of their database. What is needed, and what Amazon has in its ASIN, is an identifier for books that can be used link up copies of the same book in different libraries or locations. The ISBN only came into existence in 1968, so there is no ID for older books. That's why Amazon needed the ASIN.

Because it has such a large database, the OCLC record number has become a de facto identifier for books and other resources. The OCLC number is in every one of those (now restricted) records in thousands of library systems across the globe. But if we want to get free of OCLC, we obviously can't use their identifier.

The difficulty is getting an identifier into the millions and millions (or 1 sagan) of records in library databases. The options seem to be

1) develop a good, solid, computable identifier from the bibliographic data itself (nearly impossible)
2) create a switching system that will take bibliographic information as input and switch to a common identifier (like ASIN) (maybe more plausible?)
The Almighty Buck

Submission + - System claims rights in library catalog data (oclc.org)

Submitted by lamona
lamona writes: The main source of the bibliographic records that are carried in library databases is a non-profit organization called OCLC. Over the weekend OCLC "leaked" its new policy that claims contractual rights in the subsequent uses of the data, uses such as downloading book information into Zotero or other bibliographic software. The policy explicitly forbids any use that would compete with OCLC. This would essentially rule out the creation of free and open databases of library content, such as the Open Library and LibraryThing. The library blogosphere is up in arms. But can our right to say: "Twain, Mark. The adventures of Tom Sawyer" be saved?

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