On Sep 4, 2006, at 7:30 PM, Tim Spalding wrote:
> I gather that, although the LC sells the CDs, there are no copyright
> or redistribution restrictions—indeed, that companies often resell
> them, with minimal value adds. I also gather that libraries generally
> don't get these CDs, but rely on OCLC instead.

You rule for asking this question in public :-) I've only privately
thought about it. It would do libraries and the web community in
general a great service to make bibliographic and particulary
authority data publicly available in a machine friendly way.

Over on #code4lib [2] a few of us had an involuntary brainstorm about
using bittorrent to make the big data files available and then using
oai-pmh for updates. How cool would that be? I'm sure you have your
own ideas. Perhaps we could build the service without the full
snapshot and wait for it to arrive?

I posted a message over at the LoC MARC discussion list [2] to see if
anyone on there could provide some guidance.

[1] irc://irc.freenode.net/code4lib
[2] http://listserv.loc.gov/listarch/marc.html