On Tuesday, September 23, 2008 4:17 PM, Nate Vack wrote:
>Huh. They claim copyright of these records. I'd somehow thought:
>1: The federal government can't hold copyrights

The page [1] states:

"Copyright"
"Records in the MARC Distribution Services originating with the Library of Congress are copyrighted by the Library of Congress for use outside the United States. Subscribers are granted copyright permission to selectively redistribute records outside the United States; contact LC prior to any distribution."

So, in the U.S., they are not copyrightable, but outside the U.S. some copyright claim might be justified.

> 2: As purely factual data, catalog records are conceptually uncopyrightable

For the most part, personally I would agree with this, at least for individual records (though some parts of the record, like the 520 summaries, might contain enough original creativity that could be considered copyrightable). Others might believe otherwise, at least as it pertains to the collection of the records as a whole--for example, OCLC's copyright claims on their database of records.

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On the Fred 2.0 records, aside from their age, I wish they were available in MARC 21 format rather than XML with NFC encoding. When I tried to use MarcEdit to convert the files from XML to MARC 21 (January 2007), I ran into issues with character encodings. The files also seemed to lack header lines like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<collection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/MARC21/slim">

[1] <http://www.loc.gov/cds/mds.html#lcaf>

Thank you for your assistance,

Bryan Baldus
Cataloger
Quality Books Inc.
The Best of America's Independent Presses
1-800-323-4241x402
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