But… it seems to me that too often we follow, rather than leading. I think that part of the reason for this (yes, lack of money/resources is certainly another one) is – as you and Stephen point out point out – that too often we ask the wrong questions. For an industry that strives so hard to anticipate the needs of our customers, we just don’t seem to put significant trust in those customers. And that is something we must do if we are going to create “a more open, community-oriented, socially-connected user experience stance.”

“Roy relayed a story about how he explained the concept of WorldCat to an executive at Microsoft (I think, I could be wrong), and how the exec’s response was that it would be so awesome if WorldCat was just released to the internet wild, open source, with APIs that let people create applications that worked with and on top of it. Roy then said that he could imagine the people at OCLC freaking out (in a bad way) at the concept.”

It would, indeed, be awesome to see a comprehensive body of library holdings released to the Internet wild, with APIs that let people create applications that worked with and on top of it. That’s exactly what we’re doing at Talis.

See, for example, http://www.talis.com/tdn/platform/ for documentation of the first set of APIs. See also http://directory.talis.com/ for one possible human interface onto the Directory of basic data about libraries and their holdings, and http://www.talis.com/tdn/greasemonkey/amazon-libraries for just one simple example of the opportunities that present themselves when anyone, anywhere, can build new applications on top of library data.

There is no charge for sharing library holdings with this growing Platform, and the current set of APIs are freely available for developers to experiment with in their applications.

By working, together, to increase the pool of data accessible to these APIs, we create opportunities for widely deployed services that we can foresee, and a whole host of potential applications that have not yet been imagined.