I floated into your (very nice) domain while trying to track down the Blue Ribbon task force’s first page and also checked out your comments elsewhere.

A question re: “the new organization”. I know everyone should have a blog today. The idea I guess is so that you have the pleasure of splitting every conversation, about similar things at different times, between hundreds of domains. As librarians I suppose you’re ensuring the growth of stuff which will need classifying (with metadata of course).

Can you tell me though. Taking that everyone in your library world considers the term ‘data’ to be interchangeable with ‘information’, and that communication between peers must reflect their institution’s standing i.e. each must pump out the same information, like this press release, http://www.oclc.org/news/releases/200692.htm, which litters about 20 domains (so far). Do you think there may come a time where you and your peers might collaborate to produce and share an interactive environment?

I was just considering this embryonic interactive TV station/ Like most others it hits the wall as soon as they try and figure out how communities can be categorized in a (tool centric) domain. http://www.scivee.tv/about

Any chance we could reverse the approach = classify a community first (maybe using a bibliographic number) and then see about backing some tools into their domain.

First, I patched the problem that attributed the quote to you; it is apparently a known bug in the Quoter plug-in to WordPress. The attribution line is gone, at least, until a permanent fix is made.

As to your question of whether Google would enter into a ‘new organization’ arrangement with partners: that is a real unknown in this scheme. Google has not been very transparent in many of its motives beyond its stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Long-time readers of DLTJknow that I’m aware that commercial motives are not in perfect alignment with not-for-profit (particularly higher education) motives. Still, if we are not successful in the first round of DataNet partner selection, I would propose that we approach Google in a partnership that would pair their high-tech cyberinfrastructure with a high-touch cadre of specialists that would help researchers effectively get their stuff into the Google Research buckets. Or, said another way, the high-touch portions of the partnership would bring better data and metadata to the Google Research site.

It would me, of course, that the working relationship would extend to the parts of the DataNet solicitation that call for interoperability with other DataNet sites, and that might mean opening up programming interfaces into Google Research that they had not intended to pursue. It would also likely mean that Google would need to add data preservation to their suite of services surrounding the Google Research project. From the outside, it is difficult to tell whether Google Research is already considering the issues of preservation, or if they just consider it an “access” platform.

If anyone inside Google is reading this and finds it interesting, feel free to give me a call. My contacts inside your organization are severely limited to non-existent.