Open Source Cultural Database

Reviews, critical articles, indexes, and bibliographic data are what organizes and ties together our cultural system. In this sense, they could be viewed as a vital knowledge infrastructure, i.e. a shared public good built by collective action; in practice, however, this vast mass of cultural meta-data is largely privatized and fragmented.

As Robert Cameron (1997) notes, bibliographic indexing is a major industry supported by large annual expenditures. To take just one segment of the field, he notes that "Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent annually by research libraries in acquiring literature indexes".

Given the scale of expenditure, and the social importance of the end product, it is interesting to consider whether there is a better and/or more efficient way to assemble this cultural meta-data. In particular, the recent and remarkable successes of the World Wide Web, and the Open Source/Free Software movements, force us to ask whether some system of open standards and collaborative public effort could in fact assemble the type of bibliographic indexes now created only by commercial vendors.

Many such "indexing" or collaborative-knowledge projects have already been organized on the Internet: a particularly applicable example is the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com), which evolved from a collection of Usenet FAQs into the current, de facto repository for all filmographic data.

IMDB, however, also illustrates the perils of such a project, because while it was built collaboratively by volunteers, it was subsequently taken over by Amazon.com and effectively removed from the public domain. The current IMDB, while useful in a limited capacity, is not a public good that could be utilized in new ways, for instance by being incorporated into a broader, cross-media database.

The case of IMDB also illustrates a broader theme which increasingly [pre]occupies the "cyberlaw", technology, and civil liberties communities: the tension (some say, warfare) between the power of major media corporations, on the one hand, and the rights and freedoms of information users, on the other. New technologies allow unprecedented media "sharing" and collaboration, as with IMDB or Napster, but may also be used to take away users' customary access to information, or may prompt a legal backlash from established interests (e.g. copyright holders) threatened by the new potentials.

An "open source cultural database" engages these issues by deliberately seeking to empower cultural users/consumers, and by allowing open, public participation. Its goal is to bolster the "digital commons", by providing a trustworthy and independent venue for cultural/critical data.