Hi, On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 10:02 AM, Laura Krier <laura.kr...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'd like to find out from as many people as are interested what barriers > you feel exist right now to you releasing your library's bibliographic > metadata openly. I'm curious about all kinds of barriers: technical, > political, financial, cultural. Even if it seems obvious, I'd like to hear > about it.
Here's one technical barrier: there are some ILSs that don't respond well to web crawlers; in particular, although GoogleBot tends to crawl at a reasonable rate, there are other badly behaved ones (AhrefsBot, I'm looking at you!) that can effectively perform a denial-of-service attack on a library catalog. Of course, there are a number of ways to mitigate such issues and allow crawling, However, given the choice between allowing crawlers (for purposes that don't necessary have immediate benefit to the library) and maintaining uptime for the human users, often the convenient decision is to block the bots. Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton Manager of Implementation Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts email: g...@esilibrary.com direct: +1 770-709-5581 cell: +1 404-984-4366 skype: gmcharlt web: http://www.esilibrary.com/ Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org & http://evergreen-ils.org