Despite a proclivin toward openness, libraries have historically been involved with data and content under various lev-els of restrictions imposed by copyright and proprietary business arrangements. Libraries have also dealt with data pri-marily through self-contained applica-tions, mostly managed within relational databases. While these modes of oper-ation persist today in the mainstream production systems of interest to librar-ies, a strong movement is underway toward the principles of the Seman-tic Web and more open approaches to sharing data. I see libraries now at an interesting juncture between the realm of proprietary, restricted, and isolated data and a new era with possibilities for more openness in sharing data and put-ting it to work through Semantic Web technologies. The library community seems to be ready to push boundaries and more liberally share previously reatricted data. To what extent can metadata related to collections be shared with other organi-zations or exposed freely for the entire world? When can the actual content of collections be shared? Copyright, licens-ing terms, and business contracts impose spmecific restrictions, but libraries been working toward arrangements that allow more sharing.
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