[open-bibliography] Crowdsourcing bibliographic data

[Jonathan Gray]

Thought this was deserving of a new thread Peter! ;-)

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 11:56 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> Simple solution:
> * get every first year student to compile a bibliography of their subject by
> hand. Portion out the work just like OSM does. A list of all journals and
> all articles which students use to find new ones.

YES! This was partly why I was interested in starting Bibliographica.
A few key points on this:

  * To make something that is used you can't just give people a form
and expect them to add a thousand articles. There must be some
incentive for users in order to make this really scale. E.g. being
able to use it to generate nice indexes for courses they teach/attend,
books they write, having a community to help ensure the information is
up to date, all open so can be plugged into other
tools/services/resources, and so on.
  * Hence Bibliographica, which aims to be a free, open source,
scalable service which you can import/export from, set up your own
instance of (like Wordpress), and do lots of neat things with.
  * I think it is reasonable to assume that the people who know the
publications in a given area best are the researchers who work in that
area. ;-)
  * Relevant articles don't always come from the same bunch of
journals. E.g. in my area (philosophy / intellectual history), I also
need to search literature, theology and other areas -- not to mention
articles in different languages. IMO, subscription based services can
only take you so far in this respect, especially in the humanities.
Basically I would suggest it could be natural to pull in data to
different 'instances' run by different groups of users for different
purposes. The Cambridge University History Undergraduate instance, the
Charles Dickens instance, the 19th century fiction instance, etc.
  * Subscription resources can be *expensive*. E.g. my institution
does not subscribe to the Philosopher's Index due to the expense. It
is pretty pricey for individuals:
http://philindex.org/license-subscriptions/online-licenses/

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

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