[open-bibliography] comprehensive bibliographic database of "open" resources?

[Ian Ibbotson]

I know it's *terribly* old fashioned... and I hate to sound like a
broken 8 track... but index data still maintain an amazing registry of
all the openly searchable bibliographic databases using IRSpy at
http://irspy.indexdata.com/. The data is open in the sense that anyone
can search it, and if I recall, it provides you an interface that
proxies for the collections in the database, allowing you to search
many of them at once. there are trendy restful and nasty old  (And yet
still everso efficient) ASN.1/BER APIs. There are still a lot of these
"Old world" open datasets out there, that we're often quick to forget
about. I wonder if we shouldn't find a way to get them into CKAN
(Z3950 URL's and all).

The trouble with the old Z3950 API's in the brave new world is that
it's a search/retrieve protocol, rather than a distribution protocol
like OAI, so it's not that easy to take copies of the data. An
interesting side question... And one that I'm suddenly excited by
again.. is to ponder if it's possible to write an adapter that can
turn a z3950 target into a discrete set of data files with updates or
an even OAI feed. Sadly, not many Z targets support modified stamps or
even stable record identifiers.. But still..

e

On 16 August 2010 17:49, graham <graham at theseamans.net> wrote:
> I may be wrong but I think John is looking for something rather
> different: the equivalent of what gets called a 'knowledge base' in
> proprietary applications like SFX, which would provide the ability to do
> bibliographic searches across open access and public domain databases.
> It's something I had been wondering about trying to create too, though
> at the moment it's just a rather vague idea.. As John implies, it would
> be a big job - not just to create but to keep up-to-date.
>
> Graham
>
> On 08/16/10 15:33, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>> If I'm understanding you correctly, this is *exactly* what CKAN is for:
>>
>>   http://ckan.net/
>>   http://ckan.net/group/bibliographic
>>
>> CKAN is an open source registry of open data/open content 'packages'
>> (as in software packages). Medium to long term idea is something like
>> apt-get for open data, with support for automating lots of stuff.
>>
>> Focus is on material that is open as in opendefinition.org (of which
>> PD material and *some* CC licensed content is a subset).
>>
>> Does that help? Would love to have any feedback on how we can improve
>> CKAN for bibliographic material.
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 4:52 PM, John Wilkin <jpwilkin at umich.edu> wrote:
>>> All,
>>> Of course I can think of a bucket-load of reasons why this would be impossibly hard to assemble and maintain, but I'm still curious:  has any organization tried to create a database of essentially "open" bibliographic resources?  In this case, I'm interested in something broad enough to include CC, PD, etc.--i.e., resources that can be used (at least in scholarship and teaching) without fees paid to the maintainer of the resource?
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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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Ian Ibbotson
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