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

Tue Aug 17 16:14:35 UTC 2010

Ross Singer <ross.singer at talis.com> wrote:

> It's interesting that you attack libraries for not doing anything; I think
> they would be more than happy to be given reasonable suggestions.

Here's a first one. Dont sign metatadata licensing agreements which forbid
anything other than "personal use" of the metadata. Literal reading of every licensing
agreement I've seen would forbid typically inclusion of data in any kind of bibliographic
aggregate even for sharing amongs members of the same institiution, let alone publication
of any form of bibliography based in the "licensed metadata".
Licensed metadata is an oxymoron.

> there are no rights on the metadata itself.  That can be indexed anywhere,
> it's just the content that has restrictions.

Not true. The highest quality largest aggregations of metadata are all subject to 
licensing restrictions. Publishers and secondary indexing services also perpetuate the myth
of copyright in biblio metadata. There appears to be no copyright protection for individual biblio
records provided by US law, but selections, arrangements, databases is another matter. There might be
some copyright in a selection or arrangement, it is hard to tell, and for databases we enter some more 
difficult legal territory.

> Without some faculty support, it's going to be tough for libraries (esp. non-research
> libraries at larger universities) to keep up with all of the publications of
> their faculty.

Right. But library IT support should be capable of maintaining simple tools such as Drupal/Open Scholar
http://scholar.harvard.edu/
for individual faculty members to maintain their own personal biblio data, cvs, and reference lists on subjects they care about, in 
structured ways that are readily curated and shared.
That would provide a big incentive for faculty participation.

--Jim
----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Director, Bibliographic Knowledge Network Project
http://www.bibkn.org/

Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman