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

Tue Aug 17 17:17:32 UTC 2010

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 12:14 PM, Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu>wrote:

> 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 a couple of flaws I see in this:

1) Libraries aren't always the ones signing the contract - there are lots of
consortial agreements, not to mention institutional counsels involved.
2) Let's say the library (and a smaller fish than Berkeley, let's say Sonoma
State, for the sake of argument) decides to take a principled stand on this
and subsequently loses access to Springer, Elsevier and Nature titles.  Do
you think the faculty will be satisfied with this moral victory?

>
> > 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.
>

I guess we need to define the limits of what we mean by metadata here.
 Title, author(s), journal title, date, page number, volume, issue, etc. are
not copyrightable, else citeulike or zotero groups couldn't exist.

>
> > 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.
>

What is the uptake of Harvard's tool?  Looking through the profiles, it
looks pretty limited.  Most libraries would be hesitant to take this on
until there was a strong commitment (read: requirement) from the departments
to actually contribute and maintain their lists.

The nice thing about building an infrastructure off of reading lists (and
their US counterpart, reserves lists) is that this actually *is* a part of a
lecturer/instructor/professor's job, so the incentive to maintain them is
there.

Building an aggregation service into a link resolver, like the Umlaut (
http://wiki.code4lib.org/index.php/Umlaut) would work, too - it's sort of
like Last.fm, if I had to go there and tell it what I listened to today, I'd
have as empty a profile as those Harvard scholar's pages.

-Ross.

>
> --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
>
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