[open-bibliography] Announce: Open Bibliography (JISCOBIB)

Tim Spalding tim at librarything.com
Thu Jun 24 15:55:03 UTC 2010


I like to think I am not an idiot. Even so, I need to ask an idiotic
question. Can someone help me with the usage of "bibliography"
throughout? The word has many different uses, from a simple citation
list to any writing or data involving book-ish things.

For example, "The Open Bibliography Project will deliver a substantial
corpus of bibliographic metadata as Linked Open Data" leaves open—for
me—what the data is intended to be used for. Cataloging? Citation
lists? Anything? What's kept, what's chucked and how things are
connected all differ based on the expected usage.

Those who know me know that I've been vuvuzela-ing for open
bibliographic data for a long time. I'll do what I can here too. But
two things are of interest here from the perspective of LibraryThing:

1. We recently released OverCat (see
http://www.librarything.com/blogs/librarything/2010/06/announcing-overcat/).
Basically, OverCat is Open Library, plus some non-open records and
remaining in MARC, not translated to OL-whatever. We are--so
far--keeping even the open data closed, because OL already makes it
available. But I could see us contributing our code to this project,
or another.

2. LibraryThing is going to be getting into articles and so forth. We
are looking to mine what we can, and get member data for the rest.
We're thinking about data licensing here, both other people's stuff
and what members produce.

Best,
Tim

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> This is to announce the exciting news of a grant from JISC
> (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ ) to support an Open Bibliography project for about
> a year. The project partners are:
> * University of Cambridge, Chemistry Department, Peter Murray-Rust
> (Principal Investigator)
> * The Open Knowledge Foundation
> * The British Library (BL)
> * The University Library, University of Cambridge (CUL)
> * The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr)
> * The Public Library of Science [PLoS]
>
> The project is very closely coupled to a complementary project from David
> Shotton (PI) at Oxford on Open Citations.
>
> To distinguish the project it has the unique tag #jiscobib
>
> The project starts next week and its first activities will be to create a
> project plan for approval by JISC, and to create a web presence.
>
> The proposal concentrates on:
> * developing the practice of Open bibliography (tools, protocols, legal
> issues, etc.)
> * cases studies on selected bibliographic resources. The primary ones are:
> -- catalogue material ftom the BL
> -- catalogue material from the CUL
> -- Open Access (CC-BY) publications from the IUCr
>
> The main funded staff are Ben O'Steen, Rufus Pollock and Peter Murray-Rust.
> We are extremely grateful for very significant contributions from the
> partners, including the promise of material which can be made Open.
>
> It is expected that the tools and protocols are generally suitable for
> making Open bibliographies. The project will welcome suggestions for
> contributions of material, effort and expertise (and has already received
> some offers). We expect these to be discussed and reported on this list or
> other lists/pages created by the project.
>
> As I (PM-R) have gaps in my bibliographic knowledge I may take the
> opportunity to ask some questions on this list which may also be useful for
> other newcomers to the subject.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-bibliography mailing list
> open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bibliography
>
>



-- 
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding




More information about the open-bibliography mailing list