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

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Thu, Jun 24, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Tim Spalding <tim at librarything.com> wrote:

> I like to think I am not an idiot.


I am sure you are not :-)


> 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.
>

It's a very wide term. Starting from Wikipedia I find:

Bibliographic works differ in the amount of detail depending on the purpose,
and can be generally divided into two categories: *enumerative* bibliography
(also called compilative, reference or systematic), which results in an
overview of publications <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication> in a
particular category, and *analytical*, or critical, bibliography, which
studies the production of
books.[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography#cite_note-0>
[2] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography#cite_note-1> In earlier
times, bibliography mostly focused on books. Now, both categories of
bibliography cover works in other formats including recordings, motion
pictures and videos, graphic objects, databases,
CD-ROMs[3]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography#cite_note-2>and
websites.

My own interest as a scientists is in what WP calls "enumerative" so here
goes:
Enumerative bibliography

A *bibliography* is a list of writings that share a common factor: this may
be a topic, a language, a period, or some other theme. The list may be
comprehensive or selective. One particular instance of this is the list of
sources used or considered in preparing a work, sometimes called a *reference
list*.

Citation <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation> formats vary, but an entry
for a book in a bibliography usually contains the following information:

   - author(s)
   - title
   - publisher
   - date of publication

An entry for a journal or periodical article usually contains:

   - author(s)
   - article title
   - journal title
   - volume
   - pages
   - date of publication

PMR: This is exactly the information that I am collecting for scientific
articles. For modern works most working scientists do not   distinguish
between versions of works, manifestations, etc. and there is a single
bibliographic object (often indexed through a DOI). If, however, the author
publishes versions other than the publishers' it might be useful to record
these though it is likely to be very difficult in practice

A bibliography may be arranged by author, topic, or some other scheme.
Annotated
bibliographies <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annotated_bibliography> give
descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a
paper or argument. These descriptions, usually a few sentences long, provide
a summary of the source and describe its relevance. Reference management
software <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_management_software> may be
used to keep track of references and generate bibliographies as required.

Bibliographies differ from library
catalogs<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog>by including
only relevant items rather than all items present in a
particular library. However, the catalogs of some national
libraries<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_library>effectively
serve as national bibliographies, as the national libraries own
almost all their countries' publications.
 PMR: This emphasizes that a bibliography is extensible - you can add
annotations (and annotate them recursively if required). So it can be very
simple or very complex.

>
> 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.
>

We have two very sets of use cases. Rufus and Ben will be working with key
libreary catalogues (BL and Cambridge). Here we can expect some records to
be very complex and the expectation of usage very complex and varied

My use case is 10000 papers from the same journal. here the bibliographic
data is all of one type (enumerative).  One thing I want to do is map
authorship over time by geolocation. Another could be to find the degree of
publication involving more than one institution. This is limited only by the
imagination and the detail of the metadata

>
> 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.
>

That sounds useful. I don't quite get the point of keeping your open data
closed. From OL I find:
"Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data is open,
the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution.  " It looks
like it has a "citizien librarian" philosophy. I am sure we will be
interested in the tools for adding and maintaining records



>
> 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.
>
>
"Data licensing" will depend on what the data are. The OKF has tools for all
sorts of "data".

P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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