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

Thu Jun 24 16:57:43 UTC 2010

A few comments.

If I might restate, the problem is severe here in that the proposal
uses both "bibliography" and "bibliographic. Unfortunately, the normal
uses of these terms aren't adjective and noun pointers to the same
concept.

The definitional question doesn't interest me, however. Insert a
little argument about definitions and classification theory.

I am, however, interested in *just what data is produced, or opened*
in both extent and detail. If this project produces a linked-data
representation of the BL's library records, with all MARC data
preserved in some way—great. There's a lot that can be done with that.
If it adds data to that, from another source or through internal
analysis, double great. If it produces some lossy representation,
either in extent or detail, which can't be used for cataloging or to
add information to traditional catalogs, that becomes a lot less
interesting to me. I'm simply unclear which is happening here.

> 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

So, is BL data going to be opened up?

> That sounds useful. I don't quite get the point of keeping your open data
> closed.

I mean merely that the data is already open through others. Open
Library and ‡Biblios provide access to the same data. So we don't have
a public API to the data because we don't see much of a need. The
software that gathers and processes it is, however, pretty good.

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

This is a two sided question. I'm interested in what OKF
discovers/decides about the legal state of book-and-article records.

And I'm interested in whether LT should release its data to OKF, and
if we did, what licenses could be applied to it. For example, we
offered to release our Common Knowledge data to Open Library, but they
refused the CC-Attribution license we proposed.

Best,
Tim