[open-bibliography] OKFN blog: Bibliographica, an Introduction

[Karen Coyle]

Quoting Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.Berkeley.EDU>:

  I'd love to be able to extract out of
> OL the subset of book titles and
> authors of interest to academic researchers e.g. in mathematics or   
> statistics or economics or some
> other discipline, but I dont have the resources to do this and   
> maintain the results. Anyone able to help
> with that?

OL is developing the ability to create "lists" -- AKA bibliographies  
-- that could be exported, so it may be possible for you to have a  
running list that you could export and update. Unfortunately, there  
isn't a set date for this feature, but I know it is highly desired.

>
> I welcome suggestions from this group about how to to improve   
> cooperation, and how to get
> further resources directed towards the common goals of  these projects.

It seems to me that one goal could be inter-linking between them. OL  
is negotiating links to other book sites, like GoodReads and perhaps  
LibraryThing. (I've also been encouraging them to consider linking to  
VIAF for named persons, something that BibKN might consider.) It makes  
sense to do this because each site will have some different  
information about the resource, in particular different user  
participation. It would be good to make it easy for users and programs  
to navigate through these different sites for a given book, article,  
author, subject, or whatever.

>
>> It seems like that would be a lot more useful and productive than   
>> ratcheting up the level of
>> competition and duplication yet another notch.
>
> I hope so too.

There are areas of duplication, but I don't see that as a bad thing.  
The basic bib info may be duplicative, but it is needed to support the  
functionality of the site, so I don't see how that can be avoided. We  
do need to share identifiers so that we can know when two resources in  
different databases represent the same work. Is DBpedia the best place  
to do that? It would be fairly simple to link OL ids to DBpedia where  
an ISBN is present. It's harder to calculate equivalence without it,  
but it can be done. I also think that we should gather/store all of  
the identifiers that we can for each resource -- from Library of  
Congress Cataloging numbers to DOIs to Amazon ASINs... It will make  
linking easier.

kc

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
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