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

Fri May 28 19:32:58 UTC 2010

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 6:03 PM, Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> I've been in contact
> with OL people, but to date the cost of OL/BibKN cooperation has exceeded the apparent benefits.

Yes, they've got to be one of the most insular "open" organizations around.

> 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?

I actually see the uncoordinated duplication of data as part of the
problem.  The Open Library data is pretty low quality right now, but
hopefully it will be improving (hint to OL: people would help you with
this if you let them).  How will BibKN get the updates with those
improvements?  If BibKN goes ahead and cleans up their little
extracted subset, how do those changes get back to OL? How are the two
sets of changes reconciled if they conflict?

> 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.

I think acknowledging that there will be multiple repositories of
bibliographic data with different focuses and figuring out how they
exchange updates cooperatively would be a useful thing.  Having strong
provenance for the data and modifications to it is a key enabler, I
think.

The main thing is to get the dialog established.  It sounds like there
have been some bilateral discussions.  Perhaps it's time to widen the
scope.

Tom