[open-bibliography] Changes on openbiblio wiki

Tue Oct 19 14:57:07 UTC 2010

Adrian Pohl <ad.pohl at googlemail.com> wrote:

> 2. I rearranged the Working Group's web presence a bit.
> What do you think about the changes? 

Much improved, many thanks!

> Is this web presence readable for people who have no clue what the group is doing but who are vaguely
> interested in the group's work?

I think this is a secondary audience at this time. The primary audience should be those on this list who
are already committed to openbiblio activities, as a means of sharing information, raising awareness
of each others efforts and projects, avoiding duplication of effort, and encouraging productive collaborations
to form. 

> What is missing?/To Do
Here are some suggestions.

Those interested in bibliographic data management and cleaning workflows need a list of available software tools,
data sources and webservices. I am thinking especially about article metadata, which is very different to book metadata from
a socio-economic perspective.
For the tools, comments on their purpose, usability, flexibility, ...... Whether they are
proprietary or open source, well maintained, ....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_management_software

is a great start, and we should not duplicate this. I would suggest rather scripting the data out of those tables 
and supplementing with our own notes.
We especially need some commentary on the suitability of some these software systems 
e.g. JabRef, Zotero, BibSonomy, Mendeley, .....  for openbiblio purposes. The perspective of the wikipedia article
is that of the individual user. What is missing is the perspective of the bibliographer who wishes to use such
tools to publish bibliographies back to the web.  So there is the question of what formats are available as machine export,
what license restrictions there might be imposed on the export by the sytem, etc.

We also need information about more advanced tools and services like reference parsing software, e.g. ParsCit, ...

For projects, I'd like to see for each project a few sentences of roadmap, what its goals are, extent of support,
number of FTE committed to the project, timeframe, ....

For publishers and A&I services, I'd like to see something like http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ for metadata policies.
Is their metadata open? If so in exactly what legal sense and in what format? How to get in bulk? How to get by webservice? .....
Does the service permit users to publish selected data  back to the web in open formats?

Possibly this could be done as an OKFN project under the SHERPA umbrella.
The number of non OA publishers with certifiably open metadata is so small at this time that the challenge is just to get the first entries on the list.  
For OA publishers, the issue is how to get at the data easily. Even a list of aggregators of OA materials which provided good machine access
to biblio data would be useful.

more than enough suggestions for one email!
cheers
--Jim