[open-bibliography] Library support and REST

Tue Oct 26 10:38:46 UTC 2010

Some hurried thought from the bus: 

Perhaps it would be interesting & useful to describe the role of the librarian in a future where bibliographic data is crowd-sourced from enthusiast volunteers. Sometimes it does seem as though we ask librarians to collude in the demise of their profession. This may not be the case, but it can appear so - after all, cataloguing is a large part of librarianship.

Peter: I think it's disingenuous to suggest librarians are disinterested in this issue. I realise you are trying to provoke a response - but by your own admission this does not seem to be working. Perhaps a different approach is required if we want librarians to engage. But, as you sometimes seem to hint, perhaps we really don't need them to....?

Paul

Paul Walk
(sent from phone)

On 26 Oct 2010, at 11:08, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 9:58 AM, Christopher Gutteridge <cjg at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> OK. Open is very important, but most people won't do extra work for the common good. I prefer carrots to sticks, but maybe appealing to librarians isn't the only approach...
> 
> There are 250,000 people making open maps and a similar number cataloguing galaxies. There's zillions of people who love books. If we can reach them we can truly create Open Bibliography. (And, unfortunately, Open Library isn't Open by OKF standards, so we have to start from near zero). The BL's data is a tremndous place to start from.
> 
> I wasn't actually asking librarians to do extra work for the common good. I was under the mistaken impression that there were interested in bibliography and would show a professional effort which could be helpful to us. 
> 
> 
> Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> I had hoped to find some feeling among libraraians that they cared about this but I haven't seen any - I've blogged, tweeted, etc. and I know these get around.
> It may be that individual libraries don't feel they will see the return on investment of the training in new techniques, retooling of data and risk of changing their licenses.
> 
> Someone pays for libraries, right? Mostly not the users.
> 
> No - some of it comes out of my grants. I don't begrudge this, but it would be nice to see engagament.
>  
> 
> Is it possible to come up with a simple and clear story to lobby with, lobby people much higher up the structure. Getting funding councils to require Open Access publication of work they fund was a great idea. Can something similar happen with libraries?
>  
> I'm not a politician. I *am* trying this with UKPMC where I encounter serious FUD. But I think there is so much experience in web democracy that we can build this ourselves.
> Example:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geograph has 10,000 members in UK and has taken 2 million photos of the country and meticulaously recorded these. That's an average of 200 photos per member.
> 
> Analogue:
> Open Bibliography could have 10,000 members and record - from the books - the bibliography and produce 3 million records for the BL data. That's 300 books each. I expect you could photograph the NON_COPYRIGHT metadata with an iPhone. Then I suspect it's a few minutes to enter each book. We'll produce the tools. 
> 
> Geograph took 5 years and is 78% complete. I suspect Open bibliography could do the same in less. it's an ideal thing for people to do at home from their own book collection.
> 
> 
> Excuse a rather naive question; but what types of libraries exist in the world? Each major type may require a different approach. I can think of;
>  
> 
> Public Lending Libraries
> National Archive Libraries
> Personal Libraries (my bookshelf & harddrive)
> University Libraries
>  
> Are archives of data (Flickr, Youtube) libraries?
> 
> I was asked to present "Library of the Future" to a JISC conference last year. I included Sourceforge, OpenStreetMap, etc as libraries of the future. I tried to get feedback from the librray community before the meeting - it's all on my blog. Almost no feedback.
> 
> Silent interest is little use today.
> 
> -- 
> Christopher Gutteridge -- http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/1248
> 
> / Lead Developer, EPrints Project, http://eprints.org/
> / Web Projects Manager, ECS, University of Southampton, http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
> / Webmaster, Web Science Trust, http://www.webscience.org/
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> -- 
> 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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