[open-bibliography] Library support and REST

Ben O'Steen bosteen at gmail.com
Tue Oct 26 11:28:46 UTC 2010


On Tue, 2010-10-26 at 11:38 +0100, Paul Walk wrote:

> Peter: I think it's disingenuous to suggest librarians are
> disinterested in this issue.

This comes down to a organisation/individual issue - if the bureaucratic
caution or pace is not supported by the action or inaction of
individuals within an organisation, then what causes it? Is it a few
members of higher rank putting on the brakes? Is it a general acceptance
by too many that this "is just how things are" rather than "this is how
things should be"?

Regardless, it is still not entirely accurate to lay the blame at the
feet of individuals - libraries act with an emergent behaviour dependant
on all the people who work within and alongside them. It's is not fair
to blame librarians, but it is fair to blame all librarians,
accountants, bureaucrats, lawyers, and academics for the actions of the
libraries.


> 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.

I think that this has great validity as this skips over the one main
misunderstandings of open metadata - we wish to be legally free to
collaborate and share on a large scale, and the copynorms that the vast
majority of people operate under are legally debatable and would likely
be targetted if attempted at scale. (I won't say illegal as I feel
deeply that this information is simply that - just information.)

I think all this list knows of the oft cited reports on how open access
increases usage/citation (Tim Brody's and others) and it is easy to
theorise that increasing the discoverability of accessible material
should do the same. Google and other 'cross-domain' search engines being
a valid example of this - it is easy to forget how hard search was in
the past.

So what can we do? What can a service that held and worked on open
metadata look like?

There are two tested policies for hosting user-submitted content:
moderation and the YouTube-style 'takedowns'. With (human) moderation of
any kind, *you* are liable for any aberrant/illegal content. With a
permissive, reactive policy, the user is liable as long as you respond
to take-down notices and pick the battles you wish to fight.

I have seen that much of OpenLibrary's content mirrors Amazon metadata
for a given item - given the APIs that were available for both, I am not
surprised. Why Nielson (who supply most of the MD to Amazon for a fee)
hasn't pursued this, I can only theorise.

Does this imply that we are being too cautious? Maybe.

So why provide it as linked data? I don't think there is much of an
argument to provide it as linked data to a typical end-user, at least in
terms of the majority that libraries deal with day-in, day-out. They
lack the tools, the software and most importantly, don't care.

However, I think it is far easier to sell the idea of inter- and
intra-library 'authority services' in the manner that Jim's BKN and
other projects suggest. Linked data is fantastic for linking around
entities - people, publishers and so on.

However, it is a double-edged sword - it cuts through technical issues
of sharing this data, but can also cut through ego's just as fast as it
is also fantastic at showing the true quality of the data. (IMO There
seems also to be a reticence in the existing LoD community to encode
murky data - that is, potentially false, duplicate, biased or
conflicting data. I would argue that bias is present anytime anyone
chooses how to use a predicate or creates yet-another-new-class when an
existing one isn't felt to be quite right.)





So, if the above was tl;dr - I think that (per-organisation) authority
lists is a great first argument for linked data in libraries and
achievable as long as we don't forget the human dimension of the ego and
how to support it when messy data is inevitably published.











> 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/
> >         
> >         
> >         _______________________________________________
> >         open-bibliography mailing list
> >         open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org
> >         http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bibliography
> >         
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > -- 
> > Peter Murray-Rust
> > Reader in Molecular Informatics
> > Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> > University of Cambridge
> > CB2 1EW, UK
> > +44-1223-763069
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > open-bibliography mailing list
> > open-bibliography at lists.okfn.org
> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bibliography
> > 
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