[open-bibliography] Library support and REST

Tue Oct 26 12:40:23 UTC 2010

Quoting Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>:

>
> 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.

The difference between something like OL and BL is that OL doesn't own  
the data it hosts, and therefore can only be silent on rights. (AFter  
all of the lawyerly gobbledy-gook, that's what the Archive's terms of  
use basically says.) This will be the case for anyone who harvests and  
combines data. It's a dilemma, but I don't know of a solution (beyond  
carrying rights data in every record, which of course then brings up  
the provenance-at-the-element-level problem). What this means is that  
when OL ingests the BL data, that data's rights are still defined by  
BL, not by OL, which has no right to declare rights over BL data. The  
same will be true when the BL data joins the linked data cloud -- it  
becomes open by a kind of default, but mainly because the cloud  
doesn't have a way to recognize rights. OL data is also in the cloud  
under that same status.

That said, OL does not accept metadata from anyone who wishes to  
assert any restrictions on use -- this is both a philosophical and a  
practical issue: OL has no way to convey nor enforce any kind of  
restriction, and Brewster is totally dedicated to openness.

kc

>
> 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
>

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet