[open-bibliography] Library support and REST

[Paul Walk]

On 26 Oct 2010, at 13:05, E.M. Chamberlain wrote:

> It would be great to see an OKFN presence at one of the UK Mashed Libraries events:
> 
> http://www.mashedlibrary.com/
> 
> You will reach a very different type of Librarian there, and also have fun.

UKOLN (my organisation) is organising the next Mashed Library event which happens to be this week (Oct 29th)

http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/mashspa/2010/08/17/theevent/

I'm not sure I understand the reference to "a very different type of Librarian" but there certainly will be some excellent librarian folk, mixing with developers who are interested in developing with library services and data. I recommend these events highly - there are a couple of places left for Friday although the signup sheet seems to have been taken down - if anyone else wants to come just email Julian Cheal at UKOLN (j.cheal at ukoln.ac.uk).

> 5) Sadly, Librarians may not be the best people to even do this, or at least the more technical aspects. As a whole, the professions' skill-set has not generally kept apace with the networked environment. I've written more on it here (http://communities.cilip.org.uk/forums/t/11967.aspx). Selling even the idea of Linked Data is frankly a challenge. To perform the potential roles we could in supporting research, a different type of individual may be required.

I plan to blog about this in more detail shortly, but I thought I's mention that I have just got back from a week away devoted to discussions about metadata at DCMI's annual conference and a meeting of the W3C incubator group on library linked data.

The DCMI conference was somewhat different than some previous conferences in that a significant proportion of delegates were both new to this 'community' and were 'practitioners'. They had come to the conference, drawn by the promise of a chance to learn, especially, about the application of LD to metadata.

I spent a whole day before the DCMI conference sitting in on four excellent tutorials, aimed at information professionals who wanted to get a handle on linked-data. In all four tutorials I noticed a tendency to (reasonably enough in this case) skip over the 'why' of linked data, and to jump to the 'how'. The 'why', whenever it was discussed, was generally of the usual 'just look at how brilliant this could be if everyone did it' variety. This is the sort of approach which nearly landed TBL et. al. huge investment from the previous government - but it can often lack persuasion for individual practitioners. Frankly, there is much in the rhetoric of linked data which leaves me unpersuaded, but I'm happily in a position where I have a remit to takes chances on things. This latter point is really important. I'm afraid that I just don't buy into any of the attempts to characterise librarians as being different to people in other professions. Librarians are professionals and I'm glad that they generally act professionally. Those of us who are not professional librarians have more freedom to take chances on promising technologies and approaches. Another way of putting it might be to say that the fact that academics/researchers appear to be able to think and act more freely than librarians is a feature of our society, not a bug.

Paul

> 
> 
> Meanwhile, to bring it home, here is another freedom we are loosing:
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/26/libraries-ebook-restrictions
> 
> So no real answers. 
> Best
> 
> --
> Edmund Chamberlain
> Systems Development Librarian / Arcadia Fellow Michaelmas 2010
> Electronic Services and Systems
> Cambridge University Library
> West Road,
> Cambridge
> CB3 9DR
> 
> tel: (+44) 01223 747437
> fax: (+44) 01223 333160
> 
> email: emc59 at cam.ac.uk
> 
> Try LibrarySearch at http://search.lib.cam.ac.uk - a new way to discover
> Cambridge Library Collections
> 
> 
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--------------------------------------------
Paul Walk
Deputy Director
UKOLN (University of Bath)
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
p.walk at ukoln.ac.uk
+44(0)1225383933
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