[open-bibliography] Openbiblio in Peter Suber's Open Access 2010

Thu Jan 6 08:12:33 UTC 2011

Hello,

for all of you who haven't seen it yet. Peter Suber refers to Open
Bibliographic Data activities in his Open Access summary of 2010. He
even labels it "one of the most active fronts for open data in 2010":

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-11.htm#2010

Quoting the full paragraph on openbiblio:

"After drug trial data and climate data, one of the most active fronts
for open data in 2010 was the domain of library catalog records and
bibliographic data.  OCLC invited public comments on its new draft
policy on the use of WorldCat records, which would open the data more
than in the past but stop short of putting them into the public
domain.  Library Thing launched OverCat, an OA index of bibliographic
data with some usage restrictions, second in size only to WorldCat.
Meantime, libraries around the world began lifting restrictions and
putting their bibliographic data into the public domain, usually under
CC0.  The movement seems to have started in Germany, with six
libraries in Cologne plus the Hochschulbibliothekszentrum des Landes
Nordrhein-Westfalen, and followed soon after by the University of
Konstanz, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, and the
University of Tübingen.  Outside Germany, similar steps were taken by
Cambridge University and CERN.  Late in the year, the British Library
made three million bibliographic records, or about 20% of its
catalogue, OA under CC0 and announced plans to release more, after
which the JISC Open Bibliography immediately released tools and
services to make the British Library data more useful.  JISC asked
EDINA to investigate whether OpenURL router data can (my guess:
legally can, not technically can) be opened up for reuse.

JISC released a toolkit to help librarians share their catalog
records, and followed it up with an Open Bibliographic Data Guide for
institutions providing OA to library catalogue records.  The Open
Knowledge Foundation launched a Working Group on Open Bibliographic
Data, which soon released a draft version of Principles on Open
Bibliographic Data for public comment.  OKF also released a preview of
Bibliographica, its new open-source tool to gather and share
semantically rich bibliographic information."

Adrian