[open-bibliography] Metadata aggregators, discovery tools and libraries

[Adrian Pohl]

Hello,

I'd like to point you to a very interesting discussion that took place
recently, see the post in the blog "Pegasus Librarian"[1] and Jonathan
Rochkind's comment on it as well as the accompanying discussion on
friendfeed[2].

It's all about how academic libraries should best serve their
customers and what they should do instead of letting themselves being
locked in by vendors with big deals like discovery platforms from
EBSCO, ProQuest, OCLC etc. Jonathan has a concrete proposal how to
harvest article metadata without relying on vendors.

Besides the fact that OCLC is trading OAIster metadata (i.e. metadata
fromOpen Acces publications) I found it especially interesting to hear
about Journal TOCs.[3] Jonathan Rochkind says about it:

"Many many publishers these days provide RSS feeds with metadata of
their recent publications. By consuming these feeds, and storing what
you get over time, JournalTOCs is building a giant database of article
metadata — that only goes back as far as when they started collecting
it. My impression is that JournalTOCs is looking for a way to monetize
this at a profit however, rather than provide it in a cooperative
cost-sharing basis."[4]

Similar approaches have already been discussed on this list. Have you
already heard about this service? Obviously nobody has objected yet
against what it does. Maybe we could approach them about opening up
the data... Interestingly, their API is licensed CC-BY.[5]

Adrian


[1] http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2011/01/heads-they-win-tales-we-lose-discovery-tools-will-never-deliver-on-their-promise.html

[2] http://friendfeed.com/lris/f9c18716/heads-they-win-tales-we-lose-discovery-tools

[3] http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/

[4] http://bibwild.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/more-on-aggregating-article-metadata/

[5] http://www.journaltocs.ac.uk/index.php?action=about