[open-bibliography] Bibliographical data for the world's lesser known languages

Fri Mar 2 22:47:40 UTC 2012

Mark MacGillivray <mark at odaesa.com> wrote:

> Also our bibjson format is detailed
> at http://bibjson.org (you can add licence details to each record if
> you desire - http://bibjson.org/#license).

Mark, this is not what you indicated in previous discussion when you implied it 
was obvious that the license assertion was about the work being indexed by the
record, and not the record itself. For instances like this with records
licensed CC BY NC, and original works under some other license, 
the subject of the license assertion does not seem obvious from context. So I think 
we need a convention to indicate whether the license assertion in a BibJSON record is 
about the record itself, or about the work it refers to.

It appears that CC BY NC applied to individual biblio records has little force.
The license itself contains the waiver: 
"Public Domain — Where the work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license."
Users of a bibliographic record could readily argue that its elements were PD.
Still, CC BY NC has the value that an arguably NC operation like OKF can
index or reprocess the entire collection without little risk of copyright infringement.

I think we should be encouraging reprocessors of biblio records to indicate their
sources as a matter of best practice, even if not a legal obligation. Providing
an easy way to do this in BibJSON seems like a step toward this goal.
I'd like to hear from others about this provenance issue, and how best to include
provenance assertions as well as license assertions in BibJSON. Is there an available
 standard for such purposes which we can  adopt?

--Jim

----------------------------------------------
Jim Pitman
Professor of Statistics and Mathematics
University of California
367 Evans Hall # 3860
Berkeley, CA 94720-3860

ph: 510-642-9970  fax: 510-642-7892
e-mail: pitman at stat.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/users/pitman