[open-bibliography] Inviting community engagement on building a bibliographic roadmap

Tue Jan 15 17:23:04 UTC 2013

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> wrote:

> This NISO project is based on an effort of mine, with a vendor collaborator.
> We wrote an initial grant proposal. We weren't able to get a planning grant
> on our own so it morphed into a NISO grant. My original purpose was to make
> sure that a larger community of interest was involved in the future of
> bibliographic data since it is, by its nature, data that is used and shared
> widely, not just within the library community.

That's too bad.  I didn't realize that you were behind it or I
wouldn't have objected so vociferously.

I see a few problems with this effort:

- NISO is a professional standards secretariat, so they have an
incentive to make the case for new standards and/or organizations
which will hire them convene meetings, write reports, and generally do
overhead type stuff associated with the standards process.  If the
standard is created in an existing group like the W3C, they lose.
Many people will come to the table assuming that they are trying to
create a place for themselves in the ecosystem.

- They intend to collect requirements from a large group of
stakeholders, but they don't have anyone signed up to do anything with
those requirements.

- They claim to be coordinating groups who haven't expressed any
desire to be coordinated -- and, if the LC & W3C wanted to coordinate,
they'd be better of doing it directly themselves instead of through a
zero value-add intermediary

- They're going to spend 12-18 months and who knows how much money to
produce a *report* and nothing more.

Perhaps the documentation and PR doesn't do justice to what is
actually going to happen, but I'd be a lot more impressed if the LC,
DPLA, Google (both Books & Search), OpenLibrary, OCLC and an open
source ILS team or two got together and said we're going to sit down
and figure out how we work together.

Tom