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

Tue Jan 15 18:41:37 UTC 2013

On 1/15/13 9:23 AM, Tom Morris wrote:
> 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.

Don't worry - I have some of the same issues that you have of it being a 
NISO project. We tried to get Dublin Core or W3C to host it for many of 
the reasons that you state, but they didn't feel that they could. I'm 
already frustrated...

>
> 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.

Xactly. I'm hoping that no actual standards come out of this, but 
perhaps some use cases, and maybe some folks will agree to work together 
on their own.

>
> - 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.

I don't think you can sign anyone up until you see what the requirements 
will be. But, yes, there is a chance that this will be another "bridge 
to nowhere."

>
> - 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

As I said above, W3C opted out of that. I don't know why.

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

Yep, the usual result of a planning grant. What can I say?

>
> 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.

That was the dream. *sigh* But someone had to get the planning grant 
that would pay for the meeting, and granting agencies have strict 
requirements about who they will give money to. It really took over 12 
months to get this far.

I approached a lot of folks, everyone thought it was a good idea and 
that someone else should organize it. If I could have gotten a grant on 
my own I would have done things quite differently. It's a harsh world. :-(

kc

>
> Tom
>

-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet