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

Wed Jan 16 16:30:40 UTC 2013

No, I'm talking about their "new bibliographic framework" initiative -- 
they are working on a "replacement for MARC". MARC was a 
library-specific format initially to be used to print cards, and wasn't 
intended to interact with non-library data. The new format is being done 
with at least some consciousness that we are in an environment where we 
might need to share data with other communities. Unfortunately, there 
seems to be no investigation of what those other communities have, want, 
or need. Bibliographic data is some of the most widely used data so it 
just makes sense that we'd want it to flow nicely between use cases.

I actually think that we do have a "business case" for free bib data, if 
not more than one. Publishers definitely do, since the data that they 
provide for free advertises their product. Libraries do because they 
share bib data, thus saving themselves a great deal of repetitive 
effort. An in essence, everyone who provides citations or a bibliography 
with their work is giving the world free bib data. We just haven't yet 
done a good job of capturing all of this data together in a useful way.

kc

On 1/15/13 5:18 PM, Thomas Krichel wrote:
>    Karen Coyle writes
>
>> Mainly that LC has already chosen a direction that does not have
>> input from a larger community.
>
>    You mean RDA?  I am hard pressed to image what the committee would do
>    to move the direction of that giant slow ship.
>
>    More generally, there has always been the question of a business
>    case for the expense of creating and maintaining free bibliographic
>    data. Not surprisingly, as far as scholarly data is concerned,
>    I find that RePEc gives us the best successful example for a model.
>    ADS, DBLP, PubMed, SPIRES are other. Within the realm of this
>    type of efforts there would be scope to coordinate. But if you
>    bring in monographs, fiction books, ebooks, sound recordings etc
>    the scope becomes really wide and the business model unclear.
>
>
>    Cheers,
>
>    Thomas Krichel                    http://openlib.org/home/krichel
>                                        http://authorprofile.org/pkr1
>                                                 skype: thomaskrichel
>

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