[openbiblio-dev] Bibliographic Metadata Guide is now on Wiki !

Tue Nov 8 15:14:43 UTC 2011

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 6:42 AM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:

>
> Due to the breadth of this (not just books, but films, artworks, etc)
> - what about renaming this to the Open Metadata Handbook? I think this
> is what we originally discussed. What do you think?
>

I think it would be useful to put some reasonable bounds on the scope.
 Doing a wonderful job on books seems like a fine first step to me, but if
you really want to expand it to all creative works (a HUGE and varied
domain), why not name it Creative Works Metadata Handbook or something
similar.  "Open Metadata" is basically unbounded in scope.  I hope that's
not intentional.

Two other comments:

- I don't see any distinctions made between descriptions of a work (i.e. a
catalog entry) and a reference to a work (e.g. citation, bibliography
entry, reading list item, etc).  Although they're arguably both just
references with different amounts of detail, to my mind they are different
things with different properties (in the degenerative case, in the linked
data world, the latter is just a link/pointer to the former).

- From a practical point of view, the mandatory vs optional designation
seems moot.  People have the metadata that they have.  You may be able to
get them to format it a certain way.  You may be able to recommend that
they make a best effort at reconciling their data and providing strong
identifiers.  It,however, seems pretty unlikely that they'll go off
populate some new field in their database just because it was marked
"mandatory."

>From an administrative point of view, is there someplace which describes
the protocol for commenting, editing, etc? The Discussion pages seem
unused.  In-line commenting without Etherpad style highlighting is going to
get pretty hard to follow unless something like the Wikipedia indenting
commenting style is used.

Tom
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