Posts Tagged ‘metadata’

Launch event for Discovery

Posted on June 8th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

Couple of weeks now since the launch of Discovery, and I’ve singularly failed to blog it up.

Discovery logo

Some notes, then, so it doesn’t go completely unremarked-on here.

Discovery (“a metadata ecology for UK education and research”) is a natural progression from the JISC/RLUK Resource Discovery Taskforce programme. Only with a catchier name.

And a nice logo.

The intention is that Discovery will build a UK-wide critical mass of open and reusable data—from libraries, archives and museum collections—through innovative discovery interfaces such as… I dunno… this one ;-)

The launch took place at the Wellcome Trust in London under the title ‘Discovery – building a UK metadata ecology‘. They’re announcing some useful, practical things, such as:

If I’m being honest – this maybe wasn’t the conference for me. It was a bit teaching-and-learning-theoretical/academic for my tastes. I got more out of the last RDTF event in Manchester where some practical library discovery problems were discussed in detail. (But that’s a problem with my unsubtle mind, not a problem with Discovery!)

Also, I have to say I wasn’t convinced by the ‘long tail’ competitive exercise in the afternoon of the launch event… is the real value (and the real convincing case for library discovery) genuinely to be found in providing easier access to more-and-more obscure collections, even if tied to a popular [populist?] ‘hook’ like the 2012 Olympics? Maybe. But I can’t help but feel that there’s still so much more work to be done in the mainstream of library discovery before we all get too special-collection-y. Quibbling aside – this is important stuff and it’s great to see momentum building. I’m wondering now where I can stick some of these. Discovery bumper sticker tiem?

Discovery banner

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Posted in #ukdiscovery, conferences, discovery, Jerome, Jerome blog, JISC, RLUK | (0) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

Opening Our Data

Posted on April 18th, 2011 by Nick Jackson

One of the main things we’re trying to do with Jerome is open up all of our Library data for you to do things with. By this we mean that we want to expose as much as possible of what we know using a properly open licence such as CC0. Unfortunately, we’re hitting a few snags with this. None are insurmountable but we’re having to tread carefully, particularly with issues of licensing.

The licensing of data is an interesting one, since we run into a whole bunch of questions around who actually owns the information in our catalogue. Since it’s all factual information (and you can’t copyright a fact) then surely it’s a free for all – except that EU law introduces a curve ball in the form of database right. Broadly speaking this provides specific protection for collections of records, but not the records themselves.

Jerome at this point begins to play merry hell with licensing since (as far as catalogue data) is concerned we never touch the database, we only ask for catalogue information on a specific record and then scrape it back into our own collection. Since we’re only dealing with facts about a work (and not the work itself, which clearly is copyrighted1) then theoretically we may (or may not) be in the clear to do what we want. Personally, I’m waiting for some definitive legal advice before going any further on this one.

So, assuming for a moment that all legal wrangling over licensing has been sorted out we still hit a problem of how we subsequently expose that data in a useful way. The beautiful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from, and we have a list of ways to expose data including MARC, XML, JSON, CSV, BibTeX, RIS, RDF, COinS and more. These are then subsequently mixed up even further using various standards for metadata, although we seem to have decided that Dublin Core is the way to go.

Fortunately since we’ve built our own data abstraction layer which (loosely) follows Dublin Core this is going to be slightly easier, but still ultimately a pain. We’re also making sure that we talk to other people engaged in open library data so that we can agree on at least a few basic things, ensuring data can be effortlessly collated from multiple sources.

We’ll have data with you as soon as possible, just let us work out the kinks of licensing and formatting first.

  1. Unless it’s public domain, in which case it isn’t [↩]

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Posted in Behind The Scenes, MARC, Planning, Resources | (3) Comments | Click here to add a comment »

Jerome, COinS and Zotero (all I really want is data in my pocket)

Posted on April 15th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

“Item pages sport COinS metadata“, we blithely announced earlier this week. In reality this is a great leap in the right direction for Jerome. It’s a perfect example of one of the ways we’re processing and [re-]presenting the bibliographic data that Jerome sucks in, making it machine readable via a really cool web interface, and enhancing the end-user experience as a result.

COinS, in case you’re suffering from Friday Afternoon Acronym Desensitivity Syndrome (FAADS), stands for “Context Objects in Spans“, don’tchaknow. It’s a way of embedding bibliographic metadata about a resource—often the data needed to meet the OpenURL standard—directly into the HTML tags of a web page about that same resource.

Give it a go with your favourite bibliographic reference management software. I used Zotero to grab the details of a random book record in Jerome:

Screenshot of a Jerome book record page; bibliographic details being captured by Zotero

And compared it to how Zotero handles the same book record presented in the University of Lincoln’s native library catalogue (SirsiDynix HiP). See the table below. HiP actually works very well with Zotero (I don’t think it uses COinS, though), capturing 14 of 17 potentially useful data fields. Jerome is less impressive (alpha release, remember!) at the moment, capturing 8 of the same 17. But it’s a bloody good start, contains all of the essential referenceable fields, and you’ll be able to watch the score even out as Jerome’s record enrichment kicks in, and as we tweak the site.

Jerome Horizon Information Portal
Item Type ✓ ✓
Title ✓ ✓
Abstract ✗ ✗
Subtitle ✗ ✓
Author ✓ ✓
Edition ✓ ✓
Place [of publication] ✓ ✓
Publisher ✓ ✓
Date ✓ ✓
# of Pages ✗ ✓
Language ✗ ✗
ISBN ✓ ✓
Library Catalog [sic.] ✗ ✓
Call Number ✗ ✓
Rights ✗ ✗
Tags ✗ ✓
Original Record ✗ ✓
Score 8/17 14/17

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Linking arms across the Fens (Jerome+COMET)

Posted on March 28th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

Screenshot of the COMET blogWe’re staying in very close touch with COMET (Cambridge Open METadata), a fellow project being funded by JISC under the same Infrastructure for Resource Discovery strand as Jerome.

I met up with Ed Chamberlain (the Systems Development Librarian at Cambridge University Library) last week, to discuss how Jerome and COMET can share ideas, resources, and workload – basically, to try and get better value from both projects; to give JISC more squid for their quid; to demonstrate collaboration/sharing/networking and all those sorts of things; and finally, just to keep things really interesting.

It all boils down to two happy coincidences…

  1. COMET is releasing loads of data (~2.2 million MARC records). Jerome loves data!
  2. Lincoln is making cool APIs. Cambridge love APIs!

Ed and I have talked already how Jerome can re-use some of the work that COMET are already doing to identify ownership (and potential IPR conflicts) in MARC records. We’re also looking to Cambridge for leadership in producing Linked Data representations. In return, we’ll attempt to apply Jerome methodologies (NoSQL architecture, “radical personalisation”, machine learning) to Cambridge’s enormous dataset, and see what results.

Toward the end of both of our projects, we’re thinking about an internal, one-day mashup event, where Jerome and COMET developers can get together (probably in Cambridge), and see what interesting things can be squeezed out of both ways of working.

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