Earlier this month OCLC announced their recommendation that member institutions use the Open Data Commons Attribution (ODC-BY) License when releasing WorldCat-derived library catalogue data. You can read David Kay’s response to that announcement here on the Discovery blog. And last week there was news that OCLC and Europeana are collaborating on a project developing ‘semantic similarity’ that will improve the experience of searching aggregated metadata by identifying items that are near duplicates or related to each other. The wider significance of this project is that it will feed into the Europeana Data Model and will provide “opportunities to develop new data services for third parties.”
It’s long been asserted that content is king, and more recently that context is queen but now Associated Press are investing in marrying the two in order to speed up the distribution of content. Clearly the Associated Press business model is based on syndication rather than aggregation but Melody K. Smith’s assertion that “[f]indability only works when a proper taxonomy is in place.” seems worth some thought with regard to its relevance for our sectors.
TechCrunch’s article pitching Mendeley’s open API against Elsevier’s closed API is flawed but it’s worth reading for the comments it provoked, particularly from Elsevier’s Director of Platform Integration, Ale De Vries. You can read more about the growth of Mendeley’s API service on the Guardian Technology blog – it’s interesting to note that their future plans involve developing their API service into a multi-directional dataflow that will allow applications built on their API to talk to each other and to upload data to Mendeley.
Seb Chan’s candid blogpost reflecting on the Cooper-Hewitt Design Center’s experience of openly releasing their collection metadata is a useful and timely reminder that a) issues around the quality of released metadata need to be addressed if we want anyone to use the data we’re releasing and b) “collection metadata [has value as a tool for discovery] but it is not the collection itself.” Seb’s point about museum collections being no match for the comprehensiveness of libraries and archives highlights the importance of open metadata, by enabling cross-institutional aggregation, and the work of OCLC and Europeana’s ‘semantic similarity’ project I mentioned above. In an ideal world it will also enable the public permeability that Seb touches on by connecting our collections with the boundless ‘amateur web’ corpus.
News from Discovery projects
- there’s a useful discussion on the Will’s World project blog of the challenges faced when attempting to consume linked data via SPARQL endpoints which highlights the importance of asking the right questions and the provision of high quality contextual data to support SPARQL queries.
- the Music Collections at Cardiff University project has found that a recently procured CD-ROM is providing invaluable help in identifying and cataloguing items from their physical collection.
- The DiscoverEdina project have reported on the completion of one strand of their project, namely the Tagger geotag metadata exposure and enrichment service and associated API [pdf].