Date: January, 4th 2011, 16:00-17:15 GMT

Channel: Meeting was held via Skype and Google Docs

Participants

• Adrian Pohl
• Karen Coyle
• Rufus Pollock
• Peter Murray-Rust
• Jim Pitman
• Alexander Dutton

Summary

Discussing the draft Principles on Open Bibliographic Data

For background information see the google doc and the discussion thread on the mailing list

• We did a significant rewriting of the ‘Definition of bibliographic data’ section in order to remove the reference to intellectual property rights on different parts of bibliographic data and deleted point 5 in the recommendations for the same reason.
• A question to be resolved is: Do we need in the 4th principle (“…it is STRONGLY recommended that bibliographic data or collections of bibliographic data, especially where publicly funded, be explicitly placed in the public domain…”) a ‘STRONGLY’ recommend for public domain or should we drop the ‘Strongly’ and simply recommend? The underlying question is whether attribution is rather a problem or a benefit in the future bibliographic data environment.
• At the moment we have gathered the following list of contributors: Karen Coyle, Jim Pitman, Adrian Pohl, Rufus Pollock, Peter Murray-Rust Who else wants to be listed as contributor?
  • ACTION: Discuss if we find areas where attribution would be a problem or would be a benefit?
  • ACTION: Ask on list who also wishes to be contributor.

Updates on Open Bibliography work & projects

• Adrian has written in October 2010 a provisional summary of Open Bibliographic Data activities in 2010. He’ll try to complete it and translate it to English for a post on the OKFN blog.
• Jim knows a person he possibly could get to do the co-cordinating work together with Adrian.
• Karen said that the W3C Incubator Group on Linked Library Data is working on a report to be published in the next months.
• Furthermore we talked about the meetings several of the group members attend and that it would be great to spread the word about the Openbiblio principles there. E.g. Karen is attending the ALA midwinter meeting (January 7-9) where she will be talking about linked library data. Rufus Pollock is going to the annual UKSG conference.
• We agreed that it would be great if group members who attend a meeting anywhere ping the Openbiblio list about it (before and/or after) and use the gathering to promote the Openbiblio principles.
  • ACTION: Rufus writes/sends a description of coordinator duties.
  • ACTION: Jim puts a person he has for coordinator work in touch with Adrian and Rufus.
  • ACTION: Please ping the list if you are going to a meeting.

Privacy and user data

Some people have recently raised the issue concerning Open Data in the context of user data. E.g. Tim Spalding wrote on the Openbiblio list:

Basically, many institutions and sites are gathering user data relative to books—tags, reviews, lists, etc. How can that data be shared?

Let’s say, for example, that two libraries were collecting tags or reviews and wanted to share that data in an open way. How would they do it? What should the balance be between openness, privacy, and keeping users in control of their data? Is there an open license that
requires you to refresh data, so a user can release their review but expect to be able to update it? Should institutions sharing tags include primary keys relative to users, or just submit total tag counts, etc.?

Rufus posed the question whether this should be an area we think about and produce some guidance on. Everybody had a strong feeling that this is interesting. However, we agreed that it presents very significant complications and challenges. Therefore we should, at least at the present, spend our energy on the main issue of opening up core bibliographic data. Karen said that these questions refer to so much stuff (reviews, user stats, tagging etc.) that is hard to do good work on it. Adrian said we should watch the issue and address this when it comes up more and more.

Launch of Open Scholarship (17th Jan)

On January 17th there will be the “Visions of a Semantic (Molecular) Future” symposium organized by Peter. Lots of interesting and influential people will be there and Peter will speak on Open Citation, Open Bibliography, Open Scholarship. He would like to present the Open Bibliographic Data Principles in an agreed (late draft version) there. He asked whether an agreed set of principles by the 11th of January is possible and the participants made clear that they would like to contribute to this goal.

• ACTION: Provide an agreed Principles document (maybe still a late draft version) until January 11th.

Action collection

We agreed on the following actions:

• Adrian posts a write-up of the meeting on http://openbiblio.net and notifies the mailing list.
• We provide an agreed Principles document (maybe still a late draft version) until January 11th.
• Adrian bugs the people about finishing the principles and asks on list who wishes to be listed as a contributor.
• We discuss on list if we find areas where attribution licenses would be a problem or a benefit?
• Rufus writes/sends a description of coordinator duties.
• Jim puts his coordinator person in touch with Adrian and Rufus.
• Everybody pings the list if you are going to an openbiblio-related meeting.