Wednesday 18th January – Open Biblio Sprint: Day 2

BibServer took precedence this morning, with Etienne, Ed and Mark continuing to develop the BibServer parsers… By March we want people to be able to download and run their own instance of the Server, or to provide a service whereby we can do it for them. We discussed various use cases that could be used to explain how BibServer is valuable in data collection – for example: a departmental administrator / researcher is required to provide a list of publications of those within his / her department using Symplectic / Web of Science / Endnote, and is to upload this information to the department’s website. BibSoup is ideal for this scenario as it allows different formats to be entered or produced, and the resulting collection can be easily searched and embedded in other web pages.

In the time we had been exploring the benefits of the BibServer, some e-mails had come through to the List with examples of collections. Starting with these, we identified a total of six people / groups who would drive open resources (BibSoup / BibServer) and whose data could be used as demonstrations (interpreted as Reading or Publication List format):

• Malaria – Tom Olijhoek (Medline)
• Sancoma – Gilles (Medline)
• Karol Langner – personal libraries of people
• UCC-PMR
• Physics.cam.ac
• Jim Pitman

It was agreed that these would be parsed through BibServer and used as examples of the functionality and importance of BibServer. Some, such as Jim’s probability web, may also benefit from dedicated BibServer instances.

Peter and I then interviewed members of the team, to record what was going on and talk about the project in general; this became short video blogs which will be available shortly.