Adrian’s post about the German National Library prompted me to note down a few other exciting developments over the last month or so. Christmas and the holiday season may be perceived as a time for winding down, but not for these people!
- The OCLC released Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) as Linked Data under an open licence. Their press release gives more information (please note, at present the full database is limited to API access, but OCLC will be making FAST available as a dump under the ODC-BY license in the near future).
- NISO is working on a standard for the coding of citations in ebooks, full details here.
- Our own Principles on Open Bibliographic Data have been translated into Hungarian (by Dudás Anikó) and Polish (by Karol Langner) so we hope this is the beginning of improved communication in both Hungary and Poland and with native speakers all over the world.
- OKFN has been working on various ways of improving the overall field of Open Data, including the Open Metadata Handbook which is designed to help make it easier to harvest and process bibliographic metadata from a variety of sources, for people with little or no technical background, explaining the metadata standards as used by different institutions.
- And of course, Peter Murray-Rust has been busy on his blog, exploring issues of US bill HR3699, how to present your list using BibSoup and generally promoting the world of open data.
- Finally – watch this space for an announcement about BibSoup, launching in beta later this week!
Many thanks to the terrific group of people who keep us updated with this information. If you would like to be among the first to hear about developments like these, get involved with the Open Bibliographic Working Group and let us know what you’re up to.
