Comments on: Discovery silos vs. the open web

By: Discovery vendors and pre-indexed data – what can be done? | Eds' blog (now better encoded)

Tue, 08 Oct 2013 13:28:16 +0000

[…] a shame about this whole data sharing mess. Adrian Phol over on the OKFN Open Biblio blog has left a concise summary of the tricky situation, and a suggestion that getting open data out there the right way to go. In principle, I think he […]

By: Lukas Koster

Lukas Koster — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 21:08:23 +0000

One comment from the IGeLU point of view. IGeLU represents a specific group of users of bibliographic metadata, the customers of Ex Libris, the provider of the Primo Central global metadata index and the Primo Discovery Tool. In this respect their first objective is to protect the position of the institutions that pay both for the content provided by commercial publishers and other content providers on the one hand, and for discovery systems provided by commercial Discovery Service Providers on the other hand. This is why they focus on these parties. In these specific circumstances these customers do not per se benefit from Open Metadata, because they already pay for the closed metadata. Their problem right now is that some commercial content providers deny them the right to access that metadata by any means they choose. This is not to say that IGeLU and the institutions they represent are opposed to Open Data at all. On the contrary. But these are two different paths and battles.

By: Jörg Prante (@xbib)

Jörg Prante (@xbib) — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 20:10:41 +0000

Yes, for a long time, it's disappointing to buy metadata from metadata farms, only to find out how different the metadata is from the holdings in library catalogs and how hard the gaps can be filled.

The answer is that libraries must be enabled to merge their catalogs with article reference databases without restriction.

By: Adrian Pohl

Adrian Pohl — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 12:38:04 +0000

FraEnrico wrote:

"Publisher hold a great power by owning their metadata, and they will never let them available in the open. Open bibliographic data provided by libraries will never be enough, because the main contents (i.e. articles) lie in someone else’s (greedy) hands."

Exactly. That is why I argue that libraries should make it mandatory for content providers to deliver rich metadata along with the licensed content. If libraries demanded this rigorously and didn't sign contracts missing such a clause, article-level metadata would finally become openly available and re-usable.

By: FraEnrico

FraEnrico — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 11:41:10 +0000

Excellent overview of the problem, thanks for this. But It seems to me that the problem is always the same: the availability of publisher's metadata. Publisher hold a great power by owning their metadata, and they will never let them available in the open. Open bibliographic data provided by libraries will never be enough, because the main contents (i.e. articles) lie in someone else's (greedy) hands.