• When: Tuesday 17
• Where: Cambridge, UK (and online)

More details to follow.

Yesterday, I was up in Harrogate at the UKSG (UK Serials Group) annual conference to speak in a keynote session on Open Bibiliograpy and Open Bibliographic Data.

I’ve posted the slides online and iframed below.

Outline

Over the past few years, there has an explosive growth in open data
with significant uptake in government, research and elsewhere.

Bibliographic records are a key part of our shared cultural heritage.
They too should therefore be open, that is made available to the
public for access and re-use under an open license which permits use
and reuse without restriction (). Doing this
promises a variety of benefits.

First, it would allow libraries and other managers of bibliographic
data to share records more efficiently and improve quality more
rapidly through better, easier feedback. Second, through increased
innovation in bibliographic services and applications generating
benefits for the producers and users of bibliographic data and the
wider community.

This talk will cover the what, why and how of open bibliographica
data, drawing on direct recent experience such as the development of
the Open Biblio Principles and the work of the Bibliographica and JISC
OpenBib projects to make the 3 million records of the British
Library’s British National Bibliography (BNB) into linked open data.

With a growing number of Government agencies and public institutions
making data open, is it now time for the publishing and library
community to do likewise?

Bibliographica is designed to make it easier for scholars and researchers to share and collect information about work in their field. It provides an open source software platform to create and share semantically rich information about publications, authors and their works.

As readers of the Open Knowledge Foundation blog will know we have a long-standing interest in open bibliographic data – from our efforts starting in 2005 to build a database of public domain works, our coordination of the response to the Library of Congress’ Future of Bibliographic Control (2007) and the recent creation of a new working group on open bibliographic data in March this year.

Bibliographica itself, is a long-held dream of Jonathan Gray, OKF’s Community Coordinator – a commons of open data surrounding scholarly communications. Thanks to collaboration and support from IDEA Lab at the University of Edinburgh, the dream is a bit closer to reality.

The primary “technical” features of Bibliographica are:

• Rich (FRBR-based) domain model
• Semantic web and linked open data to the core providing for very flexible metadata and easy integration of external material
• Wiki-like revisioning of all changes enabling easier and freer collaboration
• Software and a Service
• Designed to be installed and run by others
• Distributed — can run different nodes with pull (and push) of data between them

But what needs of users does Bibliographica aim to satisfy?

Easy collaboration by scholars and librariains in creating bibliographies and enhancing catalogues

Often the people who know most about what is published in a given field are the researchers who are active in that field. Bibliographica will enable scholars to directly collaborate on annotated bibliographic indexes for their subject area. A revisioned (wiki-like) approach to adding metadata allows for more open collaboration, and a semantic web base means support for rich metadata with a good standard structure.

We think that letting researchers directly add or edit details about publications in their field — which they can then export, publish, or do whatever they like with — is a good way to keep this information accurate and up to date.

Easy creation of publication lists for different uses

Bibliographica will provide either directly, or via integration with existing tools, an easy way to create and annotate lists of publications. Create a reading list for an undergraduate course, a bibliography for a book or article that you are writing, or a detailed list of works about a given person.

Open software and service so anyone can run their own copy

Bibliographica will be a fully open service. All the code will be open source and by default all the data will be openly licensed. Just as projects like WordPress allow anyone to set up their own copy (rather than depending on a centralised and possibly proprietary third-party service), so institutions and groups of researchers will be able to set up and run their own instance of Bibliographica, which they can customise and extend.

More sophisticated data models and searches

We plan to harness the specialised knowledge of researchers in particular domains to richly annotate information in the database so that one can provide (good) answers to questions like: “What was published on Nietschze in English between 1950 and 1975?”

Linked Data vocabularies allow wide range of statements to be made about a work or author. We’re starting with the Dublin Core and SKOS vocabularies, and defining some of our own for expressing the types of things that can be said about works or authors.

Once a substantial amount of such information has been collected it will become possible to use inferencing techniques to provide answers to more subtle and interesting questions than would be answerable by the usual bibliographic metadata alone.

Get involved

We’ll be writing more in the coming weeks about the roadmap for the Bibliographica service and some of the specifics around the use of Linked Data to describe scholarly communications.

It would be great to hear from those of you who’d like to get involved – helping to refine the data models, suggest vocabularies we should be re-using, contributing research resources to the version at bibliographica.org or testing out your own instance of the Bibliographica software.

Please get in touch, or join us on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s open-bibliography mailing list.

Resources

• Main page: http://bibliographica.org/
• SPARQL endpoint: http://bibliographica.org/sparql
• Full Text Search: http://bibliographica.org/search
• Get Involved: http://bibliographica.org/get-involved

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Over the past few months the Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam and Nederland Kennisland have been collaborating on the preparation of a set of six Public Domain Helper Tools as part of the EuropeanConnect project. The Tools are intended to assist Europeana data providers in the determination of whether or not a certain work or other subject matter vested with copyright or neighbouring rights (related rights) has fallen into the public domain and can therefore be freely copied or re-used, through functioning as a simple interface between the user and the often complex set of national rules governing the term of protection. The issue is of significance for Europeana, as contributing organisations will be expected to clearly mark the material in their collection as being in the public domain, through the attachment of a Europeana Public Domain Licence, whenever possible.

The Tools are based on six National Flowcharts (Decisions Trees) built by IViR on the basis of research into the duration of the protection of subject matter in which copyright or neighbouring rights subsist in six European jurisdictions (the Czech Republic, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom). By means of a series of simple yes-or-no questions, the Flowcharts are intended to guide the user through all important issues relevant to the determination of the public domain status of a given item.

Researching Copyright Law

The first step in the construction of the flowcharts was the careful study of EU Term Directive. The Directive attempts the harmonisation of rules on the term of protection of copyright and neighbouring rights across the board of EU Member States. The rules of the Directive were integrated by IViR into a set of Generic Skeleton European Flowcharts. Given the essential role that the Term Directive has played in shaping national laws on the duration of protection, these generic charts functioned as the prototype for the six National Flowcharts. An initial version of the Generic European Flowchart, as well as the National Flowcharts for the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, was put together with the help of the Open Knowledge Foundation at a Communia workshop in November 2009.

Further information necessary for the refinement of these charts as well as the assembly of the remaining four National Flowcharts was collected either through the collaboration of National Legal Experts contacted by IViR (Czech Republic, Italy and Spain) or independently through IViR’s in-house expertise (EU, France, the Netherlands and the UK).

Both the Generic European Flowcharts and the National Flowcharts have been split into two categories: one dedicated to the rules governing the duration of copyright and the sui generis database right and one dedicated to the rules governing neighbouring rights. Although this division was made for the sake of usability and in accordance with the different subject matter of these categories of rights (works of copyright and unoriginal databases on the one hand and performances, phonograms, films and broadcasts on the other), the two types of flowcharts are intended to be viewed as connected and should be applied jointly if a comprehensive conclusion as to the public domain status of an examined item is to be reached (in fact the final conclusion in each directs the user to the application of the other). This is due to the fact that, although the protected subject matter of these two categories of rights differs, they may not be entirely unrelated. For example, it does not suffice to examine whether the rights of the author of a musical work have expired; it may also be necessary to investigate whether the rights of the performer of the work or of the producer of the phonogram onto which the work has been fixated have also expired, in order to reach an accurate conclusion as to whether or not a certain item in a collection may be copied or re-used.

Legal Complexities

A variety of legal complexities surfaced during the research into the topic. Condensing the complex rules that govern the term of protection in the examined jurisdictions into a user-friendly tool presented a substantial challenge. One of the most perplexing issues was that of the first question to be asked. Rather than engage in complicated descriptions of the scope of the subject matter protected by copyright and related rights, IViR decided to avoid this can of worms. Instead, the flowchart’s starting point is provided by the question “is the work an unoriginal database?” However, this solution seems unsatisfactory and further thought is being put into an alternative approach.

Other difficult legal issues stumbled upon include the following:

• Term of protection vis-à-vis third countries
• Term of protection of works of joint authorship and collective works
• The term of protection (or lack thereof) for moral rights
• Application of new terms and transitional provisions
• Copyright protection of critical and scientific publications and of non-original photographs
• Copyright protection of official acts of public authorities and other works of public origins (e.g. legislative texts, political speeches, works of traditional folklore)
• Copyright protection of translations, adaptations and typographical arrangements
• Copyright protection of computer-generated works

On the national level, areas of uncertainty related to such matters as the British provisions on the protection of films (no distinction is made under British law between the audiovisual or cinematographic work and its first fixation, contrary to the system applied on the EU level) or exceptional extensions to the term of protection, such as that granted in France due to World Wars I and II or in the UK to J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan”.

Web based Public Domain Calculators

Once the Flowcharts had been prepared they were translated into code by IViR’s colleagues at Kennisland, thus resulting in the creation of the current set of six web-based Public Domain Helper Tools.

Technically the flowcharts needed to be translated into formats that computers can read. In this project Kennisland choose for an Extensible Markup Language (XML) approach for describing the questions in the flowcharts and the relations between them. The resulting XML documents are both human and computer readable. Using XML documents also allowed Kennisland to keep the decision structure separate from the actual programming language, which makes maintenance of both content and code easier.

Kennisland then needed to build an XML reader that could translate the structures and questions of these XML files into a questionnaire or apply some set of data to the available questions, so as to make the automatic calculation of large datasets possible. For the EuropeanaConnect project Kennisland developed two of these XML readers. The first translates these XML schemes into a graphical user interface tool (this can be found at EuropeanaLabs) and the second can potentially automatically determine the status of a work which resides at the Public Domain Works project mercurial depository on KnowledgeForge. Both of these applications are open source and we encourage people to download, modify and work on these tools.

It should be noted that, as part of Kennisland’s collaboration with the Open Knowledge Foundation, Kennisland is currently assisting in the development of an XML base scheme for automatic determination of the rights status of a work using bibliographic information. Unfortunately however this information alone is usually not enough for the automatic identification on a European level. This is due to the many international treaties that have accumulated over the years; rules for example change depending on whether an author is born in a country party to the Berne convention, an EU Member State or a third country.

It should of course also be noted that there is a limit to the extent to which an electronic tool can replace a case-by-case assessment of the public domain status of a copyrighted work or other protected subject matter in complicated legal situations. The Tools are accordingly accompanied by a disclaimer indicating that they cannot offer an absolute guarantee of legal certainty.

Further fine-tuning is necessary before the Helper Tools are ready to be deployed. For the moment test versions of the electronic Tools can be found here. We invite readers to try these beta tools and give us feedback on the pd-discuss list!

Note from the authors: If the whole construction process for the Flowcharts has highlighted one thing that would be the bewildering complexity of the current rules governing the term of protection for copyright and related rights. Despite the Term Directive’s attempts at creating a level playing field, national legislative idiosyncrasies are still going strong in the post-harmonisation era – a single European term of protection remains very much a chimera. The relevant rules are hardly simple on the level of the individual Member States either. In particular in countries such as the UK and France, the term of protection currently operates under confusing entanglements of rules and exceptions that make the confident calculation of the term of protection almost impossible for a copyright layperson and difficult even for experts.

Generic copyright flowchart by Christina Angelopoulos. PDF version available from Public Domain Calculators wiki page

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I’ve recently gotten involved with two Open Knowledge Foundation working groups, one on open bibliographic data and one on identifying public domain materials. Folks who follow my Everybody’s Libraries blog have seen me write about the importance of the public domain and open bibliographic records to the future of library services. But it’s also worth noting how the two issues complement each other.

If you want to identify the set of works that are in the public domain in your jurisdiction, for instance, you’ll need to do a lot of bibliographic research. As I describe in a 2007 paper on copyright and provenance, to determine the copyright status of a work you may need to know details about the time and place of first publication, the authors and their lifespans, the copyright notices and registrations associated with a work, and the relationship of the work to other works. Much of this data is included in bibliographic records, or can be more easily located when you have these bibliographic records in hand. And as I’ve described in detail at an ALA presentation, the more open bibliographic data is available, the easier it is for lots of different people (and programs) to analyze it. So promoting open bibliographic data also promotes knowledge of the public domain.

Going the other way, information about the public domain also helps build open bibliographic data. Over the past several years, I’ve been compiling information on copyright registrations and renewals, which in the US are very important for determining public domain status. (As has been noted previously, many books, periodicals, and images from the mid-20th century did not renew their copyrights as required and are now in the public domain in the US.) The catalog of copyright registrations is a US government work, not subject to copyright restrictions. And the catalog itself is a rich source of bibliographic data, with information on book titles, authors, and even publication details. Moreover, this data includes descriptions and identifiers not for specific editions, but for the higher-level FRBR concept of expressions, which can encompass many editions. This higher-level data is increasingly important in the newer, comprehensive catalogs that many groups (ranging from OCLC to the Open Library Project) are now developing. And there’s still more that can be done to get this copyright registration data online, or into forms that can be easily searched and analyzed.

In short, open bibliographic information and copyright information reinforce each other. By joining the Open Knowledge Foundation working groups on these topics, I hope to promote the synergies between them, and between people and groups working on liberating this information. If you’re interested in any of these issues, I hope you get involved as well. More information can be found on the OKFN website.

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You can find the list of 563 authors on our Public Domain Works project, which is a simple registry of artistic works that are in the public domain:

• http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2010

The list can be sorted by author surname, birth date, death date and number of works by clicking on the relevant headings. Notable authors include the poets William Butler Yeats and Osip Mandelstam, as well as the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud.

There were celebrations in Poland and Switzerland. Communia, the EU policy network for the digital public domain launched a new website at:

• http://www.publicdomainday.org/

The Telegraph celebrated Public Domain Day with an editorial from Shane Richmond, Head of Technology:

Happy Public Domain Day everyone! Today is the day that copyright expires on a whole range of works. As we reported this morning, from today works by Sigmund Freud, WB Yeats, Ford Madx Ford and illustrator Arthur Rackham are today part of the public domain. They can be made cheaply available as educational editions, translated into braille or made into audiobooks, all without anyone needing to give permission or any fees changing hands. They are also available to be reinterpreted and re-used by new artists.

The Telegraph also reported an announcement from Wikimedia UK inviting people to upload sources to Wikimedia Commons:

Wikimedia UK anticipates January 1, “Public Domain Day”, 2010 being a great year for additions to the digital Wikimedia Commons. The poetry of W. B. Yeats, the works of Sigmund Freud, and Arthur Rackham’s classic children’s book illustrations all enter the public domain. When the complexities of copyright no longer encumber reuse of old works, a work that has been a “sleeper” can become a new classic. Perhaps the definitive example of this is “It’s a Wonderful Life“, the 1946 Frank Capra film that became a Christmas classic in the 1980s.

Wikimedia UK promotes the uploading of copyright-free text to Wikisource, a sister site to Wikipedia, so that it can be widely enjoyed. Audio recordings of public domain works may be added to the Wikimedia Commons site, and Wikimedia UK invites you to join us and help digitise and preserve our common cultural heritage. You can make it available for everyone to share, build on, and simply enjoy.

On a less happy note, copyright scholar James Boyle at the Center for the Study of the Public Domain writes:

What is entering the public domain in the United States? Sadly, we will have nothing to celebrate this January 1st. Not a single published work is entering the public domain this year. Or next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that. In fact, in the United States, no publication will enter the public domain until 2019. And wherever in the world you live, you now have to wait a very long time for anything to reach the public domain. When the first copyright law was written in the United States, copyright lasted 14 years, renewable for another 14 years if the author wished. Jefferson or Madison could look at the books written by their contemporaries and confidently expect them to be in the public domain within a decade or two. Now? In the United States, as in most of the world, copyright lasts for the author’s lifetime, plus another 70 years. And we’ve changed the law so that every creative work is automatically copyrighted, even if the author does nothing. What do these laws mean to you? As you can read in our analysis here, they impose great (and in many cases entirely unnecessary) costs on creativity, on libraries and archives, on education and on scholarship. More broadly, they impose costs on our entire collective culture. […] We have little reason to celebrate on Public Domain Day because our public domain has been shrinking, not growing.

More detailed comment and analysis from the Centre is available at:

• http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday

See also posts from:

• Jamie Boyle on his Public Domain blog
• Everybody’s Libraries
• Creative Commons

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Wikimedia Commons

Utagawa Hiroshige, “Snow falling on a town”

Utagawa Hiroshige, “A river among snowy mountains”

Utagawa Hiroshige, “Nichiren going into exile on the island of Sado”

Utagawa Hiroshige, “Oi on the Kisokaido”

Caspar David Friedrich, Winterlandschaft mit Kirche (Winter landscape with church)

Caspar David Friedrich, Verschneite Hütte (Hut in Snow)

Caspar David Friedrich, Hünengrab im Schnee (Dolmen in Snow)

Caspar David Friedrich, Der Chasseur im Walde (The Chasseur in the Forest)

Flickr Commons

‘The Isefiorden, Spitzbergen, Norway’ from the Library of Congress

‘Snow field, Australian alps’ from the Powerhouse Museum

‘Le port de Venasque, Luchon’ by Bibliothèque de Toulouse

Project Gutenberg

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Some Christmas Stories

• Public domain text of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
• Original manuscript of A Christmas Carol
• Some Christmas Stories

Clement Clarke Moore, Twas the Night before Christmas

• Twas the Night before Christmas

Librivox

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

• Dickens’ Christmas Carol read by volunteers in the Librivox community.

Clement Clarke Moore, Twas the Night before Christmas

• Twas the Night before Christmas

Christmas Carols

• The Librivox community recently uploaded a collection of Christmas carols to celebrate Christmas 2009!
  

Internet Archive

Christmas 78 Miscellany

• Various Christmas songs digitised from 78 format

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In previous years there have been blog posts about this – for example, see the Everybody’s Libraries posts from 1st January 2008 and 1st January 2009. In preparation for Public Domain Day 2010, we decided to prepare our own list of authors who’s works fall into the public domain this coming January.

You can find the list of 563 authors on our Public Domain Works project, which is a simple registry of artistic works that are in the public domain:

• http://www.publicdomainworks.net/stats/year/2010

The list can be sorted by author surname, birth date, death date and number of works by clicking on the relevant headings. Notable authors include the poets William Butler Yeats and Osip Mandelstam, as well as the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud

While this starts to answer the question What works fall into the public domain this year?, the calculation is still very basic and we hope to improve the list in two main ways:

1. The results above are based on a crude life+70 computation of copyright expiry (and associated entry into the public domain). This is almost certainly wrong for some jurisdictions and for some types of work. The Public Domain Calculators project is actively working to produce jurisdiction-specific algorithms for precisely determining public domain status. Once complete this effort will be integrated into the calculations presented here. If you’d like to help out with a calculator in your jurisdiction, please get in touch!
2. The list is not comprehensive – and there are many authors, composers, artists and other creators which we are missing. To improve the list we need better data about authors and works – whether from library catalogues, or other archives of information about creative works. If you know where we might be able to get hold of such data, we’d love to hear from you!

If you’d like to participate in the Public Domain Works project, please join our pd-discuss list and introduce yourself!

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2. New developments on Public Domain Works!
3. Public Domain Calculators Meeting, 10-11th November 2009

We started out by reviewing existing work on the calculators. We then put together first drafts of diagrams representing copyright law in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. We also started work on a tutorial to help others getting started in building public domain flow diagrams for other countries. Finally we shot some footage for a micro-short film introducing the project – so watch this space!

Documentation for the event is now available, including:

• Draft flow diagram for the United Kingdom (in PDF)
• Draft flow diagram for the Netherlands (in PDF)
• Source files for flow diagrams at the Internet Archive
• Main meeting page on wiki
• Draft questions for legal experts to help build calculators
• Photos:
  • From Paul Keller
  • From Mathias Klang

If you are interested in contributing to a calculator for your country – please contact us directly or join our pd-discuss list and introduce yourself!

The Public Domain Calculators meeting was organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge as part of Communia, the European policy network on the digital public domain.

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1. Public Domain Calculators Meeting, 10-11th November 2009
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There is often a tendency to talk of ‘the public domain’ and of works falling out of copyright and ‘into the public domain’ – as though there is a single set of works which are out of copyright all over the world. In fact, of course, there are different national laws about the nature and duration of copyright in different types of works – and hence what is in the public domain is different in different countries.

We’re currently coordinating work to build a series of public domain calculators – which will help to determine whether or not a given work is in copyright in a given jurisdiction. At the time of writing we have been in touch with groups and individuals interested in helping to build the calculators in 17 jurisdictions.

In November, the Open Knowledge Foundation in association with the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge are hosting a meeting of European experts on copyright and the digital public domain as part of the Communia project. The purpose of the workshop is to produce materials such as legal flow charts and public domain “algorithms” which will help with the representation of different national copyright laws and the determination of public domain status.

Details of the meeting are as follows:

• When: 10-11th November 2009
• Where: Emmanuel College, University Cambridge
• Wiki: http://wiki.okfn.org/PublicDomainCalculators/Meeting
• Participate: Free but space is limited. If you are interested in coming, email the organizers at: info@okfn.org

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