BiblioHack has drawn to a close and the results of two days’ hard labour are in:

A Bibliographic Toolkit

Utilising BibServer

Peter Murray-Rust reported back on what was planned, what was done, and the overlap between the two! The priority was cleaning up the process for setting up BibServers and getting them running on different architectures. (PubCrawler was going to be run on BibServer but currently it’s not working). Yesterday’s big news was that Nature has released 30 million references or thereabouts – this furthers the cause of scholarly literature whereby we, in principle, can index records rather than just corporate organisations being able / permitted to do so. National Bibliographies have been put on BibSoup – UK (‘BL’), Germany, Spain and Sweden – with the technical problem character encodings raising its head (UTF8 solves this where used). Also, BibSoup is useful for TEXTUS so the overall ‘toolkit’ approach is reinforced!

Open Access Index

Emanuil Tolev presented on ACat – Academic Catalogue. The first part of an index is having things to access – so gathering about 55,000 journals was a good start! Using Elastic Search within these journals will give list of contents which will then provide lists of articles (via facet view), then other services will determine licensing / open access information (URL checks assisted in this process). The ongoing plan is to use this tool to ascertain licensing information for every single record in the world. (Link to ACat to follow).

Annotation Tools

Tom Oinn talked about the ideas that have come out of discussions and hacking around annotators and TEXTUS. Reading lists and citation management is a key part of what TEXTUS is intended to assist with, so the plan is for any annotation to be allowed to carry a citation – whether personal opinion or related record. Personalised lists will come out of this and TEXTUS should become a reference management tool in its own right. Keep your eye on TEXTUS for the practical applications of these ideas!

Note: more detailed write-ups will appear courtesy of others, do watch the OKFN blog for this and all things open…

Postscript: OKFN blog post here

Huge thanks to all those who participated in the event – your ideas and enthusiasm have made this so much fun to be involved with.

Also thanks to those who helped run the event, visible or behind-the-scenes, particularly Sam Leon.

Here’s to the next one

• Peter Murray-Rust revisited the overarching theme of ‘A Bibliographic Toolkit’ and the BibServer sub-group’s specific work on adding datasets and easily deploying BibServer; Adrian Pohl followed up to explain that he would be developing a National Libraries BibServer.
• Tom Oinn explained the Annotation Tools sub-groups’s work on developing annotation tools – ie TEXTUS – looking at adding fragments of text, with your own comments and metadata linked to it, which then forms BibSoup collections. Collating personalised references is enhanced with existing search functionality, and reading lists with annotations can refer to other texts within TEXTUS.
• Mark MacGillivray presented the 3rd group’s work on an Open Access Index. This began with listing all the journals that can be found in the whole world, with the aim of identifying the licence of each article. They have been scraping collections (eg PubMed) and gathering journals – at the time of speaking they had around 50,000+! The aim is to enable a crowd-sourced list of every journal in the world which, using PubCrawler, should provide every single article in the world.

With just 5 hours left before stopping to gather thoughts, write-up and feedback to the rest of the group, it will be very interesting to see the result…

The event attendees started the day all together, both hackers and workshop / seminar attendees, and Sam introduced the purpose of the day as follows: coders – to build tools and share ideas about things that will make our shared cultural heritage and knowledge commons more accessible and useful; non-coders – to get a crash course in what openness means for galleries, libraries, archives and museums, why it’s important and how you can begin opening up your data; everyone – to get a better idea about what other people working in your domain do and engender a better understanding between librarians, academics, curators, artists and technologists, in order to foster the creation of better, cooler tools that respond to the needs of our communities.

The hackers began the day with an overview of what a hackathon is for and how it can be run, as presented by Mahendra Mahey, and followed with lightning talks as follows:

• Talk 1 Peter Murray Rust & Ross Mounce – Content and Data Mining and a PDF extractor
• Talk 2 Mike Jones – the m-biblio project
• Talk 4 Ian Stuart – ORI/RJB (formerly OA-RJ)
• Talk 5 Etienne Posthumus – Making a BibServer Parser
• Talk 6 Emanuil Tolev – IDFind – identifying identifiers (“Feedback and real user needs won’t gather themselves”)
• Talk 7 Mark MacGillivray – BibServer – what the project has been doing recently, how that ties into the open access index idea.
• Talk 8 Tom Oinn – TEXTUS
• Talk 9 Simone Fonda – Pundit – collaborative semantic annotations of texts (Semantic Web-related tool)
• Talk 10 Ian Stuart – The basics of Linked Data

We decided we wanted to work as a community, using our different skills towards one overarching goal, rather than breaking into smaller groups with separate agendas. We formed the central idea of an ‘open bibliographic tool-kit’ and people identified three main areas to hack around, playing to their skills and interests:

• Utilising BibServer – adding datasets and using PubCrawler
• Creating an Open Access Index
• Developing annotation tools

At this point we all broke for lunch, and the workshoppers and hackers mingled together. As hoped, conversations sprung up between people from the two different groups and it was great to see suggestions arising from shared ideas and applications of one group being explained to the theories of the other.

We re-grouped and the workshop continued until 16.00 – see here for Tim Hodson’s excellent write-up of the event and talks given – when the hackers were joined by some who attended the workshop. Each group gave a quick update on status, to try to persuade the new additions to the group to join their particular work-flow, and each group grew in number. After more hushed discussions and typing, the day finished with a talk from Tara Taubman about her background in the legalities of online security and IP, and we went for dinner. Hacking continued afterwards and we celebrated a hard day’s work down the pub, lookong forward to what was to come.

Day 2 to follow…

The Auditorium was a beautiful venue, and there was a good space for giving presentations complete with seamless audio and visual equipment (a rare treat!).

We kicked off with the first three Lightning Talks:

• Mark MacGillivray – Open Biblio
• Roderic Page – “Towards a bibliography of life: linking taxonomic names to the primary literature”
• Mahendra Mahey – DevCSI

It was great to see people gravitating towards those whose presentations had struck a chord… Mahendra had invited discussion around potential events and many people had plans or ideas which they wanted to run past him, while Rod’s points on taxonomy were pertinent to Mark’s work on BibServer as well as others’ research. Other discussions grew between the bar snacks, as people began with the standard ‘what do you do?’ and swiftly developed into ‘oh that’s funny, I was talking to so-and-so about that just now…’ Our dedicated bartender was contributing too, as he specialised in nanotechnology!

The next three talks followed:

• Laura Newman – OKFN / Open Data Handbook / School of Open Data
• Ewan Klein – Semantic Web mini-projects
• Sam Leon – Public Domain Review

The hubbub of enthusiasm started up again, and it appeared there were good conversations and connections emerging around the room. From these, or perhaps just courage from having seen others do their presentations (and me fumbling along as make-shift compère), two additional people decided to give impromptu talks:

• Etienne Posthumus – Iconclass
• Wilbert Kraan – PROD / Kasabi

Many thanks to all those who presented and to those who attended to discuss all things #OpenData. Hopefully everyone left with good ideas of topics and people to follow up with afterwards, and who knows where these will lead?

As this was our first Scotland-based Meet-up we’d be glad to get feedback so we can improve; the next one is planned for May, so if you have anything you’d particularly like to see, hear or say, let us know (one suggestion was that talks are recorded, so people unable to attend can keep up-to-date). This and other events will be promoted via the OKFN Scotland List, so do sign up here otherwise you might miss out!

* Actually, it turns out that there was a Meet-up in Scotland in 2010, according to someone who’s been on the scene longer than I… but I won’t tell anyone if you don’t

Postscript, 23rd March: see here for a review by Laura Newman and a link to one by Graham Steel, thanks to Information Today Europe.

The interview was a nice opportunity to get some information about open bibliographic data activities to people who haven’t heard about it yet and to call attention to the work that was and is done by the OKFN Working Group on Open Bibliographic Data and in Germany by the hbz (where I work) and the KIM DINI working group that has just published some recommendations for opening up library data (a blog post will 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?