The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Biblio group, and Working Group on Open Data in Cultural Heritage, along with DevCSI, present BiblioHack: an open Hackathon to kick-start the summer months. From Wednesday 13th – Thursday 14th June, we’ll be meeting at Queen Mary, University of London, East London, and any budding hackers are welcome, along with anyone interested in opening up metadata and the open cause – this free event aims to bring together software developers, project managers, librarians and experts in the area of Open Bibliographic Data. A workshop will run alongside the coding on the 13th, and a meet-up on the evening of the 12th is open to all whether you’re attending the Hackathon or not.

What is BiblioHack?

BiblioHack will be two days of hacking and sharing ideas about open bibliographic metadata.

There will be opportunities to hack on open bibliographic datasets and experiment with new prototypes and tools. The focus will be on building things and improving existing systems that enable people and institutions to get the most of bibliographic data.

If you’re a non-coder there are sessions for you too. We will be running a hands-on workshop addressing the technical aspects to opening up cultural heritage data looking at best of breed open source tools for doing that, preparing your data for a hackathon and the best standards for storing and exposing your data to make it more easily re-used.

When and where?

• The main hackathon will take place over two days between 13th and 14th June at Queen Mary University of London
• On the morning of the 13th June we’ll be running the workshop addressed at the technical challenges to opening up metadata. So for those unable to participate in the hack due to time constraints or lack of coding know how – this is for you!
• On the 12th June – Tuesday evening (details TBC but will be a pub in central / east London!) – we’ll also be hosting a meet-up for anyone attending the hack and open data more generally. Whether it’s open bibliographic data, spending or government data that floats your boat all tribes are welcome!

Who is organising the event?

• Open Biblio – emphasising the utilisation of tools we’ve developed. We will be focussing on our existing tools and software, the most recent updates of which are available here: front-end BibServer / BibSoup, BibJSON, back-end BibServer
• Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Data in Cultural Heritage and Open GLAM
• DM2E – a new EU funded project devoted to enabling more cultural institutions integrate their collections into Europeana
• DevCSI – encouraging diverse thinking around software development and technical innovation

Who else is involved?

We’ve already lined up a whole host of speakers and groups who’ll be attending both the hack and the workshop. The list so far includes UK Discovery, CKAN, Europeana, Total Impact, Neontribe, The British Library with many more to be added in the coming days…

You’re giving your time and expertise – what do you get if you attend the whole hack?

• Accommodation at QMUL overnight on the 13th
• Food and drink across the 3 days
• The chance to work with experts in their fields
• Admiration and respect from your peers
• We could expound at length, but… go on, you know you want to (it’s free!)

How can I sign up?

• Register here for the 2 day hack
• Register here for workshop only
• Register here for Meet-up only

Please note, if you wish to attend all 3 events you should sign up for each, and the Workshop will run in parallel with the hacking on the morning of the 13th.

More questions?

Contact Naomi Lillie on admin [@] okfn.org.

See you there!

Lightning Talks will include Federico Sangati on crowdsourcing and education, ahead of his presentation at Dev8ed later this month, and a sneak preview of the hackathon that Open Biblio will be running 12-14th June in collaboration with OKFN’s Open GLAM and Cultural Heritage Working Group and DevCSI.

If you would like to give a lightning talk (informal 2-3 minute presentations) about anything related to open data or knowledge, contact naomi.lillie [@] okfn.org.

Sign up here and we’ll see you there!



For this and other events in Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland, sign up here.

The new scheduled collection uploader is now runnable as a stand-alone tool, to which source URLs can be provided for retrieval, conversion, and upload. Retrieved sources are stored and available from a folder on disk, as are the conversions.

Parsers can now be written in any language and plugged into the ingest functionality – for example, we now have a MARC parser that runs in perl and is usable via ingest.py and available on an instance of BibServer – thanks very much to Ed for that.

In addition, parsers need no longer be ‘parsers’ – we have introduced the concept of scrapers as well. Check out our new Wikipedia parser / scraper, for example; it functions by taking in a search value rather than a URL, then using that to search Wikipedia for relevant references which it downloads, bundles, and converts to a BibJSON collection – this is a really great example that Etienne put together, and it demonstrates a great deal of potential for further parser / scraper development.

See the examples on the BibServer repo for more insight – they are in the parserscrapers_plugins folder, and they are managed by bibserver/ingest.py.

We know documents are now lacking – we have set up an online docs resource but are in the process of writing up to populate it – please check back soon.

As usual, development work is scheduled via the tickets and milestones on our repo. Current efforts are on documentation and adding as many feature requests as possible before our hackathon on June 12th – 14th.

This enables us to keep the core of BibJSON pretty simple whilst also opening up potential for more complex usage where that is required.

Due to this, we no longer use the “namespace” key in BibJSON.

Other changes include usage of “_” prefix on internal keys – so wherever our own database writes info into a record, we prefix it, such as “_id”. Because of this, uploaded BibJSON records can have an “id” key that will work, as well as an “_id” uuid applied by the BibServer system.

For more information, check out BibJSON.org and JSON-LD

Main pages

• Collections visualisation – a smart new graphic on the landing page showing information from new collections

• Improved FAQ section with links to videos (coming soon: links to our new online docs)

Creating collections

• New Wikipedia parser – create a collection based on the references retrievable from Wikipedia for your chosen search value

• Improved collection upload – specify collection information, then view upload tickets to see progress and errors

• ‘Retry’ and other options on particular collection creation attempts are also now available from the tickets page

Search results

• Filter search results by a value range as well as specific values

• Visualise any filter as a bubble chart and select the values you want to search with

• Add / remove available filters and rename filter display names

• Improved layout of record info in search results, including auto-display of the first image referenced in a record – e.g. if there is a link to an image in your record, it is displayed in the search result

Managing and sharing collections

• Collection admin available – save your current display settings as the default for your collection, allow other users to have admin rights on your own collection

• Share any specific searches by providing the URL displayed under the ‘share’ option

• Embed – as the whole front-end of search and collection visualisation is handled by facetview it is possible to embed your collection search in any web page you control; the share / embed option on collection pages provides the code you need to insert to enable this

• Download as BibJSON – a nice new obvious button on each collection provides a link to download your collection as BibJSON

Viewing records

• Improved display of individual records, including search options to discover relevant content online

• EXPERIMENTAL record editing – this has been enabled although still in progress – you can edit the content of a record using a visual display of the keys and values in the record, although functionality for adding new keys does not yet work. However, you can also edit the JSON directly via the options, and try saving that. Be aware – this could damage your records, and of course changes the details from whatever they were in the source content.

Still in development

These ones are not yet available on BibSoup but watch this space:

• Creating new collections on-site – search and find particular records for inclusion in new collections or addition to pre-existing collections. This is not currently possible but we are working on making this an easy process

• Merging collections

• Better user creation and management, plus gravatars

• Additional functionality on record pages – linking out directly to related sources such as PubMed, Total Impact, Service Core etc

We hope you like these changes, and find them useful – do let us know what you think and keep an eye out for the upcoming improvements.

From the announcement:

“The Harvard Library announced it is making more than 12 million catalog records from Harvard’s 73 libraries publicly available.

The records contain bibliographic information about books, videos, audio recordings, images, manuscripts, maps, and more. The Harvard Library is making these records available in accordance with its Open Metadata Policy and under a Creative Commons 0 (CC0) public domain license. In addition, the Harvard Library announced its open distribution of metadata from its Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) scholarly article repository under a similar CC0 license.

‘The Harvard Library is committed to collaboration and open access. We hope this contribution is one of many steps toward sharing the vital cultural knowledge held by libraries with all,’ said Mary Lee Kennedy, Senior Associate Provost for the Harvard Library.

The catalog records are available for bulk download from Harvard, and are available for programmatic access by software applications via API’s at the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). The records are in the standard MARC21 format.“

That’s great news. There already is an entry for this dataset at the Data Hub.

See also David Weinberger’s post on the data release.

• Mark MacGillivray reported on the 29th March that the project is working with Total Impact to link their services to an instance of Bibserver

• Multilingual matters in BibJSON arose again and, once more, JSON-LD was given backing as being useful for our purposes

• Adrian Pohl discussed Nature’s release of 450,000 articles under a CC0 licence and followed up with this more in-depth article

• Todd Robbins circulated Jim Pitman’s detailed article on author identity, which explores the issue of citations in relation to a non-existent publication (!) and includes recommendations for opening your own data

• Antoine Isaac notified us of Europeana’s ‘Connecting Society to Culture Programme’, as part of the Hack4Europe! 2012 road show, including 3 hackathons in 3 different countries; it turns out that one in Berlin starts on the day our own Hackathon finishes – speaking of which…

• Hackathon ‘show of hands’ request sent out! Contact naomi.lillie [@] okfn.org if you’d like to add your name to the list of interested people. This Hackathon is being run by Open Biblio with Open GLAM and DevCSI, on the 12th-14th June, in East London – more details to follow

• Following the last Working Group meeting, Adrian Pohl expounded upon the role and goals of the Working Group, which is now given at http://openbiblio.net/about and http://openbiblio.net/get-involved

• David Weinberger announced that Harvard has opened 12 million bibliographic records to the public domain under a CC0 licence – see his blog post to read more about it and for links to further information

• Finally, Adrian announced the next Working Group meeting on 7th May, where Mark MacGillivray will be updating the community on project developments

As always, thanks to our amazing community for promoting and leading open bibliographic data in all its manifestations. To become part of the group and get your voice heard, sign up to the List here.

“It remains to be seen what agent or agents will end up providing the best service for individual researchers, departments or universities to display the bibliographic data they generate, and how best such data will be aggregated for search and discovery. But don’t wait for the big publishers and information brokers to monopolize this function.“

Finally, Jim provides some useful tips on how to “push the publishers and subscription services to support open access to your research work and open bibliographic data”. Go here to read the whole post.

From the press release:

“Nature Publishing Group (NPG) today is pleased to join the linked data community by opening up access to its publication data via a linked data platform. NPG’s Linked Data Platform is available at http://data.nature.com.

The platform includes more than 20 million Resource Description Framework (RDF) statements, including primary metadata for more than 450,000 articles published by NPG since 1869. In this first release, the datasets include basic citation information (title, author, publication date, etc) as well as NPG specific ontologies. These datasets are being released under an open metadata license, Creative Commons Zero (CC0), which permits maximal use/re-use of this data.

NPG’s platform allows for easy querying, exploration and extraction of data and relationships about articles, contributors, publications, and subjects. Users can run web-standard SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) queries to obtain and manipulate data stored as RDF. The platform uses standard vocabularies such as Dublin Core, FOAF, PRISM, BIBO and OWL, and the data is integrated with existing public datasets including CrossRef and PubMed.“

That’s great news having such an important publisher moving towards open bibliographic data. As of yet, there are no dumps of the data available. Also, there is no entry on the Data Hub. Anybody?

There might be some problems with the platform from some browsers, but it is being worked on.