It struck me that as other JISC projects such as ours are required to make their output similarly publicly available, this discussion may be of benefit to others; after all, not everyone knows what open source software is, let alone the complexities that can arise from trying to create such software. Whilst we cannot help avoid all such complexities, we can at least detail what we have found helpful to date, and how OSS Watch view our efforts.

I provided Sander and Rowan a review of our project, and Rowan provided some feedback confirming that overall we are doing a good job, although we lack a listing of the other open source software our project relies on, and their licenses. Whilst such data can be discerned from the dependencies of the project, this is not clear enough; I will add a written list of dependencies to the README.

The response we received is provided below, followed by the overview I initially provided, which gives a brief overview of how we managed our open source development efforts:

==== Rowan Wilson, OSS Watch, responds:

Your work on this project is extremely impressive. You have the systems in place that we recommend for open development and creation of community around software, and you are using them. As an outsider I am able to quickly see that your project is active and the mailing list and roadmap present information about ways in which I could participate.

One thing I could not find, although this may be my fault, is a list of third party software within the distribution. This may well be because there is none, but it’s something I would generally be keen to see for the purposes of auditing licence compatibility.

Overall though I commend you on how tangible and visible the development work on this project is, and on the focus on user-base expansion that is evident on the mailing list.

==== Mark MacGillivray wrote:

Background – May 2011, OKF / AIM bibserver project

Open Knowledge Foundation contracted with American Institute of
Mathematics under the direction of Jim Pitman in the dept. of Maths
and Stats at UC Berkeley. The purpose of the project was to create an
open source software repository named BibServer, and to develop a
software tool that could be deployed by anyone requiring an easy way
to put and share bibliographic records online.

A repository was created at http://github.com/okfn/bibserver, and it
performs the usual logging of commits and other activities expected of
a modern DVCS system. This work was completed in September 2011, and the repository has been available since the start of that project with a GNU Affero GPL v3 licence attached.

October 2011 – JISC Open Biblio 2 project

The JISC Open BIblio 2 project chose to build on the open source
software tool named BibServer. As there was no support from AIM for
maintaining the BibServer repository, the project took on maintenance
of the repository and all further development work, with no change to
previous licence conditions.

We made this choice as we perceive open source licensing as a benefit
rather than a threat; it fit very well with the requirements of JISC
and with the desires of the developers involved in the project. At
worst, an owner may change the licence attached to some software, but
even in such a situation we could continue our work by forking from
the last available open source version (presuming that licence
conditions cannot be altered retrospectively).

The code continues to display the licence under which it is available,
and remains publicly downloadable at http://github.com/okfn/bibserver.
Should this hosting resource become publicly unavailable, an
alternative public host would be sought.

Development work and discussion has been managed publicly, via a
combination of the project website at
http://openbiblio.net/p/jiscopenbib2, the issue tracker at
http://github.com/okfn/bibserver/issues, a project wiki at
http://wiki.okfn.org/Projects/openbibliography, and via a mailing list
at openbiblio-dev@lists.okfn.org

February 2012 – JISC Open Biblio 2 offers bibsoup.net beta service

In February the JISC Open Biblio 2 project announced a beta service
available online for free public use at http://bibsoup.net. The
website runs an instance of BibServer, and highlights that the code is
open source and available (linking to the repository) to anyone who
wishes to use it.

Current status

We believe that we have made sensible decisions in choosing open
source software for our project, and have made all efforts to promote
the fact that the code is freely and publicly available.

We have found the open source development paradigm to be highly
beneficial – it has enabled us to publicly share all the work we have
done on the project, increasing engagement with potential users and
also with collaborators; we have also been able to take advantage of
other open source software during the project, incorporating it into
our work to enable faster development and improved outcomes.

We continue to develop code for the benefit of people wishing to
publicly put and share their bibliographies online, and all our
outputs will continue to be publicly available beyond the end of the
current project.

Let's open up our metadata containers

I’m happy to announce that our Vaski-consortia of public libraries  serving total 300 000 citizens in Turku and the a dozen surrounding municipalities in western Finland, have recently published all of our 1.8 million bibliographical records in the open, as a big pile of data (see on The Data Hub).

Each of the records describes a book, recording, movie, song or other publication in our library catalogue. Titles, authors, publishing details, library classifications, subject headings, identifiers and so on systematically saved in MARC -format, the international, structured library metadata standard since the late 1960s.

Unless I’ve missed something, ours is the third large scale Open Data -publication from the libraries of Finland. The first one was the 670 000 bibliographical records of HelMet-consortia (see on The Data Hub), an another consortia of public libraries around the capital Helsinki. This first publication was organized and initiated in 2010 by Kirjastot.fi Labs, a project seeking for more agile, innovative library concepts. The second important Open Data publication was our national generic theseurus Yleinen suomalainen asiasanasto YSA which is also available as a cool semantic ontology.

Joining this group of Open Data publications was natural for our Vaski-consortia, because we are moving our data from one place to another anyway; we are in the middle of the process of converting from our national FinMARC -flavour to the international MARC21 -flavour of MARC, swapping our library system from Axiell PallasPro to Axiell Aurora, plus implementing a new, ambitious search and discovery interface for all the Finnish libraries, archives and museums (yes, it’s busy times here and we love the taste of a little danger). All this means we are extracting, injecting, converting, mangling, breaking, fixing, disassembling and reassembling all of our data. So, we asked ourselves, why not publish all of our bibliographical data on the net while we are on it?

The process of going Open Data has been quite seamless for us. On my initiative the core concept of Open Data was explained to the consortia’s board. As there were no objections or further questions, we contacted our vendor BTJ who immidiately were supporting the idea. From there on it was basically just about some formalities with BTJ, consulting international colleagues regarding licensing, writing a little press-release, organizing a few hundred megabytes of storage space on the internet. And trying to make sure the Open Data -move didn’t get buried under other, more practical things during the summertime.

For our data license we have chosen the liberal Creative Commons-0 license (CC0), because we try to have as little obstructions to our data as possible. However we have agreed on a 6 month embarko with BTJ, a company who is doing most of the cataloguing for the Finnish public libraries. We believe that it is a good compromise to prefer publishing data that is slightly outdated, than try to make the realm of immaterial property rights any more unclear than it already is.

Traditional library metadata at Turku main library

We seriously cannot anticipate what our Open Data -publication will lead to. Perhaps it will lead to absolutely nothing at all. I believe most organizations opening up their data face this uncertainty. However what we do know for sure is, that all of the catalogue records we have carefully crafted, acquired and collected, are seriously underutilized if they are only used for one particular purpose: finding and locating items in the library collections.

For such a valuable assett as our bibliographical metadata, I feel this is not enough. By removing obstacles for accessing our raw data, we open up new possibilities for ourselves, for our colleagues (understood widely), and to anybody interested.

Mace Ojala, project designer
Turku City Library/Vaski-consortia; National Digital Library of Finland, Cycling for libraries, etc.
http://xmacex.wordpress.com, @xmacex, Facebook etc.

The library, archives and museums (i.e. LAM) community is increasingly interested in the potential of Linked Open Data to enable new ways of leveraging and improving our digital collections, as recently illustrated by the first international Linked Open Data in Libraries Museums and Archives Summit (LOD-LAM) Summit in San Francisco. The Linked Open Data approach combines knowledge and information in new ways by linking data about cultural heritage and other materials coming from different Museums, Archives and Libraries. This not only allows for the enrichment of metadata describing individual cultural objects, but also makes our collections more accessible to users by supporting new forms of online discovery and data-driven research.

But as cultural institutions start to embrace the Linked Open Data practices, the intellectual property rights associated with their digital collections become a more pressing concern. Cultural institutions often struggle with rights issues related to the content in their collections, primarily due to the fact that these institutions often do not hold the (copy)rights to the works in their collections. Instead, copyrights often rest with the authors or creators of the works, or intermediaries who have obtained these rights from the authors, so that cultural institutions must get permission before they can make their digital collections available online.

However, the situation with regard to the metadata — individual metadata records and collections of records — to describe these cultural collections is generally less complex. Factual data are not protected by copyright, and where descriptive metadata records or record collections are covered by rights (either because they are not strictly factual, or because they are vested with other rights such as the European Union’s sui generis database right) it is generally the cultural institutions themselves who are the rights holders. This means that in most cases cultural institutions can independently decide how to publish their descriptive metadata records — individually and collectively — allowing them to embrace the Linked Open Data approach if they so choose.

As the word “open” implies, the Linked Open Data approach requires that data be published under a license or other legal tool that allows everyone to freely use and reuse the data. This requirement is one of most basic elements of the LOD architecture. And, according to Tim Berners-Lee’s 5 star scheme, the most basic way of making available data online is to make it ‘available on the web (whatever format), but with an open licence’. However, there still is considerable confusion in the field as to what exactly qualifies as “open” and “open licenses”.

While there are a number of definitions available such as the Open Knowledge Definition and the Definition of Free Cultural Works, these don’t easily translate into a licensing recommendation for cultural institutions that want to make their descriptive metadata available as Linked Open Data. To address this, participants of the LOD-LAM summit drafted ‘a 4-star classification-scheme for linked open cultural metadata’. The proposed scheme (obviously inspired by Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Open Data star scheme) ranks the different options for metadata publishing — legal waivers and licenses — by their usefulness in the LOD context.

In line with the Open Knowledge Definition and the Definition of Free Cultural Works, licenses that either impose restrictions on the ways the metadata may be used (such as ‘non-commercial only’ or ‘no derivatives’) are not considered truly “open” licenses in this context. This means that metatdata made available under a more restrictive license than those proposed in the 4-star system above should not be considered Linked Open Data.

According to the classification there are 4 publishing options suitable for descriptive metadata as Linked Open Data, and libraries, archives and museums trying to maximize the benefits and interoperability of their metadata collections should aim for the approach with the highest number of stars that they’re comfortable with. Ideally the LAM community will come to agreement about the best approach to sharing metadata so that we all do it in a consistent way that makes our ambitions for new research and discovery services achievable.

Finally, it should be noted that the ranking system only addresses metadata licensing (individual records and collections of records) and does not specify how that metadata is made available, e.g., via APIs or downloadable files.

The proposed classification system is described in detail on the International LOD-LAM Summit blog but to give you a sneak preview, here are the rankings:

★★★★ Public Domain (CC0 / ODC PDDL / Public Domain Mark)
★★★ Attribution License (CC-BY / ODC-BY) where the licensor considers linkbacks to meet the attribution requirement
★★ Attribution License (CC-BY / ODC-BY) with another form of attribution defined by the licensor
★ Attribution Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA/ODC-ODbL)

We encourage discussion of this proposal as we work towards a final draft this summer, so please take a look and tell us what you think!

Paul Keller, Creative Commons and Knowledgeland (Netherlands)
Adrian Pohl, Open Knowledge Foundation and hbz (Germany)
MacKenzie Smith, MIT Libraries (USA)
John Wilbanks, Creative Commons (USA)