Re: JISC Open Biblographic Data Guide

Owen,

Thank you some much for sharing this information. It's very
interesting, and definitely relevant to the work we're doing in the
LLD group. We'll come back to you if we have any questions regarding
this tool or the process.
Best regards,

Emmanuelle

On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Owen Stephens <owen@ostephens.com> wrote:
> I think some on the list will have seen the announcement of a new JISC
> resource - the Open Bibliographic Data Guide http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/, and
> there has been some off-list discussion resulting in this post to outline
> the why and how of the guide.
> The guide was commissioned by JISC - to quote Andy McGregor (JISC Programme
> Manager):
> ---------------
> Why are libraries around the world devoting time and resources to releasing
> their bibliographic data under an open licence? What’s in it for them and
> what are the costs and practical issues involved? JISC’s purpose for this
> guide is to try and provide some answers to these questions and to help
> academic librarians think about the potential implications for their own
> library.
> One of the possibilities that open bibliographic data offers is the chance
> for libraries and indeed anyone to reuse the data to build innovative
> services for researchers, teachers, students and librarians. JISC will be
> exploring these possibilities through the work of the Resource Discovery
> Task Force.
> --------------
> Andy has also written a slightly more extensively on the topic in this blog
> post http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2010/11/15/what-does-open-bibliographic-metadata-mean-for-academic-libraries/
> So - JISC commissioned David Kay, Paul Miller and me to write a guide -
> aimed principally at the academic sector - to inform decisions about
> producing Open Data. Note that the guide is not about Linked Data
> specifically, but rather focuses on Open Data. However, it does include a
> Linked Data 'use case' (see below)
> at http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/archives/usecases/uc2-2
> The approach David, Paul and I took was to look at the issues through a
> number of 'use cases' - essentially these were scenarios which might occur,
> or might be similar to existing activity - and pose the question 'what would
> be the result of doing this with Open Data'. Some of the scenarios are very
> general ('publish data') and some quite specific 'allow commericial use of
> data in a mobile application'.
> With 17 use cases in all, this is a lot of material, so we wanted to make it
> possible to view the guide through different facets. To aid this, the use
> cases are all structured into to 7 sections (with each section broken down
> into a number of subsections). This enables you to view a subset of the
> guide by selecting one or more use cases, and one or more sections from the
> navigation page:
> http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/navigate
> While this approach gives flexibility, we recognised that it may also be
> difficult to decide where to start with these options, so we built in three
> 'filtered' views that you can apply from any point in the guide. These are
> Institutional, Library Service and Implementation. You see these options as
> you navigate the guide, and if you click one it will present only the
> relevant parts of the the usecases you are currently viewing. We labelled
> this 'Switch Focus' (not 100% happy with that but we couldn't think of a
> better term!). The 'institutional' view is meant to only contain information
> that might be of interest to people at the institutional managerial level,
> the 'library service' view is meant to include relevant data for library
> managers, and the 'implementation' view is aimed at people who might be
> tasked to actually making it happen. We had initially thought of offering
> these as a starting point for people entering the guide - that is 'only show
> me stuff relevant to me as a library manager' type option, but eventually
> decided this was a bit prescriptive and so offer it as an option from within
> the guide.
> A final navigation option is via some pre-set pathways at
> http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/pathways-and-connections - which allow you to see
> groups of related usecases (as selected by us of course). This page also
> shows off one of the neat (I think!) facilities of the guide - which is each
> view of the guide can be referred to by a URL - which can of course be
> bookmarked, shared, etc. For example:
> http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/?usecases=uc4,uc7,uc9,uc11,uc2-2
> Note this not only displays these 5 use cases, but also shows them in the
> specified order - so is different to
> http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/?usecases=uc2-2,uc4,uc7,uc9,uc11 (well I was rather
> proud of that anyway!). We've included bookmarking tools on each view, so
> you can easily share views via Delicious, Twitter, etc.
> The guide is then finished off with some top level/introductory documents
> which set context around rights/licensing/open data.
> Each 'subsection' (generally a paragraph) support comments - so users can
> add comments at this level - and we hope that to some extent this will help
> the guide be a living resource - you can keep track of comments at
> http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/comments/feed (RSS)
> If you are still with me, just a few words about the technical stuff:
> The guide is built using WordPress, using a custom theme developed (by me)
> specially for the guide, a few plugins (all generally available except the
> one to achieve the 'switch focus' functionality), and custom taxonomies.
> These together enable the ability to create very flexible views of the
> guide. Each subsection of the guide is a wordpress 'post' then tagged using
> custom taxonomies to belong to a specific section, a specific 'focus' and a
> specific usecase. All the views of the resource are built from these
> individual posts using the tags. I should also acknowledge the great work by
> Dan Moat at http://www.tahninial.com/ who did all the stylesheet work on the
> site, and generally helped us make it look good :)
> Sorry for going on - I'm very happy to answer questions around the guide -
> either about the approaches we took conceptually or how we realised it
> technically.
> Owen
> --
> Owen Stephens
> Owen Stephens Consulting
> Web: http://www.ostephens.com
> Email: owen@ostephens.com
>

Received on Wednesday, 1 December 2010 08:55:44 UTC