Re: Audiences & defining LLD

Quoting "ZENG, MARCIA" <mzeng@kent.edu>:

  Thought this might be useful. It was from the recent 'Making the
> Case' session [1] of OntologySummit2011 where Peter Yim identified  
> the following
> audiences for the Open Ontology Repository group's messages to be delivered:
>
> (i) policy makers, (ii) budget holders, (iii) Technology Decision Makers
> (CIOs and Architects), (iv) Implementers (engineers and developers), (v)
> users/consumers of the technology, and (vi) educators

Thanks, Marcia, that is very helpful.

>
> My suggestion to this statement is to widen the 'libraries' part to  
> include information centers.  I found the following description of  
> is also helpful (still not inclusive enough):
> "the library and information science (LIS) community, which is  
> inclusive of museums, archives, and other cultural institutions." [3]
>
> What I have in mind are three examples of the open bibliographic  
> data contributors that may be beyond regular libraries: The National  
> Science Digital Library (U.S.) [4] , the Virtual Open Access  
> Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository (in progress), [5] and AGRIS of  
> FAO [6]

So then we get to the question of: what is *bibliographic* data? And  
is that what we are interested in, not just library data?

I feel cautious about expanding much beyond libraries because we need  
to make some generalizations about circumstances, needs, and  
motivations. To do that, we have to define a fairly coherent set of  
organizations. One reason to avoid expanding to "bibliographic data"  
is that there are many commercial enterprises that have bib data as  
their product, and their circumstances are very different to that of  
the (generally) non-profit, quasi-governmental institutions that  
libraries generally are. I don't know much about the situation of  
research organizations that also produce bibliographic data. There  
are, for example, professional organizations that make income off of  
their publications, including indexes to their publications, which is  
bibliographic data.

Here was what I was thinking of in terms of defining "library data":

- data describing information resources that is created by and/or  
curated by libraries.

The purpose here was to exclude things like patron data, acquisitions  
and funding data, circulation data, etc. The focus is on information  
resources only. But defining the *institution* is also difficult.  
Language expanding beyond libraries but not too far tends to refer to  
"cultural and educational institutions". I don't know if people would  
interpret that to include research organizations like the ones you  
mention. We also need to think about what people might consider to be  
"information resources." Is the data in a genome database "information  
resources?"

As I think this through, I sometimes feel like leaving it at libraries  
may be the easiest thing to do. ;-)

kc



-- 
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
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m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

Received on Thursday, 3 March 2011 19:18:44 UTC