EDINA and SUNCAT in particular are starting to explore Open and Linked Data, and would like to ask for your help!
SUNCAT is funded by JISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/). JISC has been actively involved in Open Data, which has resulted in the Discovery Open Metadata Principles (http://discovery.ac.uk/businesscase/principles/). As a result of this, SUNCAT would like to be able to open up the data that is sent by Contributing Libraries. The Resource Discovery Task Force (http://rdtf.jiscinvolve.org/wp/) was instrumental in linking the opening up of data and SUNCAT involvement. Open bibliographic data offers the chance for librarians and, indeed, anyone, to reuse the data to build innovative services for researches, teachers, students and librarians.
A major first step in the process of making metadata fully open is obtaining the consent of the Contributing Libraries to allow EDINA to make the supplied serials data open, under an Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence
(URL: http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/ ) with reference to the ODC Attribution Share Alike Community Norms (the set of norms are published at: http://www.opendatacommons.org/norms/odc-by-sa/ ). Please contact us for more details of the licence that we have drawn up. We would be expecting all Contributing Libraries who allow us to open up their serials data to sign this.
Once the data has been made open, we may be able to transform it into a set of triples, and release it as Linked Data. This is dependent on the time scale of the project, and the work that we are able to complete in that time.
We understand that there may be licensing issues with allowing EDINA to use all of the metadata that is supplied to us through regular updates to SUNCAT. However, it would be very useful to be permitted to use some or all of this data, such as letting us use records that you created originally, and did not download from an external bibliographic resource.
It must be stressed that this is exploratory project work. As we are working to a tight timescale, we would like to work with a limited number of Contributing Libraries in the first instance.
We would like to hear from you if you would be happy for us to publish some or all of your serials metadata under an Open Data Commons PDD Licence. Please contact us through the SUNCAT email (suncat@staffmail.ed.ac.uk).
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Natasha.
Natasha Aburrow-Jones
SUNCAT Project Officer
