Opening Up The BL's Metadata

Opening Up The British Library’s Metadata Neil Wilson Head of Metadata Services

The British Library?
Receives a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland
The collection includes well over 150 million items, in most languages with 3 million new items added each year
We hold 14 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, 58 million patents, 3 million sound recordings
Operates the world's largest document delivery service providing millions of items a year to customers all over the world

The British Library - St Pancras Houses the British Library’s reference collections, exhibition galleries and conference centre

The British Library – Boston Spa Designed for document delivery services & housing a collection devoted to interlibrary loan

British Library Metadata Services Origins
Operated prior to the BL’s foundation as ‘The British National Bibliography’ (BNB) since 1950
Originally a service to the national and international library communities
Has evolved through many changes in technology: Print, CD-ROM, Online, Data file etc

The Value of Bibliographic Metadata
Libraries source bibliographic metadata to reduce cataloguing, increase usage & efficiently acquire & manage stock
Publishers promote details of new works & availability of existing inventory to generate sales
Library users value the availability of ‘shortcut’ summary descriptions enabling efficient identification & selection of relevant material
Standardised free descriptive metadata is increasingly important to consumers acting as a product ‘label’ identifying key properties & summarising content

The Evolving Information Landscape
Traditional library metadata derives from static & self contained library catalogue cards
The ‘Semantic Web’ uses a more dynamic model using linking to establish relationships between data elements & enabling users to navigate from one resource to related data within others
Dynamic/Reactive
Linked to external resources
Micro Portal
Interacts with users & external systems in response to queries
Offers options for further inquiry
Open Structure
Passive
Self contained
Linear text
‘ Read’ by users as result of database query
End result
Domain specific format
Semantic Metadata Traditional Metadata

Public Sector Data - Changing Expectations
The advent of the Web accelerated the development of a collaboration culture & fostered an expectation that information, metadata & content should be as freely available as the Internet itself
Many wider benefit arguments have been advanced for public bodies to make their data freely available
2009 saw an increasing Government commitment to the principle of opening up public data for wider re-use. The Putting the Frontline First: smarter government report requires “ the majority of government-published information to be reusable, linked data by June 2011”
Possible data cleanup for re-harvesting by organisation
User generated or added linked content may enhance internal data
Offers free R&D & Management Information opportunities
New opportunities for collaboration to assist internal efficiencies
Increased reputation/relevance seen as inclusive community partner
Opportunities to offer new value added services on back of free offering
Stimulation of knowledge economy will generate tax revenue, business opportunities & jobs via innovation
Public sector information is an underexploited resource & governments should maximise state benefits from their initial investment
Encourages diversity of resources – no single supplier can create all services or content
Taxpayers have already paid once for data creation, why pay again?
Minimal development required since the data is already created
Benefit for public body Benefit for state

Libraries - Changing Perceptions
“ Librarians are book jailers locking knowledge away from users”
“ I did my PhD with only 12 visits to the library. That was 5 years ago; things have improved since then, now you don’t need to use it at all!”
“ The library world is far too insular; using formats that nobody outside understands, libraries must be more open and stop perpetuating unnecessary barriers”
“ 90% of users no longer use library catalogues. Instead they just use Google as a starting point for their research.”

New Uses of Library Metadata
Library metadata has been given new value as formats & technologies for sharing it have arisen to assist re-use e.g.:
Research usage for efficient citation management (e.g. Pro-Cite)
Management of personal collections via bibliographic sharing services (e.g. LibraryThing, Open Library )
Mashups of data elements from multiple sources
Mining of entire databases e.g. to identify publication trends
Ebooks e.g. publishers re-use metadata to describe & promote works republished in electronic form

The British Library’s 2020 Vision
2020 Themes relevant to the metadata strategy:
Lead and collaborate in growing the world’s knowledge base
Enable access to everyone who wants to do research
Support research communities in key areas for social and economic benefit

Creating an Open Metadata Strategy
Developing an open metadata strategy presented us with some issues we needed to manage e.g. :
Financial and legal - loss of revenue from traditional bibliographic services, increasingly complex copyright and licensing frameworks
Reputational – perception that the BL is not keeping up with technology or meeting government & community expectations due to differing interpretations of ‘free’ & ‘open ’
To access from anywhere
To modification/enhancement
To use with free software
To linking from your data or system
Of cost?
Of all licensing restrictions?
To sell or re-use in commercial services
To copy & redistribute?
Open Free

Creating an Open Metadata Strategy Free/Open Licensing Models
Currently many licensing models exist for putting material into the public domain & offering originators both credit & protection against liability
Because of this a range of collaborative licensing options has been developed by organisations such as Creative Commons & Open Knowledge Foundation
Few organisations give unconditional access to their metadata & parameterise their free offerings
To use for any purpose forever
To study & adapt for local use
To redistribute copies
To improve & release to the community
Data Format
Coverage/Inclusion Policy
Delivery routes (e.g. Web, FTP etc)
Level of user support (if any)
Ownership/Licensing agreements
Legislation (e.g. Data Protection Act)
Technical issues (e.g. data is non-standard format)
Policy on sharing with for profit organisations etc
Permissions Scope Free Offering Organisational Restrictions

Creating an Open Metadata Strategy Choices
In opening our data we had the following objectives:
To try and break out of library specific formats (e.g. MARC) and use more cross domain XML based structures (DC, RDF etc)
To develop the formats with the communities using them
To adopt a multi track approach including traditional libraries, researchers and linked data
To try and get some form of attribution but to also use the form of licensing most appropriate to the wider use of our metadata
To come up with an affordable way of delivering the above

Creating an Open Metadata Strategy First Steps
During 2010 we :
Developed our capability to support non-library metadata standards used by the wider web community
Run free metadata trials with a range of partners including: LibraryThing community cataloguers, DCMS non-library developers, the UK Intellectual Property Office and UNESCO
Developed a free Z39.50 record download service for the library community to assist with derived cataloguing etc
Hosted a workshop on linked data with over 40 representatives from key international organisations involved in developing linked datasets and infrastructure

Creating an Open Metadata Strategy Current Status
Since our announcement in August we have:
Signed up over 200 organisations worldwide to our free MARC21 Z39.50 service
Begun working with other linked data implementers on technical challenges, standards and licensing issues
Created a new email enquiry point for BL metadata issues: [email_address]
Begun to offer our RDF/XML metadata under a CC0 license
Begun to supply 3 million record RDF/XML datasets to organisations including the Open Bibliography Project, the Open Library and Wikimedia

Creating an Open Metadata Strategy Next Steps
During the next 6 months we intend to:
Create a prototype version of our catalogue with embedded URIs to linked data resources including DBpedia for experimental use in linked data initiatives
Extend coverage of our RDF/XML data to non-book materials (e.g. maps , printed music etc)
Co-operate with JISC to encourage wider experimentation with new BL RDF/XML bibliographic metadata
Examine collaborative options for creating and presenting linked data resources (e.g. with German National Library).
Find out more about how people are beginning to use our data

The British Library
[email_address]

Opening Up The BL's Metadata

by nw13

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

2 Embeds 4

Statistics

Opening Up The BL’s Metadata Presentation Transcript

http://paper.li	3
https://si0.twimg.com	1