Open Archives and Open Libraries

1. Open Archives and Open Libraries Thomas Krichel 2003-06-22

2. who am I? • I was an economist. • I was a leisure digital librarian. • NetEc 1993 • RePEc 1997 • I am a geek. • I am a visionary. • but not St. John the Baptist

3. Who is he?

4. St. IGNUicus • A humoristic creation of Richard M. Stallman (RMS) • RMS is the father of the free software movement • a geek • a visionary • St. IGNUicus shows an emphasis on the moral case for free software.

5. moral case and business case • Other folks in the free software movement stress the need to demonstrate the business case for free software. • They tend to avoid the word free, because free can mean cheap and cheap can mean bad. • They use the term "open source software".

6. RMS and us • Some of us are already developing and using free software. • I say: we librarians need to learn more from the free software movement. • We need to make the concepts coming of free software more a part of our business. • Let us look at a key concept: free software.

7. free software according to RMS • Free software comes with four freedoms • The freedom to run the software, for any purpose • The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor • The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits

8. free speech and free beer • Free software does not mean $0 • The term "free" in free software should be interpreted as "freedom to do things with it".

9. what has this to do with us? • Just replace free software with free information. • Libraries are about free information. • But the analogy is not quite as simple. • When we talk about free information, we usually mean things that we can freely read (download…). free as in: $0 • We do not usually mean free information as information we are free to do things with. Free as in freedom.

10. moral and business • There is a moral case for free information. • We rely on it. • There is a business case for free information. • We need to make our own.

11. we rely on the moral case • The citizen should be informed… • Individuals in the organization should have free access… • This is how we justify resources given to us. • Often, members of the community who pay get privileged access.

12. from moral case to business case • To form the business case for free information, think of "free information" as "freedom to do things" rather than $0. • Thus libraries can make a crucial business case for them as agents who transform information. • Recall that there are whole industries out there that produces free information.

13. was this seminar not about open archives? • Open archives are crucial tools for the development of libraries that transform freely available information. • By analogy to the term "open archives" I will say that the "libraries that transform freely available information" are "open libraries". These are usually digital libraries.

14. what are open archives • They are machines that may or may not store items. • Data or metadata records about these items is being made available through a machine interface. • One possible interface is defined OAI protocol for metadata harvesting. In the following I will be assuming that any open archive runs that protocol.

15. why do open archives matter • Open archives are specifically set up to allow machine readable access to information. • Thus presumably there is a permission to further process the information. "cogito, ergo sum" logic. • You may think about the act to establish an open archive as an early 3rd millennium digital ritual.

16. open archives and open libraries • In the early history of open archives, their main use is as metadata repositories. • We can build a simple open library by aggregating contents from many open archives. • But we can do more.

17. what do open libraries do? • Identify records found in open archives. • Relate identified records in open archives with each other. • These actions require human control.

18. example from RePEc • There are 300+ archives that contribute to RePEc data about publications. • That data has author name strings. • A special open archive furnishes access control records. These records lists author names and paper record identifiers of the papers the author wrote. • This is classic access control, but done by the authors. • An open archive exports the author data…

19. why do authors register? • Authors perceive the registration as a way to achieve common advertising for their papers. • Author records are used to aggregate usage logs across RePEc user services for all papers of an author. • Open archives at the RePEc user services export usage data.

20. open library idea: serials data • Serial level information is a crucial component of academic library data. • Idea: build and maintain free serial records. • Two ways to build: • Use volunteers and collect in a decentralized way. • Make an expensive central collection, disseminate well, charge $$$ for record changes later.

21. another open library idea: law • Much of the legal texts are de jure free. • De facto there are two companies who have comprehensive collections and charge a lot of money for the free information bundled with proprietary information. • Our moral case calls for a replacement! (it will also create jobs for us)

22. free legal open library • Have all laws and cases • online (open archives) • as text (open archives) • identified (open library) • Have citation metadata, so that legal citations can verified be while composing case data. • Registration procedure to verify the integrity of data.

23. open library idea II: drugs • Collect data on the composition of all drugs • drugs composition reported by drug companies, using open archives • drug components documented by the governments, using an open archive • Open library brings the two together!

24. Am I crazy? • Money does not make the world go round. Ideas do. • When RMS proposed a free replacement for UNIX in the early 80s, most people dismissed the idea. • Today it is reality! • Similarly, when I started to work on RePEc a totally free and improved A&I dataset in 1993, nobody gave it a high probability to succeed. • It will be a reality!

25. obstacles to open archives & open libraries • lack of imagination • lack of entrepreneurship • inability to form alliances • user-centered thinking • document-centered thinking • technical competence required • OAI PMH • XML and XML Schema • Unicode • the "C" word

26. what I do for open libraries • Create an open library for library science: the rclis (reckless) dataset. • Create a supporting organization: the open library society. • co-workers welcome!

27. conclusion • The open library is a business idea to move free information powered by libraries from the paper to the digital world. • Open archives are a sine qua non component of the business idea. • Open archives furnish information that we are free to further process (as opposed to consume).

28. http://openlib.org/home/krichel Thank you for your attention!