Last Thursday we had a Workshop on Open Bibliographic Data and the Public Domain in Berlin (as we blogged about here and here).

It was a great opportunity for movers and shakers from the world of open bibliographic data to meet in person, and to discuss various projects, policies, standards and initiatives relating to making data from libraries and other organisations available for anyone to reuse. The meeting was also helpful to join the dots between those working on bibliographic data, and those working on the public domain – especially in relation to work on the public domain calculators.

For anyone who couldn’t make it, you can now see:

• Notes from the workshop are now available on the following Etherpad: http://okfnpad.org/pdobd
• Some photos are available here.
• A new document giving a brief overview of work on the public domain calculators is available at: http://wiki.okfn.org/PublicDomainCalculators/About
• We created a spreadsheet listing information required to determine copyright status in the UK (in a perfect world), and cross referencing this with an overview of where this information might be obtained from existing (open) data sets. The spreadsheet is available here (or via the short URL http://tinyurl.com/pdodpcalc).

Planned future activities include:

• Workshop/hack day on open bibliographic data in the UK in Spring 2011.
• A brisk set of legal/technical principles for opening up bibliographic data (a bit like the Panton Principles for open data in science).
• Work on bibliographic data tools for Wikipedia.
• Work to link lists of public domain works (e.g. publicdomainworks.net) to copies/versions of public domain works (e.g. MusOpen, Librivox, Project Gutenberg, and so on).
• Continued work on new services using and building on open bibliographic data, such as Bibliographica.
• Further technical work to integrate various existing open bibliographic data projects.

If you are interested in keeping in touch with ongoing work in these areas, you can join the following two lists:

• Open bibliographic data:
  • Mailing list: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-bibliography
  • Working group: http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/bibliography
• Public domain:
  • Mailing list: http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/pd-discuss
  • Working group: http://wiki.okfn.org/wg/publicdomain

Here is a preview of the spreadsheet:

And following are a few photos:

Jonathan Gray

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Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.

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