There are many such CC0 national bibliographies available, and other large datasets, if the decision is made to import them. See here for a list: http://datahub.io/group/bibliographic Here is a direct link to the British National Bibliography page: http://bnb.bl.uk/ For further information on the open bibliographic project and the principles of open bibliographic metadata, check here: http://openbiblio.net http://openbiblio.net/principles Mark MacGillivray On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 1:51 PM, David Cuenca <dacuetu(a)gmail.com> wrote:

If the problem is to automate bibliographic data importing, a solution is what you propose, to import everything. Another one is to have an import tool to automatically import the data for the item that needs it. In WP they do that, there is a tool to import book/journal info by ISBN/doi. The same can be done in WD. Micru On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Thomas Douillard < thomas.douillard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: -- Etiamsi omnes, ego non

Just found this thread while browsing my email archives (I'm/was inactive on Wikimedia for at least 2 years) IMHO will be very helpfull if a central place hosting metadata from digitized works will be created. In my past experience, I've found lots of PD-old books from languages like french, spanish and english in repositories from Brazil and Portugal, with UI mostly in portuguese (ie, with very low probabilities to get found by volunteers from subdomains from those languages), for example. I particularly loves validating metadata more than proofreading books. Perhaps a tool/place like this makes new ways to contribute to Wikisource and helps on user retention (based on some wikipedians that gets fun making good articles but loves also sometimes to simply make trivial changes on their spare time)? I know that the thread was focused on general metadata from all kinds and ages of books, but I had this idea while reading this [[:m:User:555]] On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 10:42 AM, Thomas Douillard < thomas.douillard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

There are reasons for editing and there are also reasons for not editing. One big reason *for* editing is if at any time data from new sources are being imported. We in Librarianship/Information Sciences makes decisions on how the data will be available to our users/customers. Eg an author name. There are many ways to write the same name from the same individual. The same individual can adopt in his life dozens of nicknames, change their last name if gets married and so on. The rule choosen in a particular library can be the same in more libraries, or even an entire different one (based on how the local community of users from a library will search/wants the data), or even no rule is choosen and the data is recorded "as is" it is registered in the publication. Some libraries have additional records specially devoted to the synonymies for the same name, some not. Google Book Search simply imported data from many libraries without making any attempt to standardize then, resulting in the large amount of duplicates and bullshits founds in some searches (specially those whose the imprints didn't standardizet themselves the data). Some special kinds of data from the same work can also be stored in differents sets of "fields" and "subfields" of MARC21 records across different libraries, again because the user/client need of informations about the works can vary from place to place (ie you get data duplication in the same record if you simple merge records from libraries). MARC21 specification have also an entire design that IMHO is impossible to reflect in the current MediaWiki schema, even with Semanctic MediaWiki. And sometimes some libraries tells that their data is stored on MARC21 fields, but are on USMARC ones (yep, there are many flavours of MARC as there are many flavors of Ubuntu). Or it is *based* on MARC21 fields, with dozens of local adaptions. I've just finished an internship in a library with 45k of records that was migrating data from REPIDISCA *based* fields (let's call it as a FreeBSD flavour) to MARC21 *based* fields (in this comparision, an Ubuntu flavour; and yep, *based*, with local adaptions, we needs those changes). The data is migrated in an automated fashion, but still needs to be validated record by record if the library wants those records in the MARC21 fields as it's. What I'm saying is: 1) You can't simply import data from many sources without validations expecting a good quality end product. You will get a "search engine" quality data (tons of random informations that will make sense only with a continuously developed set of algorithms maybe more time+resources consuming than standartizing the data); 2) Data standardize is an epic work dozens of times more epic than writing an comprehensive encyclopedia about all subjects on all languages. Institutional support will be needed, and in more compreensive ways embracing more than just releasing their data to play around it (ie, with additional hands for standardization). [[Paul Otlet]] (1868-1944) tried it in efforts that some argues he's the concept designer of Internet and hypertext. With no success, what is very unfortunate. Will the wikimedians gets any level of success on it? [[:m:User:555]] On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 9:59 PM, Denny Vrandečić &lt;vrandecic(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

2013/12/7 Federico Leva (Nemo) &lt;nemowiki(a)gmail.com&gt; It's a good idea to search cooperation with projects which shares the same goals as Mediawikis projects, and we probably would gain a lot to seek for integration with them. other p What is one of the big driving force of Wikidata is the community, which does a terrific wotk into cleaning the data and by interlinking identifiers. One if the big future work on Wikidata is about bibliographical datas, as Wikipedias and other projects are a huge consumer of such datas and other Wikimedia projects, including Wikidata itself which is not the smallest one. That's why I think we must do a lot more with such datas than just importing them from openlibrary, as they are really important to Mediawiki in general, and that the community as a whole is a powerful drinving force for Bibliographical datas. I'm not against cooperating with openlibrary, but we should seek deep cooperation and integration with them so both projects can benefits from each others community.

Due to weird reasons my message was sent only to wikidata-l. Re-sending to wikisource-l. Sorry for any inconvenience On Sun, Dec 8, 2013 at 2:04 AM, Luiz Augusto &lt;lugusto(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

+ for open library On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 4:01 PM, Andrea Zanni &lt;zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote:

Edward Summers, 09/12/2013 12:18: Definition of active? The fact that there's no software development/investment doesn't mean it's inactive. Are there stats on users activity there and can it be compared in some way to ours as regards that kind of data? Nemo

Andrea Zanni, 09/12/2013 12:40: I exhibit a counterexample: https://openlibrary.org/recentchanges shows at least 2 users editing in the last hour. Your lemma is disproven. ;-) Nemo

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 12:58 PM, Edward Summers &lt;ehs(a)pobox.com&gt; wrote: The main issue with OL is that its situation as entity is not clear. It is both part of IA and somewhat independent, but not integrated enough in IA nor independent enough to know in which direction is going. In an ideal world OL could run an instance of a Wikibase repo and use Wikidata entities whenever relevant (authors, locations, etc). I don't know if it would be possible for their wikii software to evolve in that direction, nor if there would be enough resources to do so, but if Commons is going to do just that, maybe it is possible for OL too? Using an OL dump loader seems the easiest for the time being. Cheers, Micru

This doesn't reflect my understanding of the situation at OpenLibrary. On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 5:31 AM, Andrea Zanni &lt;zanni.andrea84(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: Karen has worked for OpenLibrary in the past, but I don't know if she currently does and she's certainly not in charge. OpenLibrary is owned and funded by the Internet Archive (ie Brewster Kahle). It is funded at a much lower level than it has been historically I'm not sure I agree. There's a lot of good data in OpenLibrary, but there's also a lot of junk. Freebase imported a bunch of OpenLibrary data, after winnowing it to what they thought was the good stuff, and still ended up deleting a bunch of the supposedly "good" stuff later because they found their goodness criteria hadn't been strict enough. One of the reasons OpenLibrary is such a mess is because *they* arbitrarily imported junky data (e.g. Amazon scraped records). The last thing the world needs is more duplicate copies of random junk. We've already got the DPLA for that. :-) Another issue with the OpenLibrary metadata is that there's no clear license associated with it. IA's position is that they got it from wherever they got it from and you're own your own if you want to reuse it, which isn't very helpful. The provenance for major chunks of it is traceable and new stuff by users is nominally being contributed under CC0, so they could probably be sorted out with enough effort (although the same thing is true of the data quality issues too). If Ed Summers (or any other capable programmer) is going to sign up to solve this problem for you guys, I'm happy to help with my knowledge of the state of play, but it's a *very * sizeable project. Tom

Am 07.12.2013 15:34, schrieb Federico Leva (Nemo): +1 -- daniel -- Daniel Kinzler Senior Software Developer Wikimedia Deutschland Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V.