Who controls bibliographic control? - open data as strategy in a cloud enviroment

Anders Söderbäck

The new generation of library systems are being marketed as cloud based, and sold as services rather than products. The systems, be them link resolvers, ERMs, discovery platforms or something else still hiding behing the horizon, have in common that they rely on large aggregations of (meta-)data. In such a cloud environment, the term ”bibliographic control” might refer to the ability to control the means of aggregation rather than making controlled descriptions.

The current interest among libraries in technologies such as Linked data is an example of working with library data from this point of view. On the other hand, the increasing reliance on large-scale data providers suggest a risk handing over control of the bibliographic ecosystem to one or a few global organizations. If the internet business ecosystem, as Tim O’Reilly have suggested, ”can be seen as a competition to establish monopolies over various classes of data”, is it even possible to avoid a global monopoly on library metadata? 

This presentation suggests that working with open data on both a practical/technical level and a legal level provides a working strategy to utilize the good parts of web-scale data management while limiting the negative aspects of monopoly and vendor lock-in.

elag2011_Soderback (122,6 MB)

elag2011_Soderback.m4v (81,54 MB)