Rights Vocabulary for Digital Libraries

Since the Rights Element is my responsibility for our class project, I have been thinking about the appropriate language to use to make sure the information is both understandable and reasonably aligned with rights language in other digital libraries. I checked to see if there is a controlled vocabulary that we might use, but found that while much attention has been paid to structure and rules, actual right-hand-side standard terms don't seem to have one standard list. This list of licensing vocabulary from Center for Research Libraries has some useful terms, but it is mostly intended for licensing electronic resources such as databases, journals, and books. PRISM offers a very minimal list of right terms.  Creative Commons provides a clearer set of terminology, adapted for RDF, and several linked data licensing vocabularies are rounded up on this handy site.

For our project, keeping it simple will probably be the best course of action, but it is interesting to see how this might be handled in a linked data environment--and to realize how important proper encoding of rights data could be in an environment where the images in your digital library could be linked to outside resources in unexpected or imagined ways.

Linked Data, BIBFRAME, and search

This week's reading included several interesting articles on linked data and libraries, including this Library Journal blog post by Enis, this post by Owens, this post by O'Dell, and this article by Gonzales. All of these articles contained similar themes regarding the need to move away from the inflexible MARC format and toward something more amenable to web searching.  Some of the problems with current library catalogs include archaic search interfaces, record formats unfriendly to web-based and other "non-print" resources, and their invisibility to search engines.

The hope for BIBFRAME is that it would provide a way forward from MARC and allow library collections to be linked in intuitive and useful ways, so that authors, for example, might be linked not just to their works but perhaps also to members of their social group and events of the time and place where they lived. Perhaps a Google search would be able to easily connect potential users to the nearest available copies of a given book.

All of this is very exciting, and every indication is that this concept, or some aspect of it, will become a Real Thing in the next several years. However, I confess to a little skepticism as to how this will play out in actual practice.  For a shared catalog system, among libraries in a system, consortium, regional area, perhaps the world, this could solve a lot of "shared collection" needs.  Doing a Google search for something and getting a book from your local library in the top results would be pretty cool.

However, for general web searching, I worry about electronic resources and the issue of authentication and restricted, licensed access. Getting inaccessible results in a Google search quickly dilutes its usefulness, so how, then, does the search handle this?  Are the library's results pushed down in relevance or relegated to a "library" silo or special search (like Google Books, perhaps)? Does frustration with licensed access increase the push for Open Access?  Or will most of the licensed resources be sufficiently obscure that the main recipients of those results likely be academics with ways of attaining access? Google already includes some licensed content in its regular search results, with some ways of authenticating users by IP address (I believe it does this with Elsevier ScienceDirect content), but it doesn't yet do this on the scale proposed by BIBFRAME. It will be interesting follow this over the next several years!

Expanding linked data: Why isn't this done?

JPow asks an excellent question in his LS blog:  Why can't citation data (cited and cited by) be included in surrogate records?

I'm going to talk about this in terms of discovery layers rather than online catalogs, because online catalogs are typically very basic, MARC-based software that is fading rapidly into the background of library systems.

I think that JPow's concept could be implemented using a combination of CrossRef, Web of Science, and Scopus -- a terrific idea, and one that is implemented already to some degree, in some discovery systems, but definitely not to any universal extent.

What's the catch? I suspect that it's mostly about money and proprietary data. Citation indexes like Web of Science and Scopus are very expensive to maintain, and very big money makers for the companies that own them. They are willing to share basic indexing and citation metadata with the discovery services, but part of the agreement is that libraries must ALSO have licensed the databases separately before they are allowed to see results from those databases included in the discovery layer, and even then much of the "secret sauce" of citation tracing and other advanced functionality isn't included. (In fairness, quite a bit of this wouldn't easily translate to the simpler discovery interface.)

What I haven't seen implemented yet is CrossRef, and that has interesting potential. I think that one catch there is that it tends to be implemented as part of the full text of articles, in the references section. That section of the full text would perhaps have to be separated in some way and included in the metadata stored by the discovery service. I think that's possible, though I don't know if any systems are doing it currently.  I think authentication could be the other tricky piece, since CrossRef links directly through DOI.  This isn't a huge issue for on-campus users (who are generally authenticated by IP address) but directing off-campus users through the right hoops (proxy server, Shibboleth, etc.) is a potential hurdle.

I did check my library's discovery system (ProQuest Summon) and found that it offers our users "People who read this journal article also read" article links attached to records it gets from Thomson Reuters Web of Science. On the other hand, it doesn't offer any extra links for records it gets from Elsevier (ScienceDirect and Scopus). We see the Web of Science information because we've separately licensed those indexes from Thomson Reuters, and that means Summon is "allowed" to show us those records. We don't see the citation links from Scopus because we haven't licensed that product, so Summon isn't allowed to present any results from that dataset. I also find it interesting that Web of Science appears to share usage-based metadata but is not sharing citation-based metadata; I'm guessing maybe they see that as potentially too cannibalistic to their own service.

So, the short answer? JPow is asking for a rabbit, yes, and it's not from a hat, but from a deep and twisty rabbit hole. I don't think it's asking too much, though I do think it would be expensive.