Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Acknowledgements
- About the authors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The open movement: its history and development
- 3 Copyright and licensing: a background
- 4 Open licensing: the logical option for cultural heritage
- Introduction to case studies
- 5 Small steps, big impact – how SMK became SMK Open
- 6 The British Library experience of open metadata licensing
- 7 Open policy and collaboration with Wikimedia at the National Library of Wales
- 8 Newcastle Libraries – the public library as a place to share culture
- 9 Developing open licensing at the National Library of Scotland
- 10 The Wellcome Library
- 11 Developing an open educational resources policy and open approaches to mitigate risk at University of Edinburgh
- 12 How to implement open licensing
- 13 Using and reusing openly licensed resources
- 14 Conclusion
- Index
6 - The British Library experience of open metadata licensing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Acknowledgements
- About the authors
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The open movement: its history and development
- 3 Copyright and licensing: a background
- 4 Open licensing: the logical option for cultural heritage
- Introduction to case studies
- 5 Small steps, big impact – how SMK became SMK Open
- 6 The British Library experience of open metadata licensing
- 7 Open policy and collaboration with Wikimedia at the National Library of Wales
- 8 Newcastle Libraries – the public library as a place to share culture
- 9 Developing open licensing at the National Library of Scotland
- 10 The Wellcome Library
- 11 Developing an open educational resources policy and open approaches to mitigate risk at University of Edinburgh
- 12 How to implement open licensing
- 13 Using and reusing openly licensed resources
- 14 Conclusion
- Index
Summary
The British Library and open bibliographic metadata
The British Library is the national library of the UK. Among its core responsibilities set out in the British Library Act 1972 is that of disseminating metadata describing its rich collections and UK publishing output since 1950 via the British National Bibliography (www.bl.uk/bibliographic/natbib.html). This requirement resulted in the Library offering bibliographic metadata services from its foundation. These services were originally operated commercially and were primarily aimed solely at the library community. However, in 2010 the British Library began to develop an open metadata strategy in response to calls from the UK government, such as Putting the Frontline First, which encouraged increased access to public sector data in order to promote transparency, economic growth and research. At the same time there was growing interest in the potential of linked data for improving reach to new users and exploiting new information sources. Such opportunities were felt compelling enough to warrant action despite the significant technical and licensing issues that needed to be addressed.
The new open metadata strategy aimed to remove constraints imposed by restrictive licensing and domain specific library standards (e.g. MARC21) and to develop new modes of access with communities using the metadata. It was believed that proactively enabling the reuse of metadata could increase its community value, improve access to information and culture, while reinforcing the relevance of libraries. However, in order to justify and sustain the initiative in a period of diminishing funding it was important to try to achieve institutional recognition via any licence model selected to support reuse. In addition, a number of risks required active management, notably:
• legal risks, for example complex copyright and licensing frameworks that require proactive management of derived metadata licensing to protect against possible liabilities
• reputational risks, for example possible perception that the British Library is not satisfying government and community expectations due to variant definitions of ‘open’ data.
Rather than create a targeted service that satisfied only one audience segment or a generic offering that risked satisfying none, a multi-track approach was adopted to address the requirements of three core user groups: researchers, linked data users and developers, and libraries.
Access, standards and licence options were then tailored to the specific needs of these groups.
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- Information
- Open Licensing for Cultural Heritage , pp. 111 - 118Publisher: FacetPrint publication year: 2017