Paul Stainthorp Schrödinger's cataloguer

This is what the CLOCK project team are currently up to (from meetings over the past couple of weeks and from notes made at the recent “Discovery: making sure your resources are discovered, used and reused“ event in Birmingham):

• Andrew Beeken has been exploring the Cambridge COMET data via its SPARQL endpoints and has already blogged about the process of using SPARQL to “build kind of a ‘Hello World’ of open data querying”. He’s now looking at the recently-released Harvard open bib data and comparing the speed, the use of matching namespaces, and the use of JSON vs RDF/XML.
• This work is leading up to unified search and presentation of records from several sources (Cambridge/COMET, Harvard, Lincoln/Jerome, OpenLibrary, etc.). Andrew and Trevor Jones are collaborating on drawing up a high-level architecture for CLOCK, and a strategy for expressing Linked Data, which will be shared with the rest of the project team (and publicly) for discussion.
• To support this, Alex Bilbie in ICT services at Lincoln is helping to get the original Jerome application up and running on the CLOCK server (jerome.library.lincoln.ac.uk), where it can be used as a stable platform for developing and RDF-ifying Lincoln’s own bib data.
• Trevor Jones and Ed Chamberlain will work together on developing the work with users (in parallel, at the University of Lincoln and the University of Cambridge) to clarify their requirements for bibliographic data:
• For cataloguers, based around a rethink of copy cataloguing workflows, we will try to tease out requirements from talking to cataloguers (and associated subject librarians) asking to be ‘positively disrupted’: what do they need to do? What is missing from their data?
• For researchers, we will build on some initial user walkthrough analysis done by Trevor and Andrew in Lincoln, with performing arts students in LPAC (the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre). What are the research questions that users are trying to answer? How does bib data help them answer those questions? What’s missing? Ed and Trevor will agree on a set of questions and tasks;
• These requirements will be used to feed the remainingcycles of platform development for CLOCK.
• Ed Chamberlain will act as the conduit between CLOCK and related projects in the Discovery strand, looking for points of shared interest/technology, and blogging (or asking others to blog) about aspects of one project which can inform the others. The other projects in which Ed is involved are: the Open Education Metadata UK (OEM-UK) project at the Institute of Education (shared interest in new user interfaces for cataloguing – possibly use screencasts to demonstrate alternative workflows?) and the Open Bibliography 2 project (lots of potential technical overlap – BibJSON, JSON-LD, BibSoup.net, expression in RDF container formats).
• Ed and I (Paul Stainthorp) will work on developing the ‘business case’ / sustainability of CLOCK and data.*.ac.uk, following up on themes discussed in the recent Discovery event, and thinking not only about institutional funding / high-level support for open bib data, but also what it takes to move open bib data publishing from a development environment into an institutionally-supported, ICT-run service.
• Finally, PS is arranging a couple of internal CLOCK ‘hack days’ (to take place on 17th-18th May, in Cambridge) – more details to follow.