Paul Stainthorp Schrödinger's cataloguer

The University of Lincoln’s Jerome project finished in August with the successful release of more than 240,000 openly-licensed bibliographic records, available over developer APIs, and a joint hack day with Cambridge University Library‘s COMET project.

Now, encouraged by positive JISC feedback, both institutions—Cambridge and Lincoln jointly—have applied for follow-up project funding under the project title CLOCK. If our bid is successful, the new project will run between December 2011–July 2012, employing a web developer based at the University of Lincoln, and distilling the work of both institutions into the development of new innovative library metadata discovery services for the scholarly community.

You can read the project proposal for CLOCK at http://lncn.eu/ijt4 – the introductory section is below.

The University of Lincoln and Cambridge University Library both delivered successful projects (Jerome and COMET) for the JISC Infrastructure for Resource Discovery Programme in 2011. This is a proposal for the continuation of and elaboration upon the work of both projects, via a programme of development work shared between the two institutions.

Throughout both projects (COMET-Jerome), parallel approaches in technology and data structure were noted and commented upon. A ‘mash day’ workshop event held in Cambridge in August aimed to explore these differences as well as areas of potential synergy. Here project members identified several points of interest to take forward.

Both projects produced outputs of interest to researchers, students, librarians, developers, and designers of bibliographic discovery environments. The CLOCK project will harness the success of these two complementary initiatives and investigate new approaches to data creation and discovery in the library domain. In particular, it will investigate, propose, and develop new, web-based bibliographic tools/APIs which will make it easier for developers, academic libraries and library end-users (esp. researchers) to find Open Bibliographic Data and incorporate that data into systems and workflows.

This project is an opportunity to [1] exploit through real-world applications the significant amount of data released openly by Cambridge University Library; [2] apply the Jerome database architecture, iterative development methodology, and API framework to a bibliographic dataset an order of magnitude greater than the University of Lincoln’s; and [3] to build and enable a new set of tools and demonstrator services which will enable the future development of public Open Bib Data web applications of practical utility to libraries and end-users.

The project will be supported by library consultant Owen Stephens, who will help to put the work into a national context, relating CLOCK to the wider movement toward Open Bib Data and the work of the JISC Discovery initiative. It will take place in an environment (Lincoln/Cambridge) where a culture of developer inquiry and experimentation is encouraged and nurtured. It is also endorsed by senior library management at both universities.

Both universities are involved in complementary development work which will  both inform and be informed by CLOCK: at Cambridge, Ed Chamberlain is guiding the development of the JISC Open Bibliography 2 project; in Lincoln, Paul Stainthorp is lead researcher on the #jiscmrd Orbital project, which is investigating the management of research data, with some areas of overlap.

CLOCK will operate as part of the wider JISC Digital Infrastructure: Information and library infrastructure: Resource discovery, and support the recent concerted effort to move toward openly licensed library discovery in UK Higher Education and beyond.