For UW-Madison General Library System Liaison Forum, 16 June 2010.

1. Open Sesame!
(and other open movements)
Dorothea Salo
Photo: Reinante el Pintor de Fuego, Liaison Forum
http://www.flickr.com/photos/reinante/4484083990/ June 2010

2. Goals
• Disambiguate jargon
• ... there’s a lot of it, and it’s often used wrongly
• (including by librarians, which makes us look uninformed)
• Point out the plays and the players
• especially here at UW-Madison, and in the Libraries
• Explain what I do and why
• “What do you do all day?” I get that a lot.
• This is a problem for me, because I can’t do what I do
effectively all by myself. I need help!
• Suggest opportunities
Photo: Daquella manera, http://www.flickr.com/photos/daquellamanera/355061741/

3. Points to ponder
• What opportunities do these movements
present us?
• ... to educate
• ... to collect
• ... to preserve
• ... to help ourselves and our patrons?
• What obligations do we have?
• ... to educate
• ... to support
• ... to collect
• ... to preserve
• What actions should we be taking?
Photo: striatic, http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/2144933705/

4. For each “open”
• What is being made open?
• as opposed to what?
• and why?
• How?
• What intellectual-property regimes are implicated?
• What obstacles present themselves?
• What different kinds of open are there in this space?
• For you to decide: why do we care?
Photo: indigoprime, http://www.flickr.com/photos/indigoprime/2425393185/

5. Open source
Image: Patrick Hoesly, http://www.zooboing.com/

6. Open source SOFTWARE
• “Source code” is the human-readable
programs that humans write.
• Computers can’t directly understand most
source code. It is therefore “compiled” into
“binary code,” which is computer-readable
but not human-readable.
• If all you have is binary code, you can’t tell
what the programmer did.
• Moreover, most software sales conditions
forbid “reverse-engineering” binary code.

7. How to open your source
• License it (why? copyright!)
• GNU General Public License (GPL): has a share-alike
sting in its tail
• BSD License: share-alike not required
• Others: Mozilla license, Artistic License, more
• Make the source available online
• It’s polite to provide compiled binaries too, but you don’t
have to.
• That’s it!
• ... sort of. Most serious open-source projects have
organizations (and their overhead) behind them.

8. Open source here
• Desktop
• Firefox/Thunderbird
• Library-specific
• Forward: built on Ruby, Solr, Lucene, Blacklight
• MINDS@UW: runs on DSpace, Postgres
• The new digital library: will run on Fedora Commons
• Anybody use MarcEdit?
• Infrastructure
• Websites: Apache web server
• Databases: MySQL, Postgres
• Programming languages: Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP
• There’s probably more. What did I miss?

9. Open standards
Photo: idealisms, http://www.flickr.com/photos/ponderer/4356051336/

10. Specs, not source!
• A STANDARD way of doing things, like...
• ... cataloging books and journals
• ... making web pages
• ... making fasteners, railroads, electrical connections
• An open standard, ideally:
• can be read and implemented by all
• does not fall afoul of patents or copyrights
• is created by consensus of interested parties

11. Library-related standards
• MARC, of course, and RDA
• ... but RDA is pay-to-read!
• Dublin Core
• Built on XML: MODS, METS, EAD, etc.
• PDF, sort of
• there is an ISO standard for PDF, but not all PDFs
conform to it
• EPUB: for ebooks
• We also use other people’s standards
• When feasible, using a standard is ALWAYS preferable to
building one’s own. Why? Interoperability.

12. Open access
(this is what I do all day)

13. Free the literature!
• Authors aren’t paid to write journal articles.
Peer reviewers aren’t paid to review them.
Most editors aren’t paid to acquire them.
• So why do they cost so much to read?
• Maybe, now that we have the Internet,
there are other ways to create, manage,
and disseminate the journal literature
without making everyone pay to read it.
• This is the core of the Open Access idea.

14. Green and gold
• Green: Repositories
• Discipline-based: arXiv, SSRN
• Institutional/consortial: MINDS@UW
• Gold: Open-access journals
• Library examples: D-Lib, Ariadne, JEP, RUSQ, JoDI
• (Interesting halfway-point: C&RL posting preprints)
• Various ways libraries can support these! Memberships,
help with author fees, in-house publishing platforms,
including them in library catalogs, promoting them, etc.

15. Gratis and libre
• Gratis: You can read it for free. Anything
else, you better ask permission.
• Libre: With credit given, OK to text-mine,
re-catalog, mirror for preservation, quote,
remix, whatever.
• Most OA is gratis. You get to “libre” via
Creative Commons licensing, usually.

16. Challenge: sustainability
• Green OA
• What faculty post to the web has a bad habit of
disappearing. Or being illegal. They’re not preservationists
or copyright lawyers.
• In the last year or so, two disciplinary repositories folded:
DList and Mana’o. Neither had contingency plans.
• arXiv is looking for monetary support.
• Some IRs (including MINDS@UW) have been threatened
with defunding or closure.
• Gold OA
• Who pays? From which budgets?
• Who gives in-kind support?

17. Open access here
• OA author-fee fund
• OA memberships and other support
• PLoS, BioMed Central, etc.
• OA journal platform
• Illuminations, Journal of Insect Science, Screen Dance
• MINDS@UW
• I would LOVE MINDS@UW to move past its current
passive collection model. I can’t do that alone.
• So, what digital materials are produced by your
departments that we should collect and preserve?
• This is not a question that I can or should answer for
you. I am not a liaison librarian or collection developer!

18. A challenge
• What do we want?
• How are we going to get it?
• I am here to help answer the technical aspects of this
question! That’s my job!
• Be aware that I don’t have digitization capacity, however.
I’m looking for the born-digital!

19. Some similar “opens”
• Open educational resources
• e.g. MIT Open CourseWare, iTunes U
• “Gratis” vs. “libre” very salient here; few want to reuse
educational resources unchanged
• Creative Commons cuts through the tangle!
• Open textbooks
• “Open content” generally
• cf the “Free Culture” movement

20. Open data
Image: Juhan Sonin, http://www.flickr.com/photos/juhansonin/3047499844/

21. Open research data
• Some disciplines have always been data
sharers: e.g. astronomy.
• Others are coming to it: e.g. genomics.
• Some journals and grant funders are
starting to insist on open data.
• Reproducibility, fraud avoidance
• No more Climategates!
• Faster, better, more collaborative science
• Sustainability? Standards? Preservation? Good question.

22. Open government data
• Governments produce a LOT of data.
• GIS
• Demographic
• Economic
• They’re starting to release it into the wild.
• Many levels, not just federal!
• Mashups, mashups everywhere!
• Tremendous research potential
• ... if researchers know where to find it
• ... and if reuse privileges are clear
• ... and they know what to do once they’ve found it

23. Techie bits
• Intellectual-property situation
• Data, as facts, are not copyrightable in the US...
• ... but as compilations, they MIGHT be...
• ... and images probably are...
• ... and the situation is different overseas. ARGH.
• Best recommendation: waive all applicable rights.
• http://pantonprinciples.org/
• “Linked data”
• In essence, publishing data in such a way as to make it
easier for other people to work with.
• For now, linked data = RDF

24. Open data here
• WisconsinView aerial/satellite photos:
http://wisconsinview.org/
• Lakeshore Nature Preserve project
• Oral histories
• There’s probably more. What did I miss?

25. Open notebook
science
Photo: mrbill, http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrbill/3483411540/

26. Opening the process
• Experiment records have been kept in
notebooks on paper. Which is fine, but...
• Where can you store them, and for how long?
• How easy is it to find records from years back?
• How auditable and complete are they?
• How does this even WORK in collaborative science?
• So even lab notebooks are moving online.
• Yes, in the teeth of “scooping” fears.
• Additional functionality and ease of collaboration are
major drivers.
• Extra attention doesn’t hurt either!

27. The table!
Notebook
Open... Source Access Data
Science
Research and Scientific
What? Software Journal literature
government data process
GPL-style vs.
Green/Gold
What kinds? BSD-style
Gratis/Libre
licensing
Open-access
License Waiving rights
journals
copyrights to all where applicable Web-based lab
How? Open-access
comers (GPL, Producing “linked notebooks
repositories
BSD, etc.) data”
Licenses

28. Thank you!
This presentation is available under a Creative
Commons 3.0 United States license.
All photographs from Flickr, via CC-BY licenses. If
you use these slides, please keep the photo credits!

29. Points to ponder
• What opportunities do these movements
present us?
• ... to educate
• ... to collect
• ... to preserve
• ... to help ourselves and our patrons?
• What obligations do we have?
• ... to educate
• ... to support
• ... to collect
• ... to preserve
• What actions should we be taking?
Photo: striatic, http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/2144933705/