2 research outputs found
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Building an Open Dissemination System
COPIM's Work package 5 (WP5) is developing technical protocols and infrastructure to better integrate OA books into institutional library, digital learning, and repository systems. This will support wider discovery and dissemination of OA books. Existing print and ebook distribution channels are difficult for new or OA publishers to engage with, requiring submission of metadata in multiple different formats (e.g. MARC, ONIX, KBART), and many platforms requiring multiple different metadata submissions; In addition, existing distribution channels are not well suited to OA content, while entirely new discovery and dissemination platforms are emerging (e.g. Google Books/Scholar).
Guided by the perspective of new and emerging not-for-profit OA presses that have not yet been sufficiently integrated into existing discovery systems, knowledge bases, and supply routes, the aim of WP5 is to develop methods and systems to better integrate the catalogues of OA publishers into curated research records. The implementation of “best practices” workflows for OA book publishers will allow their catalogues to be better integrated into the scholarly record (discoverability, reach, persistence), increasing the impact of OA books.
WP5 will build an Open Dissemination System (ODS) for OA books and a shared “best practices” digital catalogue. The ODS will be built as a decentralised system, using open source code, open protocols and standards and distributed databases—all under collective control. Doing so will ensure the system cannot be operated for the benefit of a single entity (either commercial or not). The ODS is currently under development under the project name Thoth. It consists of a metadata management system and a suite of exporting functions to allow publication metadata to be exported to all main metadata formats and data transfer with all relevant major platforms in the library and book selling supply chain.
This scoping report is a key deliverable of WP5, in order to support the creation of the ODS. The report itself will discuss the distribution of books via the traditional library supply and new forms of digital dissemination before looking at metadata in depth. Metadata creation and types will be investigated in order to form a number of key recommendations for WP5. These recommendations are noted throughout the report before being grouped and discussed further in the recommendation section (see 9.0).
Rather than publishing this report at the outset of the work package, it was decided to publish a time-stamped version, while simultaneously continuing to develop the report as the project progressed over time, and to encourage comment from the community. Version 1.0 of this report is available here and on Zenodo as a PDF (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3961564), and on the COPIM documentation site as a living document
User conceptualizations of derivative relationships in the bibliographic universe
Purpose: Considerable effort is devoted to developing new models for organizing bibliographic metadata. However, such models have been repeatedly criticized for their lack of proper user testing. This paper presents a study on how non-experts in bibliographic systems map the bibliographic universe and, in particular, how they conceptualize relationships between independent but strongly related entities.
Methodology: The study is based on an open concept-mapping task performed to externalize the conceptualizations of 98 novice students. The conceptualizations of the resulting concept maps are identified and analyzed statistically.
Findings: The study shows that the participants’ conceptualizations have great variety, differing in detail and granularity. These conceptualizations can be categorized into two main groups according to derivative relationships: those that apply a single-entity model directly relating document entities and those (the majority) that apply a multi-entity model relating documents through a high-level collocating node. These high-level nodes seem to be most adequately interpreted either as superwork devices collocating documents belonging to the same bibliographic family or as devices collocating documents belonging to a shared fictional world.
Value: The findings can guide the work to develop bibliographic standards. Based on the diversity of the conceptualizations, the findings also emphasize the need for more user testing of both conceptual models and the bibliographic end-user systems implementing those models