There is a great deal of freely-available data which may be useful to add to your local VuFind® instance. Authority records from large organizations and standards bodies can help augment your index with cross-references, and Open Access publications can expand the collection that you present to your users. This page links to a variety of open resources that you might find useful, most of which can be harvested and ingested using standard VuFind® tools. Feel free to add new sources as you find them.

• OCLC FAST - free, general purpose authority data for names, subjects and more
• MeSH - medical subject headings

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• InTech Open - metadata about open access eBooks in the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine
• Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)
• PubMed Central OAI Service - metadata from the PubMed Central archive

There has been some discussion about building a shared VuFind index of open content. This is an ambitious project that is currently just in the idea stage. Feel free to comment on the JIRA ticket if you have thoughts on the subject.

A special request: please state which sources you know of (that implement OIA-PMH, that have records that can be bulk downloaded or websites that have a sitemap.xml – although others should be possible to be added, crawling them and generating a sitemap.xml via specific software or services like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com) and would like to be analyzed and possible XSLT files generated to import their records into VuFind.

Please refer them (including their info URL, if possible), as a comment in the dedicated JIRA ticket, mentioned above. Thanks!

Bibliographic and/or usage|circulation data

This service, courtesy of the North Rhine-Westphalian Library Service Center, provides shareable bibliographic data in linked-data format. As if this writing, VuFind does not include tools to ingest this data, but it may be worth investigating in the future.

“LibraryCloud is an open, multi-library data service that aggregates and delivers library metadata. We hope it will serve as a platform for the development of Web applications that help all library users (including scholars and re-searchers) find and understand materials.”

“(LibraryCloud) It's a metadata server. It gathers up metadata - information about information - from libraries, museums, and other participating institutions, and makes that metadata available to any application that wants to use it.”

… more info here.

“Amazon.ca has a “customers who bought this item also bought” feature that recommends things to you that you might be interested in. LibraryThing has it too: the recommendations for What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies include books by Margaret Laurence, Carol Shields, Michael Ondaatje, Peter Ackroyd, John Fowles, and David Lodge, as well as other Davies works.

Library catalogues don't have any such feature, but they should. And libraries are sitting on the circulation and usage data that makes it possible. (BiblioCommons does have a Similar Titles feature, but it's a closed commercial product aimed at public libraries, and anyway the titles are added by hand.)

SPLURGE will collect usage data from OCUL members and build a recommendation engine that can be integrated into any member's catalogue. The code will be made available under the GNU Public License and the data will be made available under an open data license.”

Our thanks to William Denton (Toronto, Canada) for let us know about this project, and the shared info about it, in vufind-tech Mailling List.

… more info here.

Linked Open Data (LOD), that may be considered as part of the Open Data Movement (which aims at making data freely available to everyone) and could be described as a “recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF” (source), has recently gained prominence in many (Digital) Libraries and Archives events and related discussions.

The recent Tech Trifecta series of conferences' (that took place at Villanova University's Falvey Memorial Library, home of VuFind) presentations and discussions, namely at VuFind Summit 2012, were a major example that LOD is currently a hot issue and gathers the interest of many institutions. This section presents some selected LOD resources (information, presentations, etc.). Please feel free to add or correct the entries as needed.

Linked Open Data: The Essentials - Semantic Web Company (PDF);

LinkingOpenData - W3C SWEO (Semantic Web Education and Outreach) Community Project;

Linked Data - Connect Distributed Data across the Web;

LODLAM - Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives & Museums;

Europeana Linked Open Data (LOD) | promotional video;

Linked Open Data publication guide (PDF), “report on how to select appropriate encoding strategies for producing Linked Open Data (LOD) enabled bibliographical data” (LODE-BD Recommendations 2.0).

Bibliographic Framework Initiative Approach for MARC Data as Linked Data, Sally H. McCallum, Library of Congress;

Forging links while breaking shackles: Open & Linked Data and the British Library, Brenda Young, British Library.

A pragmatic usage of LOD within VuFind would be using it as a feasible, light weight alternative to have a shared/common index of open content (mentioned above / please refer to VUFIND-570 JIRA ticket).

By implementing mechanisms for exposing and harvesting social metadata, VuFind installations would be able not only to share their own UGC (User Generated Content / social metadata) but also to collect social metadata from specific VuFind installations. Please refer to 2012-11-13 developers call’ minutes for some initial thoughts about this approach.

Related information / projects:

• OCLC Research: Sharing and Aggregating Social Metadata (web page), by the Social Metadata Working Group;

• Open Annotation Collaboration;

• International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies.