Month: January 2008

CLADDIER Final Report

I just ran across the final report from the CLADDIER project. CLADDIER comes from the JISC and stands for “CITATION, LOCATION, And DEPOSITION IN DISCIPLINE & INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES”. I suspect JISC has an entire department dedicated to creating impossible acronyms (the JISC Acronym Preparation Executive?)
Anyhoo- the report describes a distributed citation location and updating service based on the linkback mechanism that is widely used in the blogging community.
I think this is an interesting approach and is one that I talked about briefly (PDF) at the UKSG’s Measure for Measure seminar last June. I think that, like most proponents of p2p distributed architectures, they massively underestimate the problem of trust in the network. They fully knowledge the problem of linkback spam, but their hand-wavy-solution(tm) of using whitelists just means the system effectively becomes semi-centralized again (you have to have trusted keepers of the whitelists).
And of course I was mildly exasperated by the report’s characterization of one of the perceived “disadvantages” of the CrossRef architectural model being a :

“Centralised service hosting a large persistent store – with the need for a (possibly commercial) business model to justify providing the service.”

Though DOI registries like Bowker and Nielsen Bookdata are commercial, CrossRef, the organization that services the industry that the JISC is concerned with, is *not* a commercial service.
Also if you replaced the phrase “justify providing” with the word “sustain”, the sentence wouldn’t sound like such a “disadvantage.”
But aside from these quibbles, the report makes an interesting (if technical) read.

BISG Paper on Identifying Digital Book Content

BISG and BIC have published a discussion paper called “The identification of digital book content” – http://www.bisg.org/docs/DigitalIdentifiers_07Jan08.pdf. The paper discusses ISBN, ISTC and DOI amongst other things and makes a series of recommendations which basically say to consider applying DOI, ISBN and ISTC to digital book content. The paper highlights in a positive way that DOI and ISBN are different but can work together (the idea of the “actionable ISBN” and aiding discovery of content). However, it doesn’t go into much depth on any of the issues or really explain how all these identifiers would work together and the critical role that metadata plays.
Nevertheless it’s great that the paper has been put forward as a discussion document – CrossRef plans to respond and be part of the ongoing discussion in this area.