Announcing Our Open Metadata Principles
As part of their commitment to Discovery: A metadata ecology for UK education and research, the Resource Discovery Task Force partners are inviting stakeholders across the UK libraries, archives and museums (LAM) community to join them in adopting a set of principles to enhance the impact of our knowledge resources for the furtherance of scholarship and innovation.
The RDTF partners will launch a 'call to arms' in London on 26th May based on three core statements:
- We recognise the importance of promoting a clear endorsement of open metadata with practical guidance about licensing.
- We recommend that institutions and agencies should proceed on the presumption that their metadata is by default made freely available for use and reuse, unless explicitly precluded by third party rights or licences.
- We strongly advocate that all metadata releases require licensing, for which institutions and agencies should adopt a standard open licensing framework that is suited to their purposes.
The 'call to arms' (which has 10 key points) is intended to be of value to institutions and agencies in the LAM sectors, increasing their confidence and motivation to enact these principles, to enquire further or to put them on their agenda.
Over the coming months, it is hoped that other institutions, large and small, will sign up to the statement, indicating that they support the principles and that they are committed to enacting them in appropriate areas of their work. Others will have their interest triggered and will be encouraged seek clarification or pass it on to the right person in their organization.
To enable that process, supporting material will be available at: http://discovery.ac.uk/principles
