Contributing your data - but at what cost?
Next week on 9th May, Talis is running its 5th Research Day event. It will be focussing on the building of applications for resource discovery and sharing. And happily I can say that there will be a sizeable representation from other LMS vendors who have been invited to participate.
Having spent some time recently with our Live Services Team hearing about the problems libraries are encountering in making data contributions to the Platform, I hope the theme of the day will be around collaboration. It has become pretty clear that there has to be a community effort in recognising that freeing a library's data to enable it to participate in innovation and raise library awareness is key.
The biggest barrier for many libraries in participating is the cost of doing a data export. We're pretty relaxed about the formats that we take contributions in because we're trying to remove barriers to contributing wherever we can. But we had to draw the line recently when asked if we could accept a contribution of ISBNs that were handwritten. The cost of paying vendors for export scripts is regularly cited as a reason for not participating, which means that libraries' data remains locked away.
I really hope that we can have a good discussion with the LMS vendors who are attending about this, and I also hope that we can agree to try and collaborate on some kind of agreement that tackles this issue, because if we can, we could move to a point very quickly where the cost to a library of contributing data is removed completely. Which is a far cry from the situation that some libraries find themselves in, where many of them are paying to make their data accessible up to three times over.
Firstly, by having to pay their LMS vendors for the appropriate export script to get their data out of the system (as already discussed).
Secondly, by having to pay to contribute their data to a catalogue. Others have commented on this issue recently here and here. So, I don't intend to say anymore than that, other than making a data contribution to the Platform remains a free activity, and we'll try and load pretty much any electronic format you can give us.
Thirdly by having to pay a subscription to look-up the data. As many of you know, we've made look-up of bibliographic and holdings data in the Platform a free activity, providing the library makes a commitment to contribute its holdings at least once during the course of a year.
So, if we can just get our heads together on a protocol for making data exports a charge-free activity, then cost can cease to be an issue for libraries wishing to make their data work for them. Let's hope I have some good news to report on this after next week's event.
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