Library Carpentry and the Bibliographic Data Universe: What Librarians Can Do with Open Data

Abstract

This study emphasizes the significance of open data in libraries and the necessity for library professionals to acquire expertise in managing and analyzing data. It introduces the concept of library carpentry, a specialized form of data carpentry tailored for library professionals, focusing on skills like data curation, textual data management, and bibliographic content negotiation. Library carpentry aims to equip library staff with these skills to improve current services and introduce new, data-driven information services. The paper discusses case studies illustrating the potential of library carpentry techniques, particularly in understanding bibliographic datasets under the ODbL license, emphasizing how embracing library carpentry techniques like bibliographic content negotiation, regular expressions (regex), named entity recognition, machine translation and data reconciliation, among others can help libraries evolve in response to the changing information landscape and better serve their communities.