What is this guide for?
General information on Text and Data Mining resources and support for TDM activities at UBC Library. This guide also maintains an up-to-date list of library licensed resources that allow TDM activity as well as information on legal support.
What is text and data mining (TDM)?
TDM is a broad label that refers to bulk collection and analysis of a corpus of data. A corpus can be anything from the full text of a set of journal articles to public social media posts to census data. The work of Text and Data Mining is to programmtically extract unseen relationships in the data.
Getting help with TDM
The library can help get your project off the ground legally and safely. We can help negotiate licenses for access to resources; develop agreements with providers who don't normally allow TDM; consult on project planning and tool selection; help train project members in the use of TDM tools.
To get in touch, reach out to the subject specialist librarian for your subject or schedule a consultation in the Research Commons. For legal questions reach out to Michael Serebriakov in the Office of the University Counsel.
For more information about:
- Licensing contact: lib-license@ubc.ca
- Copyright contact: copyright.services@ubc.ca
- Research Data Management contact: research.data@ubc.ca
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Text and Data Mining of UBC Library Licensed Electronic ResourcesPresentation by Michael Serebriakov on legal considerations when engaging with TDM and differences between Canadian and US copyright law.
Resources that allow TDM
Some resources allow TDM by default. It is still important to consider legal restrictions, inappropriate use, ethics, and form of data collection.
This spreadsheet lists resources licensed by UBC Library that either allow TDM entirely or in part (in which case, please ask the Library licensing team at lib-license@ubc.ca for help before starting work):
You can find all license information for UBC resources at https://licenses.library.ubc.ca/. You can search this list by package title or resource name and it will show you the license terms of use in an easy-to-understand format.
The UBC Library Open Collections are also accessible through a robust API which allows full-text download when full-text is available. Learn more here: https://open.library.ubc.ca/research.
