The LC Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative plan

The Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative plan is available at:

http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/news/framework-103111.html

The plan itself is a 10 p. PDF

http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/pdf/bibframework-10312011.pdf

Bibliographic framework is intended to indicate an environment rather than a "format".

Key points

-Broad accommodation of content rules and data models. The new environment should be agnostic to cataloging rules, in recognition that different rules are used by different communities, for different aspects of a description, and for descriptions created in different eras, and that some metadata are not rule based.

-Provision for types of data that logically accompany or support bibliographic description, such as holdings, authority, classification, preservation, technical, rights, and archival metadata.

-Accommodation of textual data, linked data with URIs instead of text, and both.

-Consideration of the relationships between and recommendations for communications format tagging, record input conventions, and system storage/manipulation.

-Consideration of the needs of all sizes and types of libraries, from small public to large research.

-Continuation of maintenance of MARC until no longer necessary. It is recognized that systems and services based on the MARC 21 communications record will be an important part of the infrastructure for many years.

-Compatibility with MARC-based records.

-Provision of transformation from MARC 21 to a new bibliographic environment.

The new bibliographic framework project will be focused on the Web environment, Linked Data principles and mechanisms, and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as a basic data model. The protocols and ideas behind Linked Data are natural exchange mechanisms for the Web that have found substantial resonance even beyond the cultural heritage sector. Likewise, it is expected that the use of RDF and other W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) developments will enable the integration of library data and other cultural heritage data on the Web for more expansive user access to information.

You all may also want to look at the report from Stanford on Linked Data at
http://www-sul.stanford.edu/about_sulair/news_and_events/Stanford_Linked_Data_Workshop_Report_FINAL.pdf

Published in October 2011, the report was compiled by Michael A. Keller, Jerry Persons, Hugh Glaser, and Mimi Calter. (60 pages, PDF)

The preliminary project timetable
The Library of Congress will develop a grant application in the next few months. The two-year grant will provide funding for the Library of Congress to organize consultative groups (national and international) and to support development and prototyping activities. Work to be done, then, more or less in 2012 and 2013 includes: developing models and scenarios for interaction within the information community, assembling and reviewing ontologies currently used or under development, developing domain ontologies for the description of resources and related data in scope, organizing prototypes and reference implementations.


Additional LC bibliographic framework transition links

Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Website
http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/

Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Listserv
http://listserv.loc.gov/listarch/bibframe.html

Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control Website
http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/

Library of Congress: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative

The Library of Congress has begun a "Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative."

"A major focus of the initiative will be to determine a transition path for the MARC 21 exchange format in order to reap the benefits of newer technology while preserving a robust data exchange that has supported resource sharing and cataloging cost savings in recent decades."

"This work will be carried out in consultation with the format's formal partners -- Library and Archives Canada and the British Library -- and informal partners -- the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and other national libraries, the agencies that provide library services and products, the many MARC user institutions, and the MARC advisory committees such as the MARBI committee of ALA, the Canadian Committee on MARC, and the BIC Bibliographic Standards Group in the UK."

This could make the RDA effort look like a piece of cake. How will the process be arranged to include these players?

Good luck, though. Sounds like fun to me. Let's get to work.

The press release has more information.

RDA and the eXtensible Catalog

Dave Lindahl and Jennifer Bowen, XCO Co-Executive Directors, wrote a brief statement that describes the benefits of implementing RDA for new metadata and discovery applications such as XC.

http://hdl.handle.net/1802/14588

In early March, Dave Lindahl and Jennifer Bowen met with the US RDA Test Coordinating Committee at the Library of Congress to discuss XC's partial implementation of RDA. The committee invited Dave and Jennifer to submit a written statement for inclusion as an Appendix to the group's final report, due out within the next month, which will include recommendations regarding whether and how the US national libraries (LC, NLM, NAL) will implement RDA.

From the statement:

"XC software represents the first live implementation of a subset of RDA in a FRBR‐based, non‐MARC environment. XC’s implementation of RDA has been led by individuals who have participated in the development of both the RDA Toolkit and the RDA vocabulary registry. XC’s use of RDA has also been informed by the real‐world requirements of actual working software, as well as through a user research process conducted at four ARL libraries."

and

"A community‐wide implementation of RDA within the library world will benefit not only users of the eXtensible Catalog, but also developers and users of other applications that make information about library collections accessible via the open web."

MADS/RDF Primer available for public review

The MADS/RDF Primer is available for public review.
Status: Final Public Review Document
Updated: 28 March 2011
Previous Version: 19 November 2010

MADS/RDF is a way to record data from the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) Authorities format for use in Semantic Web applications and Linked Data projects. MADS/RDF is a knowledge organization system (KOS) designed for use with controlled values for names (personal, corporate, geographic, etc.), thesauri, taxonomies, subject heading systems, and other controlled value lists. The MADS ontology has been fully mapped to SKOS. MADS/RDF is designed specifically to support authority data as used by and needed in the LIS community and its technology systems.

Note that the MADS/RDF is intended mainly for those designing and implementing LIS technology systems.


Now I'll wait to see how it is recieved by those who know ontologies far better than I do.

OCLC report on managing print collections in mass-digitized library world

Malpas, Constance. 2011. Cloud-sourcing Research Collections: Managing Print in the Mass-digitized Library Environment. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research. http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2011/2011-01.pdf.

Cloud-sourcing Research Collections is a 76 p. (pdf) analysis of the feasibility of outsourcing management of low-use print books held in academic libraries to shared service providers, including large-scale print and digital repositories.

Mass digitization projects like Google Books and shared online collections like the HathiTrust have given substance to the visions of a transformation of library use from paper to online resources. This "flip" and related demands for physical space and care of paper resources has resulted in renewed attention to print collections in academic libraries. This is the time for discussion within and among research libraries on how to construct new systems of services based on aggregations of digital resources, local paper resource collections and shared storage repositories for online and paper resources.

The report's main conclusion is:

"Based on a year-long study of data from the HathiTrust, ReCAP, and WorldCat, we concluded that our central hypothesis was successfully confirmed: there is sufficient material in the mass-digitized library collection managed by the HathiTrust to duplicate a sizeable (and growing) portion of virtually any academic library in the United States, and there is adequate duplication between the shared digital repository and large-scale print storage facilities to enable a great number of academic libraries to reconsider their local print management operations. Significantly, we also found that the combination of a relatively small number of potential shared print providers, including the Library of Congress, was sufficient to achieve more than 70% coverage of the digitized book collection, suggesting that shared service may not require a very large network of providers."

This points a way forward for academic libraries. The report might be an interesting frame for a discussion at Yale of how we think of our collections in this environment and how we move to use the environment to create services for readers. It is one of the few reports that integrates questions of online resources with paper resources. That kind of integrated approach to collections, preservation, user/reader services makes a lot more sense than digital only or print only approaches.

MARC marketplace: a report

A study of the North American marketplace for MARC records done for LC by R2 consulting.

http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/MARC_Record_Marketplace_2009-10.pdf

LC's effort to define an extended date/time format

Library of Congress has proposed an extended date/time definition for use with ISO 8601 and possibly with W3C as an XML schema type.

http://www.loc.gov/standards/datetime/index.html

The problem: No standard date/time format meets the needs of XML metadata schemas. W3C XML Schema built-in types xs:date, xs:time, and xs:dateTime are inadequate, as is W3CDTF, and TEMPER. ISO 8601 and the W3C schema are incompatible. The LC proposal addresses that and adds BCE dates, open date ranges, and useful/necessary concepts like "uncertain" and "approximate" to the definition and the format.

The proposal could be incorporated into schemas such as MODS and METS. (Note: it is already in use within the PREMIS schema.) It may be proposed for standardization in ISO 8601 or it might be proposed to W3C for adoption as an XML schema type – the benefits of this are clear, among them: strict validation would be supported.