Category Archives: General

Bibliographic Control in the Digital Ecosystem, International Conference, February 8-12, 2021

Organized in Firenze, Italy, and promoted by an extensive listing of Italian libraries and organizations concerned with bibliographic control, BC2021 was chaired by Mauro Guerrini (Università degli studi di Firenze), member of the Bibliography Section Standing Committee. The Bibliography Section was honoured to be among the promoters of a conference whose theme is central to our sphere of interest.

The online formula was designed to accommodate European and North (and South) American time zones, by having sessions for 4 hours a day over 5 days, held respectively in the afternoons or the mornings. This certainly favoured participation, as did having the primary language of presentations be English, with some presentations in Italian (which I greatly enjoyed).

All presentations were in plenary, which meant that I could follow everything in real time without having to make any difficult choices. IFLA colleagues were present throughout. After the welcoming statements were the opening remarks by Mauro Guerrini and by Mathilde Koskas, chair of the Bibliography Section. The first presentation was by Renate Behrens, chair of the Committee on Standards, “Standards in a new bibliographic world – community needs versus internationalisation”. The second day started with “Towards an identifier’s policy: the use case of the Bibliothèque nationale de France” by Vincent Boulet, chair of the Cataloguing Section. Agnese Galeffi, member of the Cataloguing Section SC and the BCM RG, closed the fourth day with “DREAM: A project about non-Latin script data”. On the final day, Gordon Dunsire, Cataloguing Section SC, spoke on “Bibliographic control in the fifth information age”, followed by Françoise Leresche on “Rethinking bibliographic control in the light of IFLA LRM entities: the ongoing process at the National Library of France”.

I was honoured to be part of this effort and at the end of the third day, right in the middle of the conference, I spoke on “The multilingual challenge in bibliographic description and access”, situating the need to offer comprehensive bilingual and multilingual access as a natural progression on the road to Universal Bibliographic Control.

The extremely rich program included contributions from all points of view in the publication chain, libraries, publishers, legal deposit, research data, institutional repositories, authority control, identity management, linked data, points of view from several European national libraries on bibliographic control, and closed with a review of “The Italian national bibliography today” by Paolo Wos Bellini. I was particularly intrigued by the cross-domain perspective on authority control provided by Pierluigi Feliciati who discussed authority control and ontologies from the archival point of view in his presentation “Call me by your name: the potential of cross-domain sharing of authority records control”. All presentations were recorded and made available on YouTube, and are linked directly from the conference program: https://www.bc2021.unifi.it/programme

In my view BC2021 succeeded admirably in its aim of exploring the new boundaries of Universal Bibliographic Control.

Seeking Your Ideas on Bibliography!

Greetings!

The Bibliography Standing Committee would like to invite posts on topics related the use, management, and role of national bibliographies. We welcome posts from anyone interested; you do not need to be a member of the Standing Committee! Our goal is to have at least one post per month, and generate discussion.

We’d especially welcome posts on the papers presented at our IFLA WLIC session this past August, about the Best Practice document, and national libraries’ role in linked data, but additional ideas are highly encouraged.

If interested, please contact Rebecca Lubas to talk about your ideas and scheduling. Posts need not be long, just full of interesting ideas on bibliography!

Guidelines For The Future – Sharing Best Practice For National Bibliographies In A Digital Age

The changes brought about by the World Wide Web together with the dramatic growth of digital media have called into question many key assumptions on which national bibliography were founded. At the IFLA Bibliography Standing Committee’s Warsaw satellite meeting to the IFLA 2012 Congress a new web based resource was announced to replace the original printed National Bibliographies in the Digital Age: Guidance and New Directions (2009). After several years of development this new resource will be launched at the IFLA Congress in August 2015.

Why create this new resource?

In an era of disruptive change libraries require authoritative and current best practice guidance on an increasing range of bibliographic issues. The rapidly evolving nature of the subject matter means that a more flexible, open and dynamic solution than traditional printed text is needed. To address this need the IFLA Bibliography Standing Committee has created ‘Best Practice for National Bibliographic Agencies in a Digital Age’ using the new ‘Book Page’ option available on IFLA’s web site.

The new resource is not intended to be prescriptive since bibliographic control inevitably varies widely from country to country and local requirements may be influenced by financial, legal or practical constraints. A number of potential options will therefore be presented to enable their application to be tailored according to individual circumstances, with examples and use cases given to illustrate the possible range of approaches

What topics are covered?

The new resource aims to offer information on a wide range of topics of interest to those involved in the management of bibliographic information. Examples include:

  • Service delivery & lifecycle
  • Resource description & standards
  • Business models & administration
  • How to demonstrate the continuing utility & relevance of services?
  • When to create, develop or cease services?
  • How to decide on appropriate service delivery options
  • What options exist for user support?

How is the resource organised?

In order to ensure the site is easy to use and yet remain flexible for future developments it has been organised by key themes which are further divided by topic. The main themes are:

  1. Background
  2. Organisation
  3. Purpose and value
  4. Scoping and selection
  5. Resource description and standards
  6. Service delivery
  7. Glossary/Useful links
  8. Bibliography

These thematic sections provide links to back up sources to ensure continuing relevance and currency and will be supplemented by ‘real world’ cases that show how libraries are tackling the challenges. It is hoped this sharing of experience will benefit not only new and existing national bibliographic agencies but all who wish to respond to the bibliographic opportunities offered by new technologies and media.

How will the site be kept up to date?

Following the launch, the IFLA Bibliography Standing Committee intends to implement an annual work cycle to maintain and extend the resource as new areas of interest emerge. The SC is also seeking input from experts and other IFLA committees to contribute text or review sections in order to keep it as accurate and relevant as possible.

Bibliography in a Digital Age IFLA Satellite Meeting Warsaw, 9th August 2012

A satellite meeting of the main IFLA Conference in Helsinki took place in Warsaw on 9th August 2012, kindly hosted by the National Library of Poland.

The purpose of the event was to share: experiences, techniques and challenges in the creation and management of national bibliographic services and to begin to identify new themes and best practice for the creation of a new web based resource to replace the current IFLA work ‘National Bibliographies in the Digital Age: Guidance & New Directions (2009)’

Full details of the event together with presentations and films are now available online.

Addendum: Although the conference website is no longer online, view the presentation recordings on the Bibliography Section’s YouTube channel playlist (2021-10-15)

 

LC Statement on ‘Transforming our Bibliographic Framework’

The Library of Congress has issued a statement ‘Transforming our Bibliographic Framework’ in which it announces a new collaborative initiative to be led by Associate Librarian of Congress for Library Services, Deanna Marcum to look at the issues involved in migrating from MARC to new bibliographic metadata formats.

As part of its work the LC will:

  • Determine which aspects of current metadata encoding standards should be retained and evolved into a format for the future.  
  • Experiment with Semantic Web and linked data technologies to see what benefits to the bibliographic framework they offer.
  • Foster maximum re-use of library metadata in the broader Web search environment.
  • Enable users to navigate relationships among entities to search more precisely in library catalogs and in the broader Internet. 
  • Explore the use of promising data models such as Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) in navigating relationships.
  • Explore approaches to displaying metadata beyond current MARC-based systems.
  • Identify the risks of action and inaction, including an assessment of the pace of change acceptable to the broader community
  • Plan for bringing existing metadata into new bibliographic systems within the broader Library of Congress technical infrastructure.

Worldwide review of Guidelines for Subject Access in National Bibliographies started

The IFLA Working Group on Guidelines for Subject Access by National Bibliographic Agencies – including membership from the IFLA sections on Classification & Indexing, Bibliography, Knowledge Management, and Cataloguing has created a set of draft Guidelines which is now available for worldwide review at: http://www.ifla.org/en/node/1707