Daily Archives: 2011-06-15

Testing Resource Description and Access (RDA) – Announcement

The Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Medicine have issued a statement from the Executives of the three libraries regarding the Report and Recommendations of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee on the implementation of RDA—Resource Description & Access. 

The full Report and Recommendations will be available prior the ALA Annual Conference on the Testing Resource Description and Access Home Page: http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/rda/

An executive summary of the report is currently available at: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/cataloging/RDA_report_executive_summary.pdf

 

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.