Author Archives: Pat Riva

About Pat Riva

Information Coordinator for the Bibliography Section

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.

ISNI in Quebec

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) announced joining the ISNI network as a registration agency (RA) for Quebec on 3 July 2019 (press release-French). At the Congrès des professionnel.le.s de l’information (CPI) held 2-6 November 2020, three members of the project team presented their implementation of ISNI services: “BAnQ, nouvelle agence ISNI :
pour qui et à quoi ça sert?”. The slides are available (in French): https://congrescpi.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BAnQ-nouvelle-agence-ISNI_Poirier-Danielle_CPI-2020.pdf.

This project shows the synergy that exists between the role of a national bibliographic agency and an ISNI-RA. BAnQ is responsible for the Bibliographie du Québec, published online at: https://www.banq.qc.ca/ressources_en_ligne/bib_bibliographie.html and described in the Bibliography Section’s National Bibliographic Register. In their CPI presentation on 5 November 2020, Wassim Cherif, Marie-Chantal L’Écuyer-Coelho, and Danielle Poirier, explain why BAnQ decided to join the ISNI network and their one-year implementation process for ISNI services.

The first stage involved submitting ISNI identifier requests in batch for all personal and corporate body names present in the national library’s name authority file. Of approximately 300,000 authority records sent in November 2019, 210,000 entities, or 70%, received an ISNI through this retrospective process.

The next step was to integrate ISNI assignment with creating or updating name authority records during current cataloguing. The scope is materials of received by legal deposit and catalogued for the national bibliography. A daily process, implemented in August 2020, extracts the appropriate name authorities, submits them for ISNI assignment via API, and then imports the ISNI into field 024 of the authority record. Of 4,350 authority records submitted in the first two months of this service, 3,740 or 86%, received an ISNI.

The daily process captures names that are in scope for the authority file and that come through legal deposit. However, some creators of cultural products are not included in the national library’s collecting scope and fall outside of legal deposit. To provide these creators with ISNI identifiers, BAnQ created a web form for requesting an ISNI: https://isni-formulaires.banq.qc.ca/. This was launched in September 2020.

The project is a fascinating example of how a national bibliographic agency can expand its service offer beyond the traditional, and prepare the national bibliography for linked data applications.