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national bibliographic control in the digital era

National Bibliographic Control in the Digital Era

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By Eduardo da Silva Alentejo
E-mail: [email protected]

In a growing universe of information alternatives, emerging technologies on the Web have been adapted and applied to the ways in which human beings control what they produce. That is, what is organized, preserved and disseminated to society through successive generations of bibliographic systems. Considering that in libraries and documentary centers, the physical availability of documents results from a logical and unique organization; on the other hand, on the Web, whose logic is the network, thousands of information resources can be accessed and intertwined because of semantic interoperability, a current characteristic of various bibliographic communication formats and protocols. With digital technology constantly evolving, the agility of information communication has become a primary objective for the data producer to remain relevant, the information system effective and the dissemination of knowledge efficient. Since the digital environment has been changing the way humanity interacts, the terrain of Web technologies and information systems architecture has been changing and institutions of all types are increasingly using information systems that, sometimes , do not easily fit into the traditional labels under which information systems architectures have been conceived. If there is an understanding that technologies are powerful for driving digital transformation processes for national bibliographic control activities, bibliographic organization processes also bring notes and challenges to combat information inflation in the Digital Era as well digital exclusion processes. From these perspectives, national bibliographic agencies are dealing with the evanescence and mutability of electronic documents, growing at an exponential rate and speed, apparently without any national affiliation, however, establishing a global network for exchanging bibliographic information. The notion of bibliographic control for instances of culture, especially libraries, has become imperative to combat information overload (bibliographic explosion, according to Paul Otlet), having as reference the printed book and the use of information as a means for development of societies (Parent, 2004). Bibliographic Control presupposes complete control over the materials that record knowledge, aiming to identify, locate and obtain it. And because it is not an end, it is related to the ability to face information inflation under the application of computing and automation in libraries since the 1950s (Davinson, 1975). National bibliographic control aims to produce a current national bibliography, enabling the intellectual progress of a nation to be verified (Bell, 1998). At an international level, Universal Bibliographic Control would be achieved by the exchange of official bibliographic records between national bibliographic agencies, responsible for their constitution and dissemination (Roberts, 1994). These scopes of bibliographic control require an operational system supported by instruments that allow the census, organization and dissemination of what is called national bibliographic heritage, whose operations oversee a bibliographic agency, generally a national library, as is the Brazilian case. In the history of each country, or group of countries, undertakings for bibliographic control occurred in different ways and with different technological resources. Each country has developed its own information policy and control of intellectual production (Parent, 2004). With the systematization of the Universal Bibliographic Control Program (UBC), in the 1970s, developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), librarians and other information professionals have adapted and applied technologies for the task of organizing and disseminating knowledge, from local to national and from there to global reach, based on cooperation and emphasis on international bibliographic standardization. The first worldwide conception of cooperative and decentralized bibliographic control was expressed with the UBC Program and had social and political purposes: universalization of knowledge, dissemination of bibliographic records and preservation of national and global intellectual memory as a result. This ideal was based on the creation of an internationally integrated, distributed network based on the contribution of each country’s national bibliographic control through the regular sharing of the ‘current national bibliography’ component (Alentejo; Ramanan, 2017). Córdon García (1997) explains that national bibliographic control is guided by three mutually dependent pillars: legal deposit, national bibliographic agency and current national bibliography. The triple combination of bibliographic agency, legal deposit and, current national bibliography demonstrated a strong structure that provides the bibliographic control necessary for current affairs as it has been since the beginning of the 1980s. This was developed in the context of global publishing which was characterized by the diffusion of documents in all their forms (Beaudiquez, 1998). The conception of UBC played an important role in the ideals of universalizing knowledge. It was built based on the principle that each country was responsible for identifying and describing publications in its own territory, following an international standard of bibliographic description. It also played a key role in developing a universal, machine-readable bibliographic description format for exchanging bibliographic information (Parent, 2004). Stemming from the latest recommendations provided by IFLA for the current national bibliography (Takhirov; Aalberg; Žumer, 2008), of which the Web-based current national bibliography would be the primary source for a country’s official bibliographic directory, the sense of bibliographic heritage is supports collecting based on the accumulation of materials, via legal deposit, from national libraries due to their ability to provide bibliographic services for dissemination and access to a country’s bibliographic and documentary heritage. National bibliographies accessible in the Web environment have allowed expanding understanding regarding the development of systems based on user experience, through the possibility of employing technological resources capable of improving their social functions of access to knowledge, such as: Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain. With the availability of new digital sources of information on the Web, there is potential competition between national and international bibliographic agencies with other bibliographic services, mainly with worldwide commercial bibliography, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. National bibliographic agencies, for example, have offered other bibliographic services that other bodies cannot offer, mainly in the possibilities of metadata reuse and cooperative international and local cataloging. Therefore, the successive national bibliographic control architectures sheltered the UBC Program from its social ideals, international cooperation, technical and technological improvements, premises for the exchange of bibliographic data without barriers and were sustained in the light of human rights; even in times of political and economic conflicts with global impact, applying and adapting Web versioning technologies for the purposes of universalizing knowledge. This demonstrates that national bibliographic agencies have become essential to produce current national bibliography and responsible for its dissemination under a generation of bibliographic services and products aimed at: control and preservation of the national bibliographic heritage and its sharing for the objectives of the knowledge universalization program, defended based on open access to information, free from barriers and digital exclusion. Since the 1950s, the IFLA Bibliography Section has consolidated itself as an international group interested in techniques for identifying content, organizing, producing, disseminating and preserving bibliographic information in national bibliographies, namely through national bibliographic services. IFLA’s first guidelines for current national bibliography date back to the 1950s and 1970s. In 2008, IFLA aimed to update the current national bibliography guidelines with new recommendations for publishing national bibliographies in electronic format on the Internet and including resources electronics in a variety of formats – websites (including blogs and other emerging resources), online databases, electronic journals, e-books, software, etc. Given the wide range of information systems available (online search systems, applications, databases, digital libraries, etc.), national bibliographic agencies are facing even more pressure to sustain national bibliographies and ensure that they are socially relevant (International Federation Of Library Associations And Institutions, 2008). However, with the Social Web and Semantic Web versioning, for example, there is an understanding among national bibliographic agencies about the potential of digital technologies applicable to Current National Bibliography, considering that the most varied digital formats can also be included in a common way. Within a rapidly evolving editorial and technological context, one of the objectives of this update was to understand what uses could be expected from the online national bibliography and what its usefulness is today, as its characteristic is to be a fully descriptive bibliographic resource in the form of an online product. Such IFLA guidelines introduced at least six dimensions to increase the social usefulness of national bibliography in the context of the digital environment: 1) Interface, Interoperability and functionality; 2) Information Retrieval; 3) Better cataloging procedures; 4) New scope of data recording; 5) Exchange of best practices and cooperation, 6) Organizational model and measurement of effectiveness (International Federation Of Library Associations And Institutions, 2008). Additionally, there are two paths to national registries. Some countries differentiate their national bibliographies from the national catalogue. Others consider that everything added to their collections by law does not require distribution of the caliber of a separate publication like a national bibliography, so their national catalog is sufficient. In both cases, the national bibliography is essential for the selection and acquisition of materials and, consequently, an important promotion of the publishing industry (Lewis, 1991). But the current web-based national bibliography can be published and accessed on the same online platform, portal, digital library or even in a national collective catalogue, as is the case with the Brazilian national bibliography today. The social relevance of the results of national bibliographic control can be understood by the relevance of current national bibliography, how and with what frequency official bibliographic records are searched by users in a country, which requires permanent application and evaluation of Web technologies, collection techniques and data analysis. Perhaps this is the seed for new generations of national bibliographic control systems towards the universalization of knowledge.

Selected Bibliography

ALENTEJO, Eduardo da Silva; RAMANAN, T. National Bibliography in Brazil, and Sri Lanka in Digital Age: a comparative study. Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries Journal, [Limerik], v. 6, n. 2, p. 217-227, June 2017.

BEAUDIQUEZ, Marcelle. National Bibliographic Services at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Evolution and Revolution. Copenhagen: International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, 1998. p. 1-13.

BELL, Barbara. L. An Annotated Guide to Current National Bibliographies. 2 nd ed. München: Saur, 1998.

BRANCHEAU, James C.; WETHERBE, James C. Information architectures: Methods and practice. Information Processing & Management, [Doha], v. 22, n. 6, p. 453-463, 1986.

CORDELL, Ryan. Machine Learning + Libraries: A Report on the State of the Field; Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 2020.

CORDON GARCÍA, José Antonio. El registro de la memoria: el Depósito legal y las bibliografias nacionales. Gijón: Treas, 1997.

CORDÓN-GARCÍA, José-Antonio. El depósito legal y los recursos digitales en línea. Salamanca: Documentary Repository of the University of Salamanca, 2006.

COYLE, Karen. Semantic Web and Linked data Research Interests. In: COYLE, Karen. (ed.). Linked Data Tools: Connecting on the Web. Chicago: American Library Association, 2012. p. 10–14.

DAVINSON, DAVINSON, Donald Edward. Bibliographic Control. London: Clive Bingley, 1975.

INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF LIBRARY ASSOCIATIONS AND INSTITUTIONS. Guidelines for National Bibliographies in the Electronic Age. Paris, IFLA Working Group on Guidelines for National Bibliographies, 2008.

LEWIS, P. R. The development of national bibliographic services. Issues and opportunities. In: WORKSHOP ON NATIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHIC SERVICES IN THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES, Luxembourg, 1990. Report… Luxembourg: Commission of the European Communities, 1991. p. 11-19. Disponível em: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/188233589.pdf. Acesso em: 18 jan. 2024.

PARENT Ingrid. The IFLA UAP and UBC programmes. Alexandria Journal, Cairo, v. 16, n. 2, p. 69-75, 2004.

ROBETS, Winston D. O que é controle bibliográfico universal? Anais da Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, v. 114, p. 149-171, 1994.

TAKHIROV, Naimdjon; AALBERG, Trond; ŽUMER, Maja. An XML-Based Representational Document Format for FRBR. In: BUCHANAN, G., MASOODIAN, M., CUNNINGHAM, S. J. (ed.). ICADL 2008. LNCS. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2008. v. 5362, p. 327–330.

WLIC 2023 Satellite Meeting – Universal Bibliographic Control at the crossroads: the challenges of unifying IFLA bibliographic standards

The IFLA Satellite Meeting on Universal Bibliographic Control at the crossroads: the challenges of unifying IFLA bibliographic standards took place in Brussels (KBR) on August 18 and 19, 2023.

Universal Bibliographic Control is a fundamental principle for national libraries, formulated over 50 years ago by IFLA and UNESCO. IFLA’s last official document on the subject, the IFLA Professional Statement on Universal Bibliographic Control, dates back to 2012, and the federation had not devoted a general meeting to the subject since the Lyon Congress in 2014. In the meantime, the international normative landscape for the production, sharing and dissemination of metadata has continued to evolve rapidly. The question arose: is the principle of Universal Bibliographic Control still valid? The satellite meeting organized by the Bibliography section with the Cataloguing and Subject Access and Analysis sections at KBR on August 18 and 19 brought together some fifty participants to examine this question. The program, alternating presentations (available here) and workshops, enabled these practitioners and experts from different countries to examine the foundations of UBC, its relationship with IFLA metadata standards (International Cataloguing Principles, IFLA LRM, ISBD, UNIMARC, MulDiCat), and its place in the contemporary context. Artificial intelligence, which was the subject of so many discussions during the congress, also featured prominently.

The conclusion of this day and a half of work is unanimous: yes, the concept of Universal Bibliographic Control is still valid, but the declaration needs to be revised so that it continues to be expressed in a way appropriate to the current context, paying particular attention to its status for IFLA and its place in the universe of IFLA metadata standards. The organizing sections will therefore be working on a framework for the revision in the coming months.

We’d like to thank all the participants, the speakers, KBR, the organizing committee and OCLC for sponsoring this event!

Text written by Mathilde Koskas and edited by Maud Henry

European Retrospective Bibliographies at CERL

European Retrospective Bibliographies at CERL

Early in 2022, the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL – www.cerl.org) established a Working Group on Retrospective Bibliographies. The Working Group’s main focus was to identify electronic resources with bibliographical descriptions for national, regional, format-specific (i.e. incunabula, newspapers) or language-specific print cultures (up to 1830). Over the years, CERL has included several of these resources in the Heritage of the Printed Book (HPB) database, has closely aligned itself with the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), and more recently started to act as the host for bibliographies such as the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) and Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN).

The members of the Working Group (see also https://www.cerl.org/collaboration/work/retrospectivenationalbibliographies) dream of a day when these electronic bibliographies together offer a comprehensive overview of European prints before 1830. The Working Group wishes to encourage the inclusion of permanent identifiers from retrospective bibliographies in catalogue records and research projects as a basis for connecting these bibliographies to form a strong and rich data network.

From the start, the Working Group was very much aware of the IFLA Register of national bibliographies, and felt that CERL would be in a position to create a supplement to this valuable list with information about bibliographies that focus on or have a strong component of books printed up to 1830.  A first overview  created by Olga Tkachuk, Ossoliński National Institute, in 2022, primarily gathered information about bibliographies (national, regional, language-specific) in nations in the east of Europe (currently listed are Albania / Belarus / Bosnia and Herzegovina / Bulgaria / Croatia / Cyprus / Czech Republic / Estonia / Greece / Hungary / Latvia / Lithuania / Moldavia / Montenegro / North Macedonia / Poland / Romania / Serbia / Slovakia / Slovenia / Ukraine). The list will gradually be expanded with information from European countries not yet listed.

As a result of the work on this overview, CERL decided to organise a conference on the topic. The title of the conference is Retrospective Bibliographies and European Print Cultures to 1830 – Challenges and perspectives in the digital age, and it will take place on 29 and 30 June 2023 at the Ossolineum Library, in Wrocław, Poland. For the programme and registration details see  https://www.cerl.org/services/seminars/rnb2023.

The key-note address by Marieke van Delft (now retired, but formerly of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands) will reflect on the word ‘national’ for these bibliographies, a term  used in established librarianship tradition in accordance with IFLA and bibliographic control standards, but in today’s world and in the historical context of early printing a term that throws up questions regarding content and scope of retrospective (national) bibliographies.

Looking at our European retrospective bibliographies, which today are no longer printed books, but databases, files with records and identifiers, we see that their scope is usually a mix of geographic/territorial and language aspects, according to the cultural impact and context of a given era.  Today, creating such a bibliography, maintaining and developing it, remains a cooperative challenge – as CERL’s and IFLA’s interest in this topic underlines – and a long-term financial commitment of national impact. Creating and maintaining the kind of retrospective bibliographies that are the focus of the CERL WG is often conceived of as a national duty and a commitment to cultural heritage – a national commitment to a national research infrastructure of transnational importance and impact. CERL as a consortium of European research libraries has a unifying role in this huge cooperative undertaking.

During the conference, we will take a closer look at inclusion and exclusion criteria for the bibliographies, as well as issues related to making data accessible and re-usable, the economics of funding the work and how we organise workflows and collaboration. And we would also like to talk about these bibliographies in the CERL context. Certain retrospective bibliographies, such as the Short Title Catalogue Netherlands and the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue are hosted by CERL, while some, such as the German Verzeichnisse der deutschen Drucke and the Short Title Catalogue Flanders, are included in the Heritage of the Printed Book (HPB) database (and some are both in the HPB and hosted by CERL as stand-alone databases). Should CERL differentiate between records from retrospective bibliographies and records from library catalogues in how this data is made available to the user community? And how can we help to make the data more visible and more accessible?

We hope that our conference will put us on the path of defining what makes retrospective (national) bibliographies valuable today, how we can present them in a way that offers the greatest benefit to end users, and what their long-term perspectives and development could be. For this we would be very happy to collaborate with IFLA’s Bibliography Section to encompass the print output from the earliest printed book to today.

Marian Lefferts, Consortium of European Research Libraries

Claudia Fabian, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München

 

June 2023

 

Italian translation of Common Practices published

The Italian translation of the Common Practices for National Bibliographies in the Digital Age was recently completed and has now been published in the IFLA Repository:
Pratiche condivise per le bibliografie nazionali nell’era digitale

Bibliography Section member completes doctoral thesis

Sandra Gisela Martin recently completed her doctoral thesis “Conceptual model for universal bibliographic control”.

 

ABSTRACT

The present research sought to establish a conceptual model for universal bibliographic control (UBC) based on the study of three epistemic axes: the legal deposit, national bibliographies, and bibliographic and authorship identifiers. The methodological approach responded to the analytical method based on a bibliographic design of documentary research with a qualitative strategy.  The study population consisted of the 20 Latin American countries that are members of the Association of Ibero-American States for the Development of National Libraries of Ibero-America (ABINIA), excluding Spain and Portugal. A comparative content analysis and a hermeneutic reading of the legal deposit legislation were carried out, the coverage, format and degree of visibility of Latin American national bibliographies in progress on the Web were investigated, and the degree of insertion of bibliographic and author identifiers in the bibliographic control process in Latin American national libraries and/or national bibliographic agencies was investigated. Some categories of analysis proposed in the texts were selected and others that emerged from the reading of the documents were proposed, from which comparative tables with descriptive characteristics were elaborated.

Then, a proposal for a conceptual model of universal bibliographic control was presented, based on general systems theory (GST) and considered as a global system with a model structure of decentralized, distributed, collaborative, interconnected and linked.   The CBU was reflected upon based on the four principles of relevant knowledge proposed by Morin (1999): context, global, multidimensional and complex; and nine dimensions of analysis were proposed: theoretical/conceptual framework, political, legislative, librarian, collaborative, normative, technological, relational, services.

The results and conclusions show the need, on the one hand, to rethink the conceptualization and scope of documentary heritage from a theoretical dimension and, on the other, to question the visions and missions of national libraries.  It is also pointed out that the legal deposit does not represent the totality of a country’s documentary heritage, but only a part of it, which is subject to the legislation in force and the possibilities of complying with it. In relation to the CBU, it can be concluded by highlighting the need to move from a pragmatic vision oriented to data and the strict application of bibliographic description regulations, to a theoretical and systemic vision that contemplates the complexity of the bibliographic multiverse.

Experience as a member of the IFLA Bibliography Section

Sandra Gisela Martín will present IFLA’s mission, vision, values and governance structure. She will mention the mechanisms to collaborate and join IFLA and will explain some documents referring to the organization’s actions: the Trend Reports 2013-2019, the Global Vision 2018, the Idea Store 2019 and the Strategy 2019-2024.

On the other hand, she will comment on IFLA’s activities and services in general and her experience as a member of the Bibliography Section in particular.  She will detail its functions and the resources developed by the Section: common practices for national bibliographies and the national bibliographic register.

SANDRA GISELA MARTÍN holds a PhD in Library Science and Documentation (UBA), a Master’s degree in Digital Documentation (Pompeu Fabra University, Spain), a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (UES21) and a Bachelor’s degree in Library Science and Documentation (UNC). She has been Director of the Library System of the Catholic University of Córdoba since 2003. She is a professor of the subjects: Information Sources and Services II and Information Systems of the Bachelor’s Degree in Librarianship at the UNC.  She teaches at the postgraduate level in several doctoral, master’s and specialization programs in the country. She is also an external consultant for the National Commission for University Evaluation and Accreditation (CONEAU) in the area of Libraries.