Category Archives: New Developments & Announcements

Japanese translation of “National Bibliographies in the Digital Age” now available

The Japanese translation of “National Bibliographies in the Digital Age” is now available as a PDF on the Bibliography section of the IFLA web site.

I would like to thank Yokoyama-san as well as my other colleagues at the Acquisitions and Bibliography Department of the National Diet Library, Japan (NDL) for making the translation.

Call For Papers from the IFLA Bibliography SC

The Bibliography Section is making a call for papers for the IFLA WLIC in Helsinki on the theme:
What is a national bibliography today and what are its potential uses?

Proposals may include, but are not limited to the following topics:

  • What should be in a national bibliography in the digital age?
  • Is our common understanding of the terms “National Bibliography” and “National Bibliographic Agency” drastically changing?
  • Official and commercial national bibliographies and the new models of bibliographic information
  • Dissemination of national bibliography data and emerging needs arising from the semantic web
  • National bibliographies and authoritative data: how to provide trusted data in a national bibliography? (role of authority files, repositories, lists of codes, etc.

E-mail proposals should be sent, no later than February 1st, 2012 to:

Françoise Bourdon
E-mail: francoise.bourdon@bnf.fr,
Grazyna Jaroszewicz
E-mail: g.jaroszewicz@gmail.com and
Miriam Nauri
E-mail: Miriam.Nauri@kb.se

  • Please indicate in the subject line “IFLA 2012 Helsinki proposal”.

Web NDL Authorities

The Web NDL Authorities is now fully released by the National Diet Library, Japan (NDL).  The Web NDL Authorities is a service that provides NDL’s authority records as Linked Open Data and makes them accessible to the Semantic Web.

*The Web NDL Authorities

For details, please refer also to this paper:  http://conference.ifla.org/past/ifla77/149-tadahiko-en.pdf

By OSHIBA, Tadahiko (NDL)

 

Providing JAPAN/MARC in MARC21 format

The National Diet Library, Japan (NDL), adopts the MARC21 format for the JAPAN/MARC, a machine-readable form of the Japanese National Bibliography, from January 2012. At the same time, the NDL shifts character set for bibliographic records to Unicode for international use.

From January 2012, it is also possible to download JAPAN/MARC bibliographic records in MARC21 format through the NDL-OPAC.

*The Japanese National Bibliography through the NDL-OPAC

By OSHIBA, Tadahiko (NDL)

Linked Open BNB Preview Now Available

Background

The British Library is developing a version of the British National Bibliography which it will make available as Linked Open Data.

The initial offering includes published books with future releases extending coverage to include serial publications, multipart works, integrating resources, kits and forthcoming publications.

The first subset of the British National Bibliography, covering books published or distributed in the UK since 2005, is currently available for preview at:

SPARQL endpoint: bnb.data.bl.uk/sparql
Describe endpoint: bnb.data.bl.uk/describe
Search service: bnb.data.bl.uk/search & bnb.data.bl.uk/items

Links to the following linked open data sources have been provided:
VIAF
LCSH
Lexvo
GeoNames (for country of publication)
MARC country and language codes
Dewey.info
RDF Book Mashup

The preview system represents a work in progress, but one we hope is sufficiently developed to be of interest to external audiences. Some further details and background documentation may be found at: http://www.bl.uk/bibliographic/datafree.html

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.