Tag Archives: authority records

Bibliography Section at WLIC 2021

WLIC 2021, held 17-19 August 2021, was IFLA’s first entirely online conference. The Bibliography Section participated in organizing two sessions and members of the Standing Committee were speakers at two more.

Towards entity management : new roles and new service models for libraries (Cataloguing with Bibliography)

Andrew MacEwan (British Library) and Iris Berbain (Bibliothèque nationale de France) spoke about “Using ISNI to manage entity identification in the publishing supply chain”, detailing current work in matching ISNI with pre-publication data right at source with major publishers, and with integrating ISNI further into their libraries’ workflows. This leveraging of ISNI has potential to bring authority work earlier in the workflow for creating national bibliographic descriptions for new materials.

Karina Esman (National Library of Russia) presented on a project to create rich cataloguing descriptions for culturally significant rare materials – the book monuments – in the collection of the National Library. Fascinating examples and tricky to catalogue!

Subject to Change : how to deal with changes in subject information? (Subject Analysis and Access with Bibliography)

Hollie White (Curtin University, Perth, Australia) set the stage with “Subject to flexibility: Theory and history of knowledge organisation systems” where she situated library knowledge organisation systems in the history of western knowledge organisation. She contrasted the grand unified systems with more flexible pluralistic approaches, and situated sociological and critical theories.

Violet Fox (Accessible Book Consortium, USA) used her perspective in the development of classification systems to advocate for adopting open structures in “Transparency & Change in Knowledge Organization”. Maintaining a history of when classes or terms were valid should be part of every KOS. Violet also points to the importance of understanding where the funding for developing our access systems comes from.

F. Tim Knight (Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada) in “Using Linked Data to Mitigate Colonial Subject Bias” showed the potential for a linked data implementation of equivalent terms as “term circles” with no single preferred term. SKOS attributes allow for tagging terms by language, and this could be extended to an attribute for “worldview”.

This topic led to a lively discussion!

SC member Maud Henry (Royal Library of Belgium, KBR) presented “Covid as a catalyst: towards dematerialized cataloguing at KBR” at the session National Libraries: Innovating and Transforming for Today and Tomorrow. Remote work during the pandemic provided the impetus to consider new workflows to maintain cataloguing of print materials received through legal deposit and allow the timely publication of the Bibliography of Belgium. Strategies implemented in the short term, once some onsite work was possible, include scanning initial pages for cataloguers to complete bibliographic descriptions from home, and maximizing the reuse of metadata entered through the legal deposit workflow. Their positive experience is an inducement to invest further in transforming data for reuse throughout the workflow. Maud also wrote about this project in the Metadata Newsletter (v.7, no.1, June 2021, pages 12-14).

During the session The role of IFLA Standards in the context of a changing information society organized by the Committee on Standards, Rebecca Lubas and Mathilde Koskas presented on the Section’s major project: the 2021 edition of the Common Practices for National Bibliographies in a Digital Age, which is already available as a pre-publication draft.

Section business meetings were held remotely before and after the Congress and did not require conference registration for attendance.

WLIC 2022 is planned for Dublin, Ireland. Hoping to see you all in person then.

Bibliographic Information in Digital Culture, 3rd International Bibliographic Congress, April 27-30, 2021

This III International Bibliographic Congress was organized by the State Public Scientific and Technical Library of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPSTL SB RAS), Novosibirsk. It follows the first congress held in 2010 at the Russian National Library and the second in 2015 at the Russian State Library.

Originally to be held in-person in Novosibirsk in September 2020, organizers had to rethink the formula and chose a new date. Re-conceiving the congress format to online, sessions were held during a time-slot broadly convenient to European and Central Asian participants. This opened awareness of the Congress to a broader audience and made it accessible beyond Russia. Statistics presented at the closing session showed 1180 registrants from 32 countries on 5 continents, 950 registrants were from all over Russia. Originally planned for 3 days, the Congress was extended to a fourth day as a total of 112 presentations had to be accommodated.

With its focus on bibliography, the Congress has a clear interest to the Bibliography Section. IFLA colleagues participated in organizing panels, moderating a session and presenting at the plenary session and at concurrent sessions.

The Congress started on April 27 with a plenary session, which included a welcome from Christine Mackenzie, IFLA President, and eight presentations, three from IFLA colleagues.

  • Mauro Guerrini: New perspectives of the Universal Bibliographic Control in the digital era
  • Mathilde Koskas: Report from the Chair of IFLA’s Bibliography Section: National Bibliographies and national bibliographic metadata in the age of mass information
  • Caroline Saccucci: Library of Congress CIP Program: Collecting the U.S. National Imprint

There were two panels at the end of the first day:

  • Using DOI in bibliographic reference – present and prospects for the future (recording)
  • МARC: Replace or remain? Moderator: Caroline Saccucci; panelists: Sally McCallum, Regina Reynolds, Nathan Putnam, Boris Rodionovich Loginov, Olga Nikolaevna Zhlobinskaya. (recording)

On April 28, the session “Modern directions for national bibliography – Bibliographic activities in the national libraries around the world” had reports from the national libraries of China, Bulgaria, Belarus, France, United Kingdom, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and several from Russia. The session “Collaborative cataloging as a form of bibliographic interaction between libraries”, moderated by Renate Behrens, chair of the IFLA Committee on Standards, included reports on aspects of union catalogues, authority files and standards from Russia, Iran, Germany, Italy, China, Canada, and Poland. Section members Aliya Saidembayeva (National Library of Kazakhstan) and Marina Neshcheret (Russian State Library) were among those who presented reports.

All recordings from the Congress are available on YouTube, individual sessions are best accessed from the Connect link in the Congress program. Very unfortunately the simultaneous translation is not captured, so that the Russian presentations are not accessible to a non-Russian speaking audience.

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.

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)