The Bib Blog

The first of an ongoing series of quarterly updates from the U.S. RDA Test Coordination Committee was released on January 16, 2012. The Committee will monitor the progress and activities relating to the preparation and implementation of RDA as the community approaches the January 2013 implementation start date. Through this report process the three U.S. national libraries will “judge readiness for RDA implementation to mean completion of a recommendation or convincing evidence that the recommendation is sufficiently on track to implement RDA.”

This update reviews the recommendations from the Committee’s Final Report, issued in June 2011, noting the status and accomplishments made to this point in time. It is encouraging to see that most of the recommendations reviewed in this document have a status of being either ‘on track’ or ‘completed.’

I will just mention one as an example:

Rewrite the RDA instructions in clear, unambiguous, plain English

In the status comment the Committee reports that this is recommendation would be better stated as “‘reword’ rather than ‘rewrite.’ It was not the Coordinating Committee’s intention to change the meaning or intent of the RDA instructions; the intent was to have RDA instructions written in clearer, less ambiguous language.”

And, as I’m sure you’ve heard, the selection of Chris Oliver, Chair of the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, as Copy Editor, is listed as an accomplishment. And certainly if anyone can improve the readability of RDA it will be Chris!

The update goes on to note that “This work is already underway. Ms. Oliver will first submit reworded chapter 9, followed by chapters 10, 11, 6, and 17. The work on these five chapters will be completed and put forward for approval by the Joint Steering Committee and review by the U.S. RDA Test Committee by June 2012.”

There are many other recommendations reviewed in this first quarterly report and I encourage you to look at the others covered in this report.

A forum to update the progress of the Library of Congress Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative was held on January 22nd at the American Library Association Mid-Winter Meeting in Dallas, Texas. There were about 110 people in attendance including folks from the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Biblioteca Nacional de España, and our own Library and Archives Canada.

In his introductory remarks Beacher Wiggins said that this forum aimed to “learn how the Library of Congress could engage the community in the Bibliographic Framework Transition project and to foster dialogue about community concerns.”

Deanna Marcum, who now heads up the strategic consulting service Ithaka S+R, spoke about the need for a new bibliographic framework a question that has been on her mind for some time. She indicated that two recent reports were catalysts toward this initiative: the first was the final report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control; and, the second was the report from the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee of LC, NAL, and NLM which stated in part that there should be “credible progress toward a replacement for MARC” as one of the recommendations leading to a successful implementation of RDA.

Marcum also asked her then Library of Congress colleagues: “[what would Henriette D. Avram] have done in the age of Google. All agreed that Avram would not have viewed MARC as the final answer, but would have overseen an evolution of MARC to meet contemporary needs.”

Sally McCallum then provided an overview of and a synopsis of responses to initial Transition plan released on October 31, 2011. She noted that “several national libraries abroad had submitted statements of support for the Transition Initiative.”

In her remarks she stated that the Framework would:

“… most likely be based on Linked Data principles and use the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a World Wide Web Consortium specification, as its basic data model. The new framework will support many more options for data storage and retrieval than is the case now.“

McCallum also looked to the development of RDF ontologies as part of the new bibliographic framework and “stressed the need for community collaboration.”

If you haven’t yet done so one way you can participate in this initiative is by joining the BIBFRAME electronic discussion list.

The minutes for this meeting are now available.

It was announced today that the RDA terms for Content Type, Carrier Type, and Media Type have been published as open linked data in the Open Metadata Registry. The terms in these vocabularies have been “derived from the RDA/ONIX framework for resource categorization which established an extensible methodology for categorization of resources according to content and carrier.”

As noted in the announcement posted to Autocat, Gordon Dunsire says:

“These vocabularies are crucial for the selection and identification of information resources. Their publication as linked data in RDF allows the terms to be used by all bibliographic metadata communities in the Semantic Web environment. I look forward to the future development and publication of mappings from the vocabularies to the RDA/ONIX Framework. Similar mappings of other content and carrier vocabularies, such as those for ISBD area 0, will support metadata interoperability between communities and improve resource discovery for all.”

Another RDA step forward …

This has been posted to a number of email lists so I imagine you’ve seen this already. I’m posting it here too so the information can be quickly accessed if needed.

The Library of Congress is pleased to release – for dissemination, sharing, and feedback – the initial plan for its Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative.

The plan is available at:

http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/news/framework-103111.html

Additional Links

Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Website
http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/

Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Listserv
http://listserv.loc.gov/listarch/bibframe.html

Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control Website
http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/

The presentation slides from the IFLA 2011 RDA Satellite meeting, held at the National Library of Puerto Rico in August, are now available.

Very useful information but of particular interest to Canadian libraries are these two presentations:

• Preparing for RDA Implementation in Canada – Marg Stewart, Library and Archives Canada
• French Translation of RDA Update on the Project – Pat Riva, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

In addition to RDA Marg talks about the recent reorganization at LAC. At the end of her presentation Marg mentions the RDA CAnadian Knowledge Exchange (rdacake) wiki but does not provide the link. RDA Cake can be found here <http://rdaincanada.wikispaces.com>.

Both Marg and Pat speak about the necessity of having the French translation of RDA ready as part of the implementation process. Pat lays out the methodology and provides a timeline for the completion of the translation.

As part of the U.S. RDA test report it was announced that RDA implementation will not occur before January 2013. For some time RDA implementation has been on the minds of many Canadian cataloguers including members of the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing (CCC) and the Technical Services Interest Group of the Canadian Library Association.

Now that the U.S. test has finished plans are starting to firm up and additional training initiatives will start to emerge from the various interested parties.

It’s time to get ready for RDA!

The first group of RDA Vocabularies have been upgraded from ‘new-proposed’ to ‘published’ on the Open Metadata Registry.

“This status change … signals that the final steps have begun in reviewing the work of the DCMI/RDA Task Group and ensuring that the RDA vocabularies (both elements and controlled vocabularies/concepts) are available in a stable form for the builders of applications.“

Alan Danskin, Chair of the Joint Steering Committee, Gordon Dunsire, co-Chair of the DCMI/RDA Task Group, and Troy Linker, Publisher, ALA Digital Reference all comment on the importance of this work in the announcement posted to the RDA Toolkit blog yesterday.

The RDA Vocabularies are available on the Open Metadata Registry and you can follow further review and developments by subscribing to the RSS feeds available there.

This report was issued about a month ago and is where the implementation announcement was made:

“Contingent on the satisfactory progress/completion of the tasks and action items below, the Coordinating Committee recommends that RDA should be implemented by LC, NAL, and NLM no sooner than January 2013.“

The tasks include the following:

• Rewrite the RDA instructions in clear, unambiguous, plain English
• Define process for updating RDA in the online environment
• Improve functionality of the RDA Toolkit
• Develop full RDA record examples in MARC and other encoding schemas
• Announce completion of the Registered RDA Element Sets and Vocabularies. Ensure the registry is well described and in synchronization with RDA rules
• Demonstrate credible progress towards a replacement for MARC
• Ensure and facilitate community involvement
• Lead and coordinate RDA training
• Solicit demonstrations of prototype input and discovery systems that use the RDA element set (including relationships)

The full report (vii, 184 pages) and executive summary (8 pages) are both available.

This “statement” was issued by Deanna B. Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress in mid-May so not so new news but certainly something to take note of. The Library of Congress recognizes that “technological and environmental changes are … causing the library community to rethink the future of bibliographic control, including the MARC 21 communication formats.”

The profession is wrestling with many alternative views of the future and Deanna B. Marcum is leading an initiative at the Library of Congress to “analyze the present and future environment, identify the components of the framework to support our users, and plan for the evolution from our present framework to the future—not just for the Library of Congress, but for all institutions that depend on bibliographic data shared by the Library and its partners.” A very ambitious agenda in which they promise to involve community stakeholders through various discussions and meetings over the next two or three years.

Apparently a number of the participants in the RDA test group commented that despite the current budgetary issues many consider it “necessary to replace MARC 21 in order to reap the full benefit of new and emerging content standards.” Again not new news, Roy Tennant and others have been calling for the death of MARC for some time now.

One of the issues listed in this statement includes experimentation with Semantic Web and linked data technologies and it will be very interesting to see if this will become a primary focus with the profession as the bibliographic environment evolves into the future.

This short report by Jennifer Bowen and David Lindahl was issued earlier this month by the eXtensible Catalog Organization. Bowen and Lindahl are the Co-Executive Directors of the eXtensible Catalog Organization and wrote this report as a followup to a meeting they had with the US RDA Test Coordinating Committee at the Library of Congress. At the meeting they spoke about implementing some aspects of RDA in the eXtensible Catalog.

RDA and eXtensible Catalog is only three pages in length so easy to read and absorb quickly.

Here are some of the statements that resonated with me:

• RDA elements can … interact easily with elements from other metadata schemas, making RDA a much more flexible standard than other standards currently in use within the library community
• fortunate to have access to elements from a standard such as RDA that has been developed within the library community, and which therefore aligns closely with defined elements in existing library catalog data
• RDA … serves as an important “bridge” between present library systems and emerging applications such as XC
• a significant amount of AACR2/MARC data cannot be reused without considerable programming or manual record editing
• to knowingly continue to create metadata that cannot be reused effectively in other systems is potentially a waste of current library resources, especially when using a more forward‐looking standard (RDA) will begin to address these problems
• XC has set the stage for additional transformations of metadata into a more complete FRBR‐based implementation of RDA
• one of the strengths of the library community has always been its adoption of community‐wide standards such as AACR2 and MARC, which encourage other communities to interact with our metadata. A widespread adoption of RDA will continue this tradition of library leadership in metadata standards, and provide a clearer vision for the development of future library systems

It’s short. I recommend reading the whole thing yourself.

Recent announcement on the RDA discussion list from Judy Kuhagen regarding the report from the US RDA Test Coordinating Committee.

“The US RDA Test Coordinating Committee continues to evaluate and analyze the data from the US RDA Test. The report from the committee will be submitted to the senior managers of the three U.S. national libraries on May 6. The decision of those senior managers will be announced in June; the report for the public will be released before the 2011 ALA Annual Meeting (June 23-28).“