WLIC 2023 Satellite meeting Universal Bibliographic Control at the crossroads: the challenges of unifying IFLA bibliographic standards, KBR, the Royal Library of Belgium, 18-19 August 2023

Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) was created jointly by IFLA and UNESCO as part of a global effort to ensure better access to information. UBC has long been a fundamental part of the international framework for the bibliographic aspect of libraries’ work. IFLA’s UBCIM Programme has been responsible for the creation of the ISBDs as well as UNIMARC. 20 years after it closed, and about a decade after IFLA’s last collective reflection and declaration on UBC (IFLA Professional Statement on Universal Bibliographic Control and Lyon Declaration), the IFLA Sections on Bibliography, Cataloguing and Subject Analysis and Access invite metadata specialists from all around the world to convene at KBR in Brussels to start discussing a new framework for the coming decades. At a time when IFLA is re-examining its technical and strategic infrastructure for metadata standards creation and maintenance to take into account the new environment of data exchange for data interoperability, each individual term of the “UBC” concept can be questioned.