During its last two meetings, the RDA Steering Committee (RSC) drew up and adopted the RSC Action Plan 2020-2022. This action plan was also presented at ALA Midwinter by Kathy Glenan, Chair of RSC. In parallel, there is a Strategic Plan of the RDA Board.
Interest in ISNI membership continues to increase as the standard is adopted or rolled out more widely. A consortium of the leading university libraries in the Netherlands, represented by SURFmarket, has signed up for ISNI membership, bringing at least academic 13 libraries into the ISNI fold. ISNI also hopes soon to welcome the group of legal deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland, affiliating with ISNI in a joint effort coordinated by the British Library (which is already a Registration Agency in its own right).
Outside the library world, ISNI is also in advanced discussions with a number of organizations in the music industry, one of which Quansic (located in Switzerland) joined late in 2019. The ISNI board is keen to extend the territories where ISNI is directly represented, and have dialogues underway with prospective Registration Agencies in both South America and Australasia.
Since 1 January 2020, the Frankfurt-based technology and information provider MVB has taken over the role of a registration agency for the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. MVB is building the new standardization service during the first half of 2020. All author information in the VLB (Verzeichnis Lieferbarer Bücher), the catalogue of books in print used in the German-speaking world, automatically receives an ISNI, provided the German National Library has clearly identified the author. From now on, publishers who maintain their titles on vlb.de can also add ISNIs to their authors. Consequently, the number of titles with unique creator identifiers will increase significantly within a short period of time.
The conversation continued at the 2019 ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia between representatives of the RDA Steering Committee and the larger BIBFRAME community, which includes the Library of Congress/NDMSO, LD4P, Share-VDE, and the organizer group of the annual BIBFRAME workshops in Europe. A possible field of future cooperation is an approach to application profiles. For the coming years, the RSC has a BIBFRAME mapping on its action plan. The group is pleased to report continuing progress and is planning to meet again at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago in June 2020. All the presentations of ALA Midwinter Conference are now online.
The French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation’s Open Science Committee has commissioned the Couperin consortium to lead a consortium membership in ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier) on behalf of French institutions, especially higher education and research institutions. This consortium makes it possible to pool memberships on a national scale, in particular to obtain preferential rates for individual institutions and strengthen French overall representation. Consortium membership will provide the opportunity to promote ORCID for researchers and institutions, and build ORCID-based services. ORCID is a non-profit organization that assigns persistent digital identifiers to researchers and academics. This membership is in line with one of the French commitments to the Open Government Partnership (Commitment 18: Developing an “open science” ecosystem).
ISO standards regularly undergo a systematic revision process. A ballot about ISO 4 standard revision has been issued by ISO and will be closed by February 25, 2020. This ballot is intended to decide if the standard should be revised, maintained without any modification, or withdrawn. The ISSN International Centre is in favour of confirming the ISO 4 standard. Contact your ISO national member body to voice your support for the confirmation.
The following resolutions are currently submitted to vote by ISO TC46/SC9:
RESOLUTION 2020-01: Stop Publication ISO 3297
ISO/TC46/SC9 resolves to stop the publication of ISO 3297 to incorporate the missing section and make other amendments to the document resulting from the FDIS ballot closed November 29, 2019 and the translation of ISO/FDIS 3297 as contained in ISO_PUB_3297.doc.
RESOLUTION 2020-02: Launch 2nd FDIS Ballot
ISO/TC46/SC9 resolves to launch a 2nd FDIS ballot of the document with the missing text included and the other proposed changes included. Please note that a 2nd FDIS is an exception when the first FDIS resulted in approval. In this case with missing text, this is the only option to ensure a well vetted document.
Please contact your ISO national member body to support these resolutions before March 16th, 2020.
Together with CSUC (Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya), OCLC organized a symposium for library professionals in Spain engaged in metadata practices around authorities and identifiers. The goal was to encourage thinking strategically about the transition towards an interlinked ecosystem of bibliographic entities. Thirty-five staff from CSUC member institutions, the national library of Spain and the university of the Basque Country participated in this event in Barcelona on 3 December 2019.
Have a look at the event webpage with the slide presentations
CONTENTdm is a service for building, preserving and showcasing a library’s unique digital collections.
The large volume of unique, digital content stored in CONTENTdm offers an excellent opportunity for transition to linked data. Using linked data, the wide variety of data models and descriptive practices across CONTENTdm will be significantly easier to manage for library staff and will provide rich discovery for library end-users and web browsers. Immediate benefits of this project will be the ability to do structured searching across all CONTENTdm repositories and searching and faceting based on authority files and library-staff-defined vocabularies. The outcomes and findings from the linked data Wikibase prototype (Project Passage) completed in 2018 have provided great insight into how to implement a system to facilitate the mapping, reconciliation, storage, and retrieval of structured data for unique digital materials.
The agenda for the asynchronous RSC meeting, held 6-9 January 2020, has been posted on the RSC website.
Three papers associated with agenda items being discussed have also been posted and are linked from the agenda.
Community feedback on these papers via your regional representative is most welcome.
