As use cases build in the global research ecosystem around persistent identifiers (PIDs) for research organizations, ORCID has recently increased its financial commitment to the first and only openly available organization identifier—Research Organization Registry (ROR). Instead of disambiguating people as ORCID does, ROR disambiguates institution names, captures affiliations, links affiliation metadata to research outputs, and exchanges affiliation information across scholarly systems, making it an indispensable component of a research ecosystem that connects researchers with their research.

The RDA Board plans to begin a countdown clock in May 2026 (specific date still to be determined), with the removal of the original Toolkit taking place a year later—May 2027. This plan was presented to the RDA Steering Committee in May 2023, and the RSC fully supported this decision.

Cluster ISSN is a new concept defined in ISO 3297:2020. Cluster ISSNs are identifiers that allow an ISSN designated by a specific prefix, e.g., ISSN-L 0302-9743, to identify a group of related continuing resources.

This proposal is to define a new repeatable field (023), to provide a field that is distinct from the ISSN field (022) for this separate data element. Another goal is to allow the URIs associated with each Cluster ISSN to be linked unambiguously with their corresponding Cluster ISSN. Anticipation of future Cluster ISSNs with their associated URIs necessitates a new repeatable field to provide a separate field for each Cluster ISSN and its associated URIs. The result is a unique ISSN (ISSN-H) that will group the successive titles held by a publication over time.

In May 2023, the proposal was made available to the MARC community for discussion whose result will be known on 28 June 2023.

The Oceania region RDA Committee (ORDAC) presented a series of three webinars exploring concepts from the Official RDA Guidance chapters, presented by ORDAC member and Oceania RSC representative Charlotte Christensen from the National Library of New Zealand.
These sessions provide the step before beginning to describe a resource, exploring terminology and structure that will be key to following more community-focused sessions in the future. The recordings are available:

Watch the Session 1 recording

Watch the Session 2 recording

All updates to the UNIMARC Bibliographic and Authorities formats, 3rd ed., approved in 2022 are available online (in PDF format).

See all the updates to the UNIMARC Bibliographic format.

See all the updates to the UNIMARC Authorities format.

The World Wide Web Consortium has just formed a new public-interest non-profit organization. The new entity preserves a member-driven approach, existing worldwide outreach and cooperation while allowing for additional partners around the world beyond Europe and Asia. The new organization will develop open web standards as a single global organization with contributions from W3C Members, staff, and the international community.

The Software Heritage project, launched in 2016 by Inria (France), aims at collecting, preserving, and making readily available the source code of all software ever written, building an essential infrastructure at the service of cultural heritage, digital development, science, industry, and society as a whole. Watch the presentations about software source code as documentary heritage and an enabler for digital skills education and innovation.

ISO 23527:2022 Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) developed by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) has just been published by ISO. RAiD is a persistent identifier for research projects and activities. RAiD connects existing persistent identifiers for researchers, institutions, outputs and tools with key project information to create a timeline of research projects. ARDC delivers other identifiers, i.e. Digital Object Identifiers, Handles, International Generic Sample Number Service (IGSN).

The guidelines that instruct Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) catalogers working in shared cataloging environments to encode all languages using MARC language codes and, optionally, also using ISO 639-3 language codes have been revised. However, it is possible that in the future, macros and other automated means will be developed to generate MARC language codes if catalogers have manually entered ISO 639-3 codes, eliminating the need for double coding.

The MARC/RDA Working Group (MRWG) is pleased to announce the release of its final report.

This report provides a background to the group’s establishment, its charge, membership, schedule of work and guiding principles. It goes on to summarize those changes to MARC 21 recommended by the MRWG and agreed by the MARC Advisory Committee in support of the RDA Toolkit following completion of the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign (3R) Project. It also details those changes to RDA which the MRWG considered. In conclusion, the report analyses the limitations associated with implementing 3R in a MARC 21 context as well as the possible scope for further changes in future.