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.

A new release of RDA Toolkit was posted on December 16, 2022. It included updates to both the English and Finnish versions of RDA. There were changes to the English RDA text related to RSC approval of two proposals at its July meeting. These changes added instructions to two Item and two Manifestation elements to make them consistent with other RDA elements that permit recording methods for non-RDA vocabulary encoding schemes, and made additions to the “Recording an unstructured description” section of five elements.

Read more about the release in the December 2022 Release Notes.

The ISNI Libraries Sector Consultation Group held its second Open Meeting of the year on 20th October 2022. The Chair of ISNI’s Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), Emma Rogoz (British Library) presented an interesting overview of ISNI technical developments in recent months. Work is nearing completion on a duplicate detection crawler. Some participants reported briefly on a range of topics: the use of ISNI in identifying publishers and brands (Gaëlle Bequet, ISSN-IC); enhancing ISNI’s documentation (Erin Burnand, British Library and the ISNI Quality Team); the recent launch of the ISNI Book Publishing Consultation Group (Andrew MacEwan, British Library).

This is a timely moment to explore the risks and trust-related issues associated with an ever wider implementation of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). Following an earlier work on ‘risks and trust in pursuit of a well-functioning Persistent Identifier infrastructure for research’ conducted by the Knowledge Exchange (KE) Task & Finish Group on PIDs, the KE commissioned a study in July 2021 to look deeper into these issues. This work will result in the publication of a report and a series of case studies on specific areas of current PID development. The full project results are expected to be published by the KE by the end of 2022.

Le groupe Systèmes & Données du programme Transition bibliographique a organisé sa 7e journée professionnelle « Métadonnées en bibliothèques » le 25 novembre 2022 en visio conférence.

Ce rendez-vous met en avant une avancée majeure du groupe : la constitution et la mise en ligne d’un jeu de données conforme à la modélisation IFLA LRM dans un format UNIMARC. L’objectif est de donner de la matière pour des tests d’intégration de ces données et de développement autour d’un catalogue par entités tant pour les interfaces professionnelles que publiques.

La BnF et l’Abes lancent l’élaboration de l’ontologie RDA-FR en septembre 2022, dans le cadre du programme Transition bibliographique. Librement disponible sur le web, cette ontologie permettra aux agences bibliographiques nationales et éditeurs de SGB (systèmes de gestion de bibliothèques) de créer et de diffuser leurs données structurées. L’enjeu est d’assurer la visibilité de celles-ci et de faciliter leur exploitation par tous, au-delà des bibliothèques.

Todd Carpenter, Executive Director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), argues that policies on identifiers are too vague and need to be specific. Within the sphere of scholarly communications, there is a common understanding of the value of PIDs, metadata. It is past time that we all agree on a core set of identifiers and basic metadata elements and begin to encourage researchers to use them at scale when communicating their results. In order to facilitate this, funders, publishers, and systems providers need to ensure that ease of use and seamless interoperability are achieved so as not to create barriers to adoption.

The 6th BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe Annual Meeting took place as a hybrid event from 20-21 September 2022. It was organized by the National Széchényi Library Budapest, Hungary. This forum brings together people working in the transition from MARC to Linked Data using the BIBFRAME model and related tools.

The presentations are online.

The conference organized by KBR (Royal Library of Belgium, which hosts the Belgian ISSN Centre) was held in Brussels and online on 13th and 14th September 2022. The networking project LOD-ISNI aims to strengthen the long-term cooperation with (inter)national partners, and to promote the use of Linked Open Data and international standards for disclosing and valorizing cultural heritage materials.
The programme was split into two sections with the first day of the conference focusing mainly on linked data, and the second day on international standards. The videos and presentations are online.