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.

• String encoding schemes in RDA Toolkit,
• RDA content elements, which discusses the aggregates model,
• RDA content elements Appendix.

Community feedback on these papers via your regional representative is most welcome.

Tina Buck, Electronic Resources Librarian, University of Central Florida, will present NISO’s PIE-J recommended practices at ER&L (Electronic Resources and Libraries) annual conference to be held on 10 March 2020 in Austin, Texas, USA. PIE-J addresses presentation of titles and ISSNs throughout a journals’ lifespan. Such presentation is critical for accurate citations, link resolver functionality, and general ease of use. But is PIE-J being followed? This session will assess several publisher/platform displays of journal landing pages and article level screens.

Look at the full schedule.

The RDA Steering Committee (RSC) is responsible for maintaining RDA: Resource Description and Access.

RDA is a package of data elements, guidelines, and instructions for creating library and cultural heritage resource metadata that are well-formed according to international models for user-focussed linked data applications.

The agenda for the asynchronous RSC meeting, to be 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.

• String encoding schemes in RDA Toolkit
• RDA content elements
• RDA content elements Appendix

Community feedback on these papers via your regional representative is most welcome.

The revision of an ISO standard is a very specific process involving experts from various backgrounds and countries. ISO Central Secretariat regularly issues guidelines and recommendations to help the convener of the working group and experts to proceed with the revision. The ISSN standard was last revised in 2007. This paper describes the current revision process of ISO 3297 -ISSN. Although ISO experts can share their insights at regular meetings, it is sometimes useful to call upon the community of users to get their input. A survey was thus conducted in 2018 about the views of ISSN users on the future of the standard. ISO experts have since reviewed the survey findings and come forward with proposals for the development of the next ISSN standard.

This paper was presented by Gaëlle Béquet, Director of ISSN International Centre and Chair of ISO/TC 46, at IFLA WLIC 2019 – Athens, Greece – Libraries: dialogue for change in Session 208 – Serials and Other Continuing Resources.

The intent behind the formulation of Thema was to develop a descriptive book subject classification system (similar to BISAC) that was suited to the needs of a multi-cultural, multi-lingual book supply chain. A core tenet of the system was that the scheme would be sufficiently flexible to allow an individual market to retain a unique cultural voice, all while remaining a unified and simple-to-adopt scheme.

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a NISO member organization, recently published an informative three-part series on the creation and development of Thema.

The ISNI International Agency and Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) have announced that BAnQ is joining the ISNI network as a Registration Agency operating in Québec. ISNI, the International Standard Name Identifier, is used to uniquely identify persons and organizations across a wide range of creative sectors. The ISNI International Agency acts as the registration authority for identifiers. BAnQ plans to offer ISNI assignment services to people and organizations associated with Québec works, including visual and audiovisual materials as well as books.

At IFLA WLIC 2019, the ISBD Review Group gave account on the work carried out to prepare the revision of ISBD, as mentionned in the four-years work plan for revision of ISBD 2018-2022 approved by the IFLA Committee on Standards.

The 2nd international ISNI Summit for Libraries was held on 26th-27th June 2019 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). Organized by the BnF and the British Library, the summit attracted 36 participants, including representatives from 17 national and research libraries as well as representatives from the ISNI International Agency and OCLC.  This summit led to the creation of the ISNI Consultation Group for Libraries led by a steering group in charge of drafting the terms of reference and an action plan. The resulting final statement about the ISNI Consultation Group for Libraries is available on the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s website, together with presentations delivered over the two days: https://bit.ly/2jZ6LpO