Karen Coyle is in the putting the finishing touches on the February issue of Library Technology Reports, titled "RDA Vocabularies for a Twenty-First-Century Data Environment". In the following excerpt, she addresses the difficulty that many librarians have in understanding the basic concepts of FRBR, and offers some diagrams to clarify them. Though understanding FRBR may be tricky, she argues, it is essential to a transformation to a modern, workable data environment.
Highly recommendable introduction to the the current requirements for bibliographic metadata. - This chapter of “Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata” explores the history of library data and where it stands in a modern context. The rise of a new information environment—the World Wide Web—has revealed the downside of the long history that libraries have with metadata. The question that we must face, and that we must face sooner rather than later, is how we can best transform our data so that it can become part of the dominant information environment that is the Web.
This year the ALCTS Forum at ALA MidwinterL1 brought together three perspectives on massaging bibliographic data of various sorts in ways that use MARC, but where MARC is not the end goal. What do you get when you swirl MARC, ONIX, and various other formats of metadata in a big pot? Three projects: ONIX Enrichment at OCLC, the Open Library Project, and Google Book Search metadata.
In this post, Jennifer Bowen discusses the implications of Karen Coyle's January issue of Library Technology Reports, and places it in the current context of Metadata librarianship.