Library of Congress Provides Details About Transition Away From MARC
By Michael Kelley Oct 31, 2011The Library of Congress (LC) released today a "general plan" for its ambitious effort to move the U.S. library community toward a modern method of exchanging bibliographic data.
The Bibliographic Framework Initiative General Plan, building upon an initial announcement in May, would slowly distance libraries from the 40-year-old MARC format as the "common exchange currency for bibliographic data" and implant libraries in an environment conditioned by the technologies of the Semantic Web and linked data principles. This would include the use of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Resource Description Framework as a data model, which is the preferred method for publishing linked data.
"Although the MARC-based infrastructure is extensive, and MARC has been adapted to changing technologies, a major effort to create a comparable exchange vehicle that is grounded in the current and expected future shape of data interchange is needed," the plan states.
The LC announcement follows the publication last week of the final report of the W3C Library Linked Data Incubator Group, which, as LJ has reported, urges the library community to reconceptualize metadata and publish it to the Web using linked data technologies so that it will play well with nonlibrary datasets on the Web.
The LC explicitly acknowledged today the W3C's report and the call for greater interoperability of library metadata, and it has been exposing its own vocabularies as linked open data since 2009, including the publication in August of its flagship Name Authority File.
"Embracing common exchange techniques (the Web and Linked Data) and broadly adopted data models (RDF) will move the current library-technological environment away from being a niche market unto itself to one more readily understandable by present and future data creators, data modelers, and software developers," the LC plan says.
In an introductory letter posted on the LC website, Deanna Marcum, the associate librarian for library services, said:
"The new bibliographic framework we are aiming for will broaden participation in the network of resources, librarians will be able to do a much better job of linking their patrons to resources of all kinds (from the library and from many other sources), and costs can be better contained."
The LC is planning to apply for a two-year grant in the near future to support the initiative. It will form an advisory committee to frame the principles and a technical committee to deal with the nuts and bolts. Recommendations for who should serve on the committees can be submitted to ndmso@loc.gov. Comments about the initiative itself can be posted at Bibliographic Transition listserv.
"The LC and its MARC partners are interested in a deliberate change that allows the community to move into the future with a more robust, open, and extensible carrier for our rich bibliographic data, and one that better accommodates the library community's new cataloging rules, RDA [Resource Description and Access]," the plan states.
Marcum said that the requirements for the new bibliographic framework were identified based on the recommendations of the 2008 Working Group of the Future of Bibliographic Control and the recent test of RDA conducted by the National Agricultural Library, the National Library of Medicine, and the Library of Congress.
Both made clear that, given a growing linked data environment, the full richness of the library's world bibliographic data as well as the full capabilities of RDA could not be realized until MARC, which was created for a pre-Web environment, was superseded as a standard.
The LC in its announcement today published a number of mostly technical requirements for the work to move forward (including being "agnostic" to cataloging rules), but it does say that the initiative will take into consideration the needs of all types of libraries, from small public to large research.
It also recognizes that "systems and services based on MARC 21 communications record will be an important part of the infrastructure for many years."
Despite assuring compatibility with MARC-based records, the future clearly lies elsewhere.
"The amount of legacy data ... does not deter us from taking responsible actions for the next generation of libraries and librarians," Marcum wrote. "The problem has been well defined by our partners. We now turn to partners of many types to help us find a durable solution."
