** Please excuse cross posting**


Please join the ALCTS CRS Holdings Information Committee at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia:

Saturday, January 25th from 3:00-4:00 pm in the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Room 203 B.



BIBFRAME and the future of holdings information

Our first speaker, Rebecca Guenther, will discuss the BIBFRAME initiative and the effects it will have on the communication of holdings information. The Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) is an effort to provide a foundation for the future exchange of bibliographic description. It develops a model and ontology for describing bibliographic data, addressing both future data exchange and a transition path for existing MARC 21 bibliographic data. The Framework is a Linked Data Model that defines information entities - relating to bibliographic description, holdings, and authority. The intention is to enable the rich metadata available in libraries and other cultural heritage institutions to be part of the global web of data. BIBFRAME is in development and at this time the holdings focus is on the "obtain" function of bibliographic data, rather than prediction. This presentation will summarize the BIBFRAME Data Model in general and how holdings information fits into it by using BIBFRAME Annotations and RDF Classes HeldMaterial and HeldItem. It will illustrate various common scenarios and describe the properties in the BIBFRAME vocabulary relevant to holdings.

Rebecca will be followed by Diane Hillmann, who will discuss her research and share her thoughts on the future of holdings data. Of all the MARC 21 formats, Holdings was the one most clearly designed for machine manipulation. It is granular, flexible, and intended to be used at either a detailed or summary level. It has sometimes frightened potential users because it looks complex (even where it isn't), and in its "native" form is not particularly human friendly. Some of the complexity arises because there are both display and prediction aspects in the encoding, and not all library systems have developed predictive serial check-in systems supported by MARC Holdings. Some of the bibliographic metadata efforts now going forward ignore the existing MARC Holdings, sometimes in favor of simpler solutions based on the perception of the waning need for predictive check-in for digital subscriptions. Not much effort has been expended to bring the MARC Holdings format forward into the discussions about changing requirements and re-use of existing standards. As part of this presentation, Diane will review the effort to put the MARC21 Bibliographic Format into a very granular RDF expression, creating the possibility of lossless mapping. In this context, what can be done to follow that model for MARC Holdings, and what would that look like?"



Rebecca Guenther has 35 years of experience in national libraries, primarily working on library technology standards related to digital libraries. Most of her professional life has been at the Library of Congress in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office developing national and international standards related to metadata. In addition she is an adjunct professor in NYU's Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program and at Rutgers School of Communication and Information and consults on metadata issues.


Diane Hillmann is currently Director of Metadata Initiatives for the Information Institute of Syracuse. She was formerly Research Librarian, Cornell University Library and Director of Library Services and Operations of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). She is active in the library standards community, having served several terms on the MARC Standards Advisory Committee (MARBI) as a liaison from the law library community and as a LITA representative. She currently represents the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative on the ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA) discussing the new Resource Description and Access (RDA) standard [RDA]. In addition, she serves as the Standards Coordinator for the Library Information Technology Association (a division of the American Library Association) and was recently appointed to the NISO Content and Collection Management Topic Committee.



We look forward to seeing you there!



Violeta Ilik on behalf of the ALCTS CRS Holdings Information Committee

Violeta Ilik | Assistant Professor
Office of Scholarly Communication
Texas A&M University Libraries
5000 TAMU | College Station, TX 77843

Tel. 979.862.4661 Email: vilik at library.tamu.edu