Cultural Heritage

On the 11th January the BIC Bibliographic Standards Group (of which I’m a member) met to consider the UK response to Papers scheduled for discussion at the MARBI meeting at the ALA 2010 Mid-Winter event. Following the meeting, the minutes were agreed via email, and posted on Google Docs on the 14th January.

Actually, when I say met, this was a telephone conference call – not a last-minute response to the weather and travel situation but pre-planned. The twice-yearly BIC BSG meetings take place just before the MARBI meetings, so that’s always early January and usually sometime in June. With group members based all over the UK, we now conference call the January meeting. Keeping the summer meeting face-to-face helps integrate new members but we are all more than happy not to have to face the challenges of winter travel.

The remit of the group is two-fold. One task is to decide on the UK response to proposed changes to the MARC 21 formats used in library catalogues; the UK representative presents this at the MARBI meetings. The other task is to keep a watching brief on a range of other standards of relevance to the UK library sector. Members of the group brief each other on a whole range of standards, often from the standpoint of a contributor to the development of a particular standard, or as a user of newly emerging standards. Where appropriate we can identify activity (e.g. an event, a paper) that we or another group might be able to take forward to inform the community.

So what were we discussing on the 11th January 2010? The five MARC 21 Proposals concerned differentiating types of electronic resources (2010-01), series data for digital preservation projects (2010-02), recording Date and Place of Capture information (2010-03) new data elements for work and expression information (2010-04) and coded cartographic mathematical data (2010-05). The three Discussion Papers concerned ISBD punctuation in records (2010-DP01), encoding URIs for controlled values (2010-DP02) and encoding new identifiers ISTC and ISNI (2010-DP03).

Standards we are currently watching are: BIC ‘Code of Practice for the Identification of E-Books and Digital Content’; the BIC E4Libraries Subject Category Headings (some public libraries are actively looking at using these); BIC Standard Subject Categories (pressure to converge with US scheme BISAC); International Standard Text Code (ISTC) – around 4,000 identifiers have been assigned to date; International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) – voting on the draft closes in March; RDA-DCMI Initiative; RDA in RDF at the NSDL Registry (Element Sets and Vocabularies); Dublin Core; FRBR; FRAD; FRSAD; Bibliontology; MODS; MADS; METS; Learning Object Metadata (LOM); http://www.openarchives.org/ore/; Harmony (harmonisation of metadata models).

What about the practicalities of virtual meetings? We used a telephone conference call (offered by specialized service providers). If this is going to be a lengthy call I’d suggest using a handset with hands-free option or a headset – easier on the ear and to take notes. Alternatively you could try Skype, a software application to make voice calls over the Internet. Calls to other Skype users are free, but of course everyone needs to have the application installed. Skype also has additional features (e.g. instant messaging, file transfer and video conferencing) which may be useful.