2012

The 2012 Warsaw Conference

On August 9th 2012 the Standing Committee together with the IFLA Cataloguing Section held a conference Bibliography in a Digital Age at the National Library of Poland in Warsaw. The event was a Satellite Meeting to the main IFLA 2012 Congress. The purpose of the event was to share: experiences , techniques and challenges in order to identify developing themes & best practice.

Emerging Themes

• A need for pragmatic selection policies
• Open services to wider user groups
• Acquisition & application of new skills
• Linking & use of persistent identifiers
• Definition of "published" digital material
• Targeted metadata transformation & crosswalks
• Requirement for multiple forms of metadata

National Bibliographic Agencies:

• Operate in a global market
• Create & supply metadata for a wider range of resources than ever before

Pragmatism & Selection

No universal solution exists & national variation exists between:

• Coverage of print, digital and multimedia
• Breadth & depth of descriptions applied
• Definition & treatment of materials

But agreement that:

• We cannot be exhaustive but we can be representative
• Should balance effort in creation of quality description & access points
• "Minimal" must still be accurate
• Must be selective in harvesting & enhancement techniques
• Advance (e.g. CIP) data is still valued

Users

New user types require greater flexibility in:

• Support skills (e.g. IT, legal, library)
• Access options including connection to content
• Output formats & standards
• Personalisation of data and services

But all value consistency, authority & persistence of services offered ...

Open

"Open" is becoming the norm via:

• Open licensing models
• Open access routes
• Open standards

Charging is a "MARC" or "premium service" issue concerning professional and/or commercial usage

Being able to accomodate increasing data re-use requires proactive licensing

Growth Areas

• Automated data creation - and enhancement
• Web harvesting- selection/domain/event
• Large scale processing of e-publications - via new workflows
• Growth in the use of ontologies and controlled vocabularies
• Semantic approaches - from "tags to triples"
• Development and maintenance of persistent links & IDs
• Linking - to and from resources