The Future of Cataloging: RDA, Linked Data and More - schedule

RDA Steering Committee Chair-Elect Kathy Glennan will provide information about the external and internal factors that have driven the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign (3R) Project, highlight some of the significant changes coming to RDA, and discuss what catalogers need to do to get ready for the new Toolkit.

The Inventory app in the FOLIO suite of micro-services is being developed to be metadata format agnostic, that is, it will be compatible with multiple data sources such as MARC, Dublin Core, and BibFrame. RDA vocabulary and elements are proposed as default filters/facets, for example, RDA content type and nature of contents. This session will outline some of the ways RDA has shaped the development of FOLIO and the potential implications of a format-neutral catalog environment.

Community college cataloging has little defined support; there are few, if any, universal cataloging practices for community college libraries to abide by, and often, cataloging teams consist of only one or two individuals. Small, isolated teams may also experience lack of community. While community college cataloging can come with special challenges, some are also of great benefit. For example, small departments have results in the ability to rapidly adopt new practices and train cataloging staff on those practices.

Until 2017, Tulsa Community College cataloging was still largely based on AACR2 practices, and while previous catalogers had tinkered with RDA, no official steps had been taken to modernize the college’s cataloging practices. At best, records were completed in hybrid formats with complicated solutions for non-monographic items. In June 2017, TCC cataloging committed to modernizing their cataloging practices by first adopting RDA, and then by preparing staff for the eventual migration to BIBFRAME. Utilizing a variety of free or inexpensive resources, staff were able to transition from AACR1/AACR2 standards to RDA in less than six months, as well as collaborate with catalogers at different institutions to solve long-standing cataloging problems and conundrums. As a result, the College has completed hundreds of RDA record conversions or original catalogs in the past academic year, and the College is beginning to explore other avenues for modern records, such as Linked Data and metadata standards.

This presentation will cover the challenges facing TCC prior to RDA conversion, the steps taken in order to successfully convert to RDA standards, the resources utilized, and the future plans for TCC cataloging.

Texas A&M University Libraries has recently joined the Linked Data for Production (LD4P) cohort. This presentation will give an overview of what the LD4P project is, why we are interested in participating, an overview of our objectives and timeline, and what we hope to learn.

The transition to linked data drives ever-greater technical bridge-building between previously segregated systems, and yet the implementation of controlled vocabularies to govern the new linked environment continues to occur primarily within linguistic silos. The use of unique identifiers, such as those employed by the Getty Vocabularies, can mitigate this problem, but linked data dependent on translated terms suffers unavoidably from key limitations: the lack of 1-to-1 equivalents between languages, uneven language skills amongst metadata creators, limitations in funding and labor to support translation efforts, and long-term instabilities arising from semantic drift. This presentation considers possible contributions toward solutions from the field of interlinguistics, particularly in the potential for an auxiliary language to function as a universal linguistic standard for metadata--democratizing access to metadata librarianship, rendering terminology maximally accessible to contributors from different regions (particularly in the global south), stabilizing term definitions, and reducing ambiguities by outsourcing translation from linked data itself into institutionally-local display metadata.

What are we doing when we follow Tim Berners-Lee’s instruction to “use URIs as names for things,” and why are we doing it? Aiming to fill a perceived gap between introductory talks describing what a linked data triple is and more advanced technical presentations describing linked data implementation, this theoretical talk seeks to take a big picture look at library linked data and situate it in cataloguing history as well as in the current landscape of the burgeoning semantic web. Linked data fulfills the dream to abstract information to an atomic level, and does this in a useful, machine-actionable manner. By demonstrating where linked data’s adoption in libraries comes from, and what it leads to, I seek to promote a paradigm that sees linked data and it’s underpinning theoretical developments (RDA, IFLA LRM) as logical, necessary, and full of possibilities.

"RDA and Non-Human Personages" will discuss the roles of agents in the IFLA Library Reference Model and the challenges inherent in LRM's definitions of persons and collective agents and their effect on the RDA idea of a "person." If agents must be real human beings, what about works that claim non-humans as their creators? Topics covered will include non-human personages in an agent-like capacity, fictitious entities, the use of pseudonyms for non-humans, alternative and real identities, animal performers, gods, angels, and everything in-between, and explains how the nomen entity may be used to record these in bibliographic records.

Join Zepheira and the Dallas Public Library (DPL) to learn more about how linked data works, how DPL used it to develop and implement a new service, and where we predict linked data is heading.

Gives a brief overview of cataloging maps in MARC and RDA, including a focus on fields specific to maps. Discusses scale, relief, and projection and other map characteristics. Walks the audience through the cataloging of an example map to create a MARC record. Describes fields added in RDA (33x fields).

How do people search for books? To answer this question, our team analyzed millions of real Google searches. We find a significant disconnect between search terms and cataloging practice: most of the details we catalog are never searched, and most of the terms searched aren't in the catalog record. Even if catalogs can be crawled by Google (as they can with Linked Data), they will not appear in search results unless the metadata follows Google's most important maxim: Give the user what they want. In this session, I present our findings and demonstrate why current proposals for the future of cataloging fall short of search engine visibility.