All updates to the UNIMARC Bibliographic and Authorities formats, 3rd ed., approved in 2022 are available online (in PDF format).

See all the updates to the UNIMARC Bibliographic format.

See all the updates to the UNIMARC Authorities format.

The World Wide Web Consortium has just formed a new public-interest non-profit organization. The new entity preserves a member-driven approach, existing worldwide outreach and cooperation while allowing for additional partners around the world beyond Europe and Asia. The new organization will develop open web standards as a single global organization with contributions from W3C Members, staff, and the international community.

The Software Heritage project, launched in 2016 by Inria (France), aims at collecting, preserving, and making readily available the source code of all software ever written, building an essential infrastructure at the service of cultural heritage, digital development, science, industry, and society as a whole. Watch the presentations about software source code as documentary heritage and an enabler for digital skills education and innovation.

ISO 23527:2022 Research Activity Identifier (RAiD) developed by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) has just been published by ISO. RAiD is a persistent identifier for research projects and activities. RAiD connects existing persistent identifiers for researchers, institutions, outputs and tools with key project information to create a timeline of research projects. ARDC delivers other identifiers, i.e. Digital Object Identifiers, Handles, International Generic Sample Number Service (IGSN).

The guidelines that instruct Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) catalogers working in shared cataloging environments to encode all languages using MARC language codes and, optionally, also using ISO 639-3 language codes have been revised. However, it is possible that in the future, macros and other automated means will be developed to generate MARC language codes if catalogers have manually entered ISO 639-3 codes, eliminating the need for double coding.

The MARC/RDA Working Group (MRWG) is pleased to announce the release of its final report.

This report provides a background to the group’s establishment, its charge, membership, schedule of work and guiding principles. It goes on to summarize those changes to MARC 21 recommended by the MRWG and agreed by the MARC Advisory Committee in support of the RDA Toolkit following completion of the RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign (3R) Project. It also details those changes to RDA which the MRWG considered. In conclusion, the report analyses the limitations associated with implementing 3R in a MARC 21 context as well as the possible scope for further changes in future.

A new release of RDA Toolkit was posted on December 16, 2022. It included updates to both the English and Finnish versions of RDA. There were changes to the English RDA text related to RSC approval of two proposals at its July meeting. These changes added instructions to two Item and two Manifestation elements to make them consistent with other RDA elements that permit recording methods for non-RDA vocabulary encoding schemes, and made additions to the “Recording an unstructured description” section of five elements.

Read more about the release in the December 2022 Release Notes.

The ISNI Libraries Sector Consultation Group held its second Open Meeting of the year on 20th October 2022. The Chair of ISNI’s Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), Emma Rogoz (British Library) presented an interesting overview of ISNI technical developments in recent months. Work is nearing completion on a duplicate detection crawler. Some participants reported briefly on a range of topics: the use of ISNI in identifying publishers and brands (Gaëlle Bequet, ISSN-IC); enhancing ISNI’s documentation (Erin Burnand, British Library and the ISNI Quality Team); the recent launch of the ISNI Book Publishing Consultation Group (Andrew MacEwan, British Library).

This is a timely moment to explore the risks and trust-related issues associated with an ever wider implementation of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). Following an earlier work on ‘risks and trust in pursuit of a well-functioning Persistent Identifier infrastructure for research’ conducted by the Knowledge Exchange (KE) Task & Finish Group on PIDs, the KE commissioned a study in July 2021 to look deeper into these issues. This work will result in the publication of a report and a series of case studies on specific areas of current PID development. The full project results are expected to be published by the KE by the end of 2022.

Le groupe Systèmes & Données du programme Transition bibliographique a organisé sa 7e journée professionnelle « Métadonnées en bibliothèques » le 25 novembre 2022 en visio conférence.

Ce rendez-vous met en avant une avancée majeure du groupe : la constitution et la mise en ligne d’un jeu de données conforme à la modélisation IFLA LRM dans un format UNIMARC. L’objectif est de donner de la matière pour des tests d’intégration de ces données et de développement autour d’un catalogue par entités tant pour les interfaces professionnelles que publiques.