The British Library (BL) and OCLC are collaborating on a strategic initiative to enrich the links between the international name authority file of the Library of Congress and Program for Cooperative Cataloging (aka the LC-NACO) and the ISNI database. The BL has prepared and submitted a ‘back file’ of NACO records created over the last 5 years, for addition to the ISNI system. The NACO records have been enriched with additional ISBN and title data from the BL’s catalogue and from the LC’s ‘Books All’ file to facilitate matching and disambiguation. Aligning the ISNI database with up-to-date NACO name authorities will facilitate the integration of ISNIs into authority control workflows across the wider library sector and the Linked Data ecosystem. ISNIs derived from NACO correlations are already shown in the BL’s Linked Open Data BNB (British National Bibliography), and the 5-year update will add many more ISNIs to that file.

The 5th conference held on 4 December 2020 organized by the «Systems and Data» group of the French program Bibliographic transition in France brought together nearly 500 participants on the theme «Cataloguing by entities or the big bang of data».

The recordings of the presentations are online, to consult HERE ! A summary of the conference is provided in French.

The report “Transforming Metadata into Linked Data to Improve Digital Collection Discoverability: A CONTENTdm Pilot Project” shares the CONTENTdm Linked Data Pilot project findings, where OCLC and five partner institutions investigated methods for transforming metadata into linked data, to improve the discoverability and management of digitized cultural materials. This follows the first report published in 2020, Transitioning to the Next Generation of Metadata”, that shone a light on the evolution of the next generation of metadata.

In 2020, NISO welcomed 14 new endorsing publishers as the most recent adopters of its Transfer Code of Practice. The Code contains best practice guidelines for both the Transferring Publisher and the Receiving Publisher, to ensure that journal content remains easily accessible by librarians and readers. Publishers who endorse the Code can register for free with the ISSN Portal; when they acquire a title, they may record the transfer through the ISSN Portal. Information about transfers is shared with the library and publishing communities via the Transfer Alerting Service.

Whether or not you attended PIDapalooza21, and whether or not you made it through the full 24 hours, you can read up on what you missed. Five Scholarly Kitchen chefs (Alice Meadows, Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Todd Carpenter, Judy Luther, Phil Jones)  shared their experiences. You can also “relive” PIDapalooza 2021 for yourself on the dedicated YouTube channel.

PIDapalooza, the open festival of persistent identifiers, will be held online from 27-28 January 2021 with a multilingual program. Notably, Carlos Norberto Authier (ISSN Centre of Argentina) will speak about persistent identifiers assigned for free to academic articles in Argentina; Abel Packer (SciELO) will describe SciELO Program adoption of PIDs towards more visibility and participation in the global flow of scientific information; Arnaud Gingold will give examples of PIDs implementation’s options and strategies from the OpenEdition platforms and the OPERAS discovery service TRIPLE; and Laura Paglione will advocate for richer metadata that fuels discovery and innovation.

During the sessions of the Permanent UNIMARC Committee 2020, most of the discussions were devoted to the adaptation of the format to the LRM model through the finalisation of the description grids of works and expressions in the UNIMARC/A format.

(Article in French)

The results of this thesis confirm that semantic interoperability may be achieved under specific conditions. All the conditions, prerequisites and good practices identified during the study of the models, the development of the mappings and their assessment using the approach of the Gold Datasets, involve cataloging policy decisions. Thus, the final thesis statement advocates for better cooperation between stakeholders and the adoption of a common mindset and practices to resolve heterogeneities of the past and to prevent new ones from happening. The thesis can be downloaded here.

In 2020, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) welcomed 14 new endorsing publishers as the most recent adopters of its Transfer Code of Practice.

The Transfer Code of Practice responds to the expressed needs of the scholarly journal community for consistent guidelines to help publishers ensure that journal content remains easily accessible by librarians and readers when there is a transfer between parties, and to ensure that the transfer process occurs with minimum disruption. The Code contains best practice guidelines for both the Transferring Publisher and the Receiving Publisher.  Publishers are asked to endorse the Code and to abide by its principles wherever it is commercially reasonable to do so. Publishers who endorse the Code can register for free with the ISSN Portal ; when they acquire a title, they may record the transfer through this portal. Information about transfers is shared with the library and publishing communities via the Transfer Alerting Service<https://journaltransfer.issn.org/>.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announced on November 17th that their Voting Members have approved a new work item to update the 2008 Recommended Practice, NISO RP-8-2008, Journal Article Versions (JAV): Recommendations of the NISO/ALPSP JAV Technical Working Group. A NISO Working Group is being set up, and work is expected to begin in early 2021. The NISO JAV working group will define a set of terms for each of the different versions of content that are published, as well as a recommendation for whether separate DOIs should be assigned to them.