So does this new “fusion catalog” with a blended mix of standards, formats, rules and detail affect the user at all? Or is it all hidden under the discovery layer anyway? Do we still really need and can we maintain the high level of consistency of the union catalog? The conference presentation gives some aspects of the lessons learned during the transition from union to fusion catalog, that is sometimes imperceptible to everyone but catalogers:

“Past:

• Following uniform cataloguing practices
• Preferring a high level of consistency in bibliographic records

Present:

• Bring in vendor records applying different cataloguing rules and various level of completeness
• Accepting that ‘a minimal record [is more] beneficial to library users than no record at all’

Variations are inevitable

• The ideal: Conform fully to one single cataloguing standard and to local conventions
• In reality: different cataloguing data sets are blended together

• Direct and immediate access to the needed library materials is more important to users than standard cataloguing records

[...]

• When variations are accepted and catalogers are open to accepting differences in cataloguing practices”

With RDA on the horizon and with the perspective of having legacy data and new data sitting side by side, as well as data created following different RDA policy decisions for alternatives/options and cataloger’s judgments, if consortial and/or global shared cataloging is to continue we will finally have to say goodbye to our rather closed world-view and come to terms with a non-uniform, blended mixture of bibliographic information.

The German National Library reported on their project of automatically extracting metadata from title pages of doctoral dissertations. Since these pages conform to a certain pattern where the same information can be found in the same place on each title page of each thesis, software that can decipher structures according to rules, thesauri and OCR can be used. Here’s a summary of the project in English

and the conference slides in German can be found here.

It’s always interesting to follow the progress and practical examples of automated metadata generation because descriptive cataloging can be supported and accelerated, and human skills can be used for quality management and error assessment instead of manually entering information that can be captured automatically.

Data modeling has to be aware of developments in the creation of the objects it primarily describes and makes discoverable. Borrowing expressions from the print paradigm, the forked book is comparable to a kind of “bound with”, multi-work constellation, but more complicated since only parts of works might be used, different versions might be created and licensing information would have to be noted. I guess Bibframe will be able to accommodate these versions and remixes, but that would mean that the statement in the November Bibframe report, “Each BIBFRAME Instance is an instance of one and only one BIBFRAME Work”, will not hold, because, as I see it, the instance (the remixed/forked book) would be in a relationship with two or more works.

Because of Redis’s flexibility, I’ve been able to use RDA element names as either discrete properties for each BIBFRAME entity or as part of the naming scheme for the BIBFRAME entity’s associated keys.  A nice feature of this approach is that we are not restricted to just RDA but we can use other metadata standards (MODS, DC, ONIX, VRACore, etc.) as discrete properties or as part of the Redis key naming schema for the BIBFRAME entities. We are also using a simplistic mapping of FRBR Work and Expressions to BIBFRAME Creative Work, along with FRBR Manifestation and Item to the BIBFRAME Instance…

Here’s a video that details HTRC’s mission of supporting scholars (e.g. in the digital humanities) in their research:

I would be particularly interested in learning more about a project mentioned 2.45 minutes into the video that involves “automatically enhancing the metadata that describes the volumes”, ultimately resulting in higher quality metadata – maybe we’ll hear more about it in the future.

via CDLINFO News