Bibliographic Framework Initiative Update, January 26, 2014

A recorded webcast of the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) update that was presented at ALA Midwinter in January is now available at: http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/media/updateforum-jan26-2014.html. Sally McCallum of the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at the Library of Congress is the first presenter. She discusses, in general terms, some of the experimentation with BIBFRAME that has taken place during the last year or so. She says that in 2014, emphasis will be placed on the development of test implementations;  a registry of BIBFRAME implementations has been set up to keep track of who is doing what with BIBFRAME, and can be viewed at: http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/implementation/register.html. McCallum foresees a dual BIBFRAME/MARC environment existing for ten years. The next two speakers, Reinhold Heuvelmann of the German National Library, and Jackie Shieh of George Washington University Libraries, report on their experiences as early experimenters with BIBFRAME. Their projects are described in the above-mentioned implementation registry. The final speaker is Eric Miller of Zepheira, developer of BIBFRAME. Part of Miller's presentation involves a brief demonstration of a prototype BIBFRAME editor, which lends a welcome dimension of concreteness to the  relatively abstract discussions we've heard about BIBFRAME so far. You can actually see the prototype BIBFRAME editor at: http://editor.bibframe.zepheira.com/static/.

Interlibrary Loan of E-Books

      There have been several articles in the past few weeks detailing the efforts of schools such as Duke, Texas Tech and Hawaii to facilitate the interlibrary loans of ebooks (for example, see http://chronicle.com/article/Library-Consortium-Tests/144743/ ) . Hawaii is an especially interesting case, as interlibrary loan to the middle of the Pacific is a somewhat daunting process, which loaning e-books would almost certainly make easier. To that end, Texas Tech and Hawaii have partnered on Occams’s Reader , a pilot program for loaning e-books. The program currently works in concert with ILLiad and is limited to .pdfs. Given the current restrictions  of DRM on many published e-books, this limitation is understandable. The program begins in March and will run for a year.

            Additionally, Angela M. Carreño and Bill Maltarich have documented New York University’s E-Book strategy in their article in the lastest eContent Quarterly, “Aggregation, Integration, Cooperation: The Three Imperatives of New York University’s E-book Strategy”. ( eContent Quarterly1.2 (Dec 2013): 36-52. ) 

          There has been several papers on this topic in the last few years, including ones from Heather Wicht at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Joanne Percy at Eastern Washington,  and Xiaohua Zhu and Lan Shen from the University of Tennessee and University of Purdue, Calumet, respectively.

Digital Document Fixity?

As more law libraries are developing independent digital collections it is important to take into consideration the preservation of those documents for the future. One main component of this is to ensure that the files and corresponding metadata have not been corrupted. While many of us are fortunate enough to have a third-party system hosting our content that we can rely on to maintain the integrity of our documents, this isn’t something that is universally true. 

If you aren’t relying on a third-party system, and in many cases even if you are, you will want to maintain independent copies of your data. A good guideline to follow is the NDSA’s Levels of Digital Preservation. This tiered set of recommendations provides solutions for institutions of all sizes and allows you to start small and build up. Bear in mind that the goal is to develop these guidelines over time, so it’s a good idea to check back occasionally to see if they have been updated.

One of the central concepts of these guidelines is the idea of fixity, or stability, of digital documents. In essence fixity is information that can be used to confirm that unauthorized changes have not been made to digital content. NDSA has recently released a draft version of a Fact Sheet, Checking Your Digital Content: How, What and When to Check Fixity?, that helps identify the reasons behind identifying and then checking fixity, as well as several ways to go about doing so and where to store fixity data once it has been obtained.

Potential name change for Government Printing Office

Legislation has been introduced to rename the Government Printing Office the Government Publishing Office.  The position of public printer would be re-titled Director of the Government Publishing Office.  According to Public Printer Davita Vance-Cooks, "The name Government Publishing Office better reflects the services that GPO currently provides and will provide in the future."

GPO's full announcement on the FDLP page is available at: http://www.fdlp.gov/component/content/article/19-general/1583-legislation-introduced-to-change-gpos-name-to-government-publishing-office.  Full text of the legislation is available via FDsys.

Is it inevitable your ILS will be Cloud-based?

            In a recent Twitter post, Lisa Rabey asked a question.

Question: is there a distributed cloud ILS? If not, why not?
— #moriartylives (@pnkrcklibrarian) January 15, 2014

          A few people responded to her question, notably Marshall Breeding and  Keri Cascio, Director of Innovative Technologies and Library Resource Management at the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in Kansas City, Missouri. Cascio pointed out that Ex Libris' Primo and Alma, OCLC WorldShare Management System, VTLS Virtua were all cloud based systems, either through as SaaS (Software as a Service)or as a distributed cloud server environment. SirsiDynix has trumpeted their BlueCloud Suite. Libserra also has a product.

Two years ago, Edward M. Corrado & Heather Lea Moulaison wrote an article in the Digital Shift that tackled many of the questions surrounding putting a library in the cloud. At a recent conference in Charleston, Brad Spry, Shoko Tokoro and Michael Winecoff presented on UNC-Charlotte's Atkins Library's recent move to the OCLC Worldshare System. Softlink has a cloud based product tailored specifically for law firm libraries. 

      



     

BIBFRAME webinars available for viewing

Recordings and slides from two recently presented webinars about BIBFRAME have been made freely available by the School of Library & Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The webinars were presented November 6, 2013 and January 8, 2014 by Kevin Ford of LC's Network Development and MARC Standards Office. The Bibliographic Framework Initiative, commonly referred to as BIBFRAME, is a project to "determine a transition path for the MARC 21 exchange format to more Web-based, Linked Data standards."  In the first webinar, Ford provides a basic background to the BIBFRAME initiative, with an emphasis on objectives, requirements, and expectations for the project. The second webinar begins with a review of some of these concepts, then progresses to a live demonstration of a BIBFRAME editing tool. The webinars do not assume prior knowledge of BIBFRAME or RDF (Resource Description Framework), so they are a good starting point for those looking for an easily absorbed introduction to BIBFRAME. The webinar recordings and presentation slides are available at: http://www.slis.wisc.edu/BFwebin.htm.

NDSA: 3 Years in Review

Last month the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) celebrated the third anniversary of its organizing workshop.  In that time 5 working groups have tackled several pressing issues related to digital stewardship.  Butch Lazorchak from the Library of Congress has put together a review of NDSA’s accomplishments as well as an overview of where it is headed in 2014.

Some of the highlights include identifying NDSA Innovation award winners across several categories (so we all have digital stewardship role models), web archiving and storage surveys, and Digital Preservation in a Box.  NDSA has also produced a series of webinars and posts regularly to The Signal blog, providing two valuable resources for now and the future.

In 2014 we should keep our eyes open for the release of several more NDSA reports as well as expanded outreach activities.