Videorecording of June BIBFRAME forum now available online

If you were unable to attend the most recent forum of the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) at the ALA annual meeting in June, a videorecording is now available online at http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6323. The main speakers were Sally McCallum, Kevin Ford, Andrea Leigh (all of LC) and Philip Schreur of Stanford University Libraries. I was particularly interested in Kevin Ford's live demonstration of the prototype BIBFRAME editor, which became available a few months ago. Unfortunately, all the viewer sees during the live demo is Kevin typing on his computer; the screen he is typing on is not shown in the recording. For me, not being able to see the interface or what was being typed made the live demo worthless. This is clearly a case of "you had to be there."

Philip Schreur presented an overview of a two-year grant-funded project in which Cornell University Library, Stanford University Libraries, and the Harvard Library Innovation Lab are collaborating. The goal of the project, called Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L for short) is to "create a Scholarly Resource Semantic Information Store (SRSIS) model that works both within individual institutions and through a coordinated, extensible network of Linked Open Data to capture the intellectual value that librarians and other domain experts and scholars add to information resources when they describe, annotate, organize, select, and use those resources, together with the social value evident from patterns of usage."

Andrea Leigh described the background of a BIBFRAME AV modeling study (available at http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/pdf/bibframe-avmodelingstudy-may15-2014.pdf). The report was commissioned by the BIBFRAME team within the Network Development and Standards Office at the Library of Congress and aims to identify the content description needs of the moving image and recorded sound communities and specify how those requirements can be met within a generic bibliographic data model like BIBFRAME. The presentation did a good job of outlining the many complex challenges associated with the description of audio-visual resources, but did not hint at how these challenges might be addressed by BIBFRAME.   

The question-and-answer portion of the session is not particularly useful because the questions cannot be heard and no effort was made to repeat them so that they would be audible for the recording.