Project goals and objectives

The ISBD consolidated edition of 2011 has positioned this IFLA standard as a core standard for universal bibliographic control, while its representation in the W3C RDF standard (work done by the ISBD/XML Study Group) enables its use within the Open Linked Data communities and enhances developments of Semantic Web bibliographic tools and services. The objective of this project is to position the ISBD to other IFLA and other community standards documentation, such as the FRBR group of models and RDA cataloguing rules, with the goal to promote interoperability among and reuse/retrieval of bibliographic data/content. As the ISBD RG has already started on this course, this project is partly a continuation of work already done, and partly takes some of that work forward to the next level of realization of the ISBD RG's main objective: ISBD as an IFLA standard brand for universal bibliographic control in the Semantic Web.

Contribution to IFLA strategy

The project is seen to follow all the directions as agreed in the IFLA Strategic Plan 2010–2015 by:

  • Empowering libraries to enable their user communities to have equitable access to information;
  • Building the strategic capacity of IFLA and that of its members;
  • Transforming the profile and standing of the profession;
  • Representing the interests of IFLA's members and library users throughout the world;
  • Enabling all members of the Federation to engage in, and benefit from, its activities without regard to citizenship, disability, ethnic origin, gender, geographical location, language, political philosophy, race or religion.

Methodology, participants, anticipated beneficiaries and stakeholders; expected outcomes and results and how these will be disseminated; project deliverables

To reach the above objective and goal, the project work is divided into three highly interrelated tasks:

  1. Based on the work done by the three-year project of the ISBD/XML Study Group (Development of ISBDXML Schema; the project continues to 2012) and related activities of its members, write and publish online Guidelines for use of ISBD as Linked Data with the goal to explain the basic concepts (linked data, etc.), translation and linking issues, procedures of implementation and usage of the ISBD in RDF (profiling the ISBD) for development of new services and tools. The guidelines should cover both theoretical and practical issues, with concrete examples. There are already developments experimenting with releasing instance data based on legacy catalogue records;  users of the OMR (Open Metadata Registry) will have benefit from this work, not only the ISBD community. As the environment is still unstable, with much development by diverse communities in progress, while some areas are still unexplored, the guidelines should be considered an on-going publication, open to updates.

    • 2-day meeting of authors/editors (4 persons; expenses for 1 person): Croatia, June 2012, and 1-day  meeting during IFLA
    • Expenditure for editing in pdf/html formats
    • Timeline: 1st version for comments by the ISBD RG meeting during the IFLA meeting August 2012; the final version by October/November 2012
    • Promotion: presentation and workshop at LIDA, 18-11 June 2012, Zadar, Croatia
  2. Based on the 2011 approved project, the IFLA ISBD Review Group and the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC) meeting on alignment and interoperability of standards (IFLA Project No. D3.4.13-1/11): a follow up meeting to discuss and cover any further action arising from the 3-4 November 2011 meeting, and prepare a mapping document (vocabularies and elements) and a proposal, if required and considered to be urgent, for an update to the ISBD 2011 edition.

    • 1-day meeting of the ISBD RG representatives (ideally those attending the JSC/ISBD meeting): Europe, spring 2012 (3 persons), and the ISBD RG meeting during IFLA (part of the RG’s meeting agenda)
    • Timeline: a report of the JSC/ISBD RG meeting, Glasgow 2011 to the ISBD RG with a proposal for further discussion and alignment by February 2012; prepare a document for RDA/ISBD alignment during the spring meeting; final proposal for an ISBD update (as required: either urgent or to be prepared for the regular update cycle) by June for the IFLA meeting August 2012
  3. ISBD/FRBR co-ordinated activity regarding alignment of ISBD data elements and FRBR attributes: within its task of consolidating FRBR conceptual models (FRBR/FRAD/FRSAD) the FRBR Review Group has recognized certain problems that specifically address ISBD data elements, their definitions and their positions as attributes relative to FRBR entities. The ISBD RG ensured that the ISBD 2011 edition was aligned with FRBR, however, while monitoring the FRBR RG activities in this field, it has now recognized that it should become more active considering developments around the FRBR model consolidation work because it can have repercussions not only on the ISBD 2011 edition and future updates, but also on the work that is being done in OMR, specifically in view of linking RDF representations of these two documents.

    • 1-day meeting of ISBD RG representatives: Europe, spring 2012 (3 persons), and an ISBD RG meeting during IFLA (part of the RG’s meeting agenda)
    • Timeline: report of the FRBR/ISBD meeting, spring 2012 to the ISBD RG with a proposal for further discussion and alignment (as required: either an urgent ISBD update or to be prepared for the regular update cycle) by June for the IFLA meeting August 2012

All planned activities and their results (both in progress and in final form) will be reported to relevant communities, and communicated in the ISBD RG website, forums and conferences.

Plan of follow-up action

It is expected that the described activities will be extended to the next year, 2013.

This project has not been planned as a two-year project because the field is very dynamic and rather unstable, and concrete activities, meetings, etc. cannot be envisaged so far ahead. Also, it can be expected that a major project would be proposed that would include different IFLA units, and some non-IFLA organizations with the aim of approaching the representation of IFLA standards in the Linked Data and Semantic Web environment in a strategic and encompassing manner which is now lacking.