BIBFRAME Linked Data: A Conceptual Study on the Prevailing Content Standards and Data Model

Abstract

The BIBFRAME model is designed with a high degree of flexibility in that it can accommodate any number of existing models as well as models yet to be developed within the Web environment. The model’s flexibility is intended to foster extensibility. This study discusses the relationship of BIBFRAME to the prevailing content standards and models employed by cultural heritage institutions across museums, archives, libraries, historical societies, and community centers or those in the process of being adopted by cultural heritage institutions. This is to determine the degree to which BIBFRAME, as it is currently understood, can be a viable and extensible framework for bibliographic description and exchange in the Web environment. We highlight the areas of compatibility as well as areas of incompatibility. BIBFRAME holds the promise of freeing library data from the silos of online catalogs permitting library data to interact with data both within and outside the library community. We discuss some of the challenges that need to be addressed in order to optimize the potential capabilities that the BIBFRAME model holds.

Are Canadian Libraries Ready to Transition from MARC to BIBFRAME?

“…Most libraries rely on the 1960s-era MARC format to describe items in their online catalogues, but the MARC formata record-based format composed largely of string literalsis not well understood outside of the library community. To make library data more broadly useful and replace the MARC format (Morris 2019), the Library of Congress (LC) and international library community developed the Bibliographic Framework (BIBFRAME) linked data vocabulary (Park, Brenza and Richards 2020). Linked data uses Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs, similar to web links) to unambiguously identify entities and relationships between entities and has been adopted by many different types of organizations (Fayyaz, Ullah and Khusro 2018).…”

Study of library data models in the semantic web environment

“…Commercial vendors started developing Integrated Library Systems (ILSs) that used database technology, were more userfriendly (Figure 2:3) and enabled advanced search tasks. The MARC structure could be described as "a series of tagged literals or tagged text strings" (J.-R. Park, Andrew Brenza, & Richards, 2020). Due to this characteristic structure, MARC data was stored in a record-based format limiting the processability of bibliographic data in relational database settings.…”

“…Lastly, Taniguchi questioned the applicability of BIBFRAME's main objective (Taniguchi, 2017b), that is "to accommodate any number of content models and specific implementations, but still enable data exchange between libraries" (Miller et al, 2012). The BIBFRAME policy regarding domain/range constraints is also referred in (Baker et al, 2014;J.-R. Park et al, 2020).…”