Bibframe seems to be conceived as a kind of universal adapter for bibliographic data. That comes across from the introduction on the initiative home page: 'a general model for expressing and connecting bibliographic data', and from the Introduction to Bibframe Profiles: 'The BIBFRAME metamodel is designed to be lightweight, flexible and able to accommodate the declarative needs of both existing (RDA, DACS, VRA, etc..) and yet-to-be-developed community vocabularies.'
But I haven't seen anything that explains clearly why a metamodel is necessary or the best option. What kind of environment is envisaged where this is so?
I'm not a technical expert, but I think there are ways of exchanging RDF without need of a metamodel; indeed, RDF is designed to support diversity. RDA, and I guess some other metadata schemes that Bibframe hopes to represent, can be expressed directly in RDF.
Bibframe claims to 'accommodate the declarative needs' of various schemes but it has its own data model and vocabulary, so it looks like just another model. If specific models are going to be used locally, then it must be worth questioning the value of the extra complexity and possible semantic degradation of having to map into and out of Bibframe to share data. I wonder whether the mainstream library infrastructure would end up creating, managing and storing Bibframe 'records', as they have done with MARC. This doesn't seem to be making the best of the opportunities offered by linked data concepts and technologies.
Furthermore, whilst the note in the Introduction to Bibframe Profiles that defines a 'BIBFRAME Record' tries to undo the traditional, MARC sense of a record, the fact that the notion of a BIBFRAME Record is used at all makes me wonder whether a vision for a bibliographic linked data environment has not been fully explored.
Terry Willan
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-----Original Message-----
From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Philip Evan Schreur
Sent: 26 July 2014 00:38
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] BF vocabulary and RDA
Just adding my pennies as well. The amount of resources we are responsible for is far outstripping our capacity for full RDA metadata creation. We are already reinventing our processing streams. I don't see why Bibframe shouldn't communicate data created according to RDA but it shouldn't be dependent on RDA for its structure. Structure and data needs come first. Once that's settled, we look to see how RDA can be expressed in that structure.
Philip
Sent from my iPhone
> On Jul 25, 2014, at 4:20 PM, "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> I'll see that +2 and add my own to the pot.
>
> In all seriousness, it's not totally clear to me what the purpose is of doing Linked Data based on cataloging rules that do not invest in either the RDF metamodel or the Web, or even what it means to do Linked Data in that way.
>
> For me, a Bibframe bound to RDA is of much less interest than a Bibframe that can act as an interchange and point of commonality amongst different models of description, especially from the point of view of a research institution. That's because the portion of resources in the responsibility of such institutions that is carefully described by professional catalogers (the only audience for RDA) is shrinking. At my institution, and I think this is common, the remainder now more and more consists of the intermediate products of research, often described by the researcher or scholar who created them, or of digitized representations of archival material with original cataloging that is concerned with SAA (or entirely local) standards. If Bibframe is limited to being an RDF format for RDA cataloging, it's of no use at all for the fastest growing segments of descriptive work at my institution.
>
> ---
> A. Soroka
> The University of Virginia Library
>
>> On Jul 25, 2014, at 6:23 PM, Karen Coyle <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>> +1 and +1 again - kc
>>
>>> On 7/25/14, 1:15 PM, Fallgren, Nancy (NIH/NLM) [E] wrote:
>>> Hi Sally,
>>>
>>> I was under the impression that BIBFRAME was to be rule agnostic in order to appeal to a wider community than MARC/AACR2/RDA users and to avoid the interdependence we had with MARC/AACR. While that’s probably not entirely realistic, shouldn’t the effort be to minimalize the influence of MARC/AACR2/RDA on the BF vocab to the extent possible? When we someday move away from RDA will we need to completely overhaul or throw out BF too?
>>>
>>> -Nancy
>>>
>>>
>>> Nancy J. Fallgren
>>> Metadata Specialist Librarian
>>> Cataloging and Metadata Management Section Technical Services
>>> Division National Library of Medicine
>>>
>>>
>>> From: McCallum, Sally [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>>> Sent: Friday, July 25, 2014 2:10 PM
>>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>> Subject: [BIBFRAME] BF vocabulary and RDA
>>>
>>> Hi all,
>>> There are often references to MARC on this list but the real influence on the BF vocabulary has been RDA, which we are not in a position to ignore in the bibliographic environment. With RDA you record the attributes of an entity and then an institution can make the Work title or label for that entity as long or short as is needed for the situation. But we are not yet in that environment so we must carry our strings in addition to the pieces. The pieces look a lot like MARC because the pieces called out by RDA look that way, but not entirely: RDA has more, and there is a tendency to want each element in RDA separately identified for manipulation purposes. As RDA matures, BF will follow the progress and adapt as appropriate.
>>>
>>> Sally
>>>
>>> ***********************************
>>> Sally H. McCallum
>>> Chief, Network Development and MARC Standards Office Library of
>>> Congress, 101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540 USA
>>> [log in to unmask]
>>> Tel: 1-202-707-5119 – Fax 1-202-707-0115
>>> ***********************************
>>
>> --
>> Karen Coyle
>>
>> [log in to unmask] http://kcoyle.net
>>
>> m: 1-510-435-8234
>> skype: kcoylenet
>>
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