RDA in the Fifth Information Age: entity, identity, authority

The Fifth Information Age is characterised by the ubiquitous recording of social transactions in an explosion of persistent cultural memory. A person who contributes to social media is an agent who creates digital cultural artefacts. The internet of things, of personal devices for the capture, creation, transmission, and output of information means everyone is potentially an author, a publisher, a distributor, with a profound impact on traditional methods of authority control. The focus of authority control is shifting from the provision of a unique label for an individual person or group to the description of an individual as an instance of a class, as an entity.

Continue reading

The characteristics and use of authority control in contemporary library catalogues: a brief overview of the implementation of authority control of personal names in the COBISS.CG system

The paper describes and emphasizes the importance of authority control for personal names in the development of library catalogues. The introductory part of the paper presents a historical overview of the development of authority control in world librarianship, the most important library conferences that dealt with this topic, as well as the way authority control functions in the world and in library-information systems operating on the COBISS platform.

Continue reading

Perspectives for the future development of authority data in the COBISS system

By introducing the IFLA Library Reference Model, the significance of authority control is constantly increasing as authority data will play a key role in the linked data network. Consequently, the preparation of authority data will help when implementing IFLA LRM and will prove useful during the transition to RDA (Resource Description and Access). The overview of authority data situation in the COBISS.net system with the focus on the Slovenian COBISS.SI system is presented.

Continue reading

COBIB.SI: increment of bibliographic records in 2021

The article presents in detail the data on the annual increment of bibliographic records in 2021 at annual and monthly levels. The analysis includes 177,705 bibliographic records created by 543 cataloguers. In the last quarter of the year, 28 % of bibliographic records were created. Most records, i.e. 1,015 records, were created on Tuesday, 9 February 2021, Tuesdays are also the most productive days in the year.

Continue reading

Bibliographic Transition in France: work in progress

This article presents the current state of bibliographic transition in France, the approach and the organization that were applied to make library catalogues compatible with semantic web technologies and bibliographic data on the web. In order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to move to entity-based cataloguing built on the IFLA LRM model.

Continue reading

Iskalno okno

Online public access catalogues and library discovery systems

This article provides an overview of computer-based catalogue systems designed for use by library clients, seeing present day discovery systems on the same trajectory as the older online public access catalogues (OPACs) which they are gradually replacing, both in technical development and their approach to client use scenarios. It traces the history of the OPAC/discovery system from its origins in the library automation of the 1960s through to the present and discusses the main technical standards which have formed its development.

Continue reading