Bibliographic Framework Initiative (MARC replacement) update

New document released from LoC: Bibliographic Framework as a Web of Data: Linked Data Model and Supporting Services http://www.loc.gov/marc/transition/pdf/marcld-report-11-21-2012.pdf

The new, proposed model is simply called BIBFRAME, short for Bibliographic Framework. The new model is more than a mere replacement for the library community's current model/format, MARC. It is the foundation for the future of bibliographic description that happens on, in, and as part of the web and the networked world we live in. It is designed to integrate with and engage in the wider information community while also serving the very specific needs of its maintenance community - libraries and similar memory organizations. It will realize these objectives in several ways:

1. Differentiate clearly between conceptual content and its physical manifestation(s) (e.g., works and instances)

2. Focus on unambiguously identifying information entities (e.g., authorities)

3. Leverage and expose relationships between and among entities

In a web-scale world, it is imperative to be able to cite library data in a way that not only differentiates the conceptual work (a title and author) from the physical details about that work's manifestation (page numbers, whether it has illustrations) but also clearly identifies entities involved in the creation of a resource (authors, publishers) and the concepts (subjects) associated with a resource. Standard library description practices, at least until now, have focused on creating catalog records that are independently understandable, by aggregating information about the conceptual work and its physical carrier and by relying heavily on the use of lexical strings for identifiers, such as the name of an author. The proposed BIBFRAME model encourages the creation of clearly identified entities and the use of machine-friendly identifiers which lend themselves to machine interpretation for those entities.

and thus we start our march to semanticizing our bibliographic data by looking to linking data, which will allow us to have more flexibility in terms of constructing records (& relationships), better authority and bibliographic control (fix in one place, change is propagated across records which consist of aggregated data presented in a framework (most likely in near future, fields), and the ability for our data bits to be harvested (if our data is open) and used outside of traditional library catalogs ...