Newsletter of the Section on Bibliography

May 2000

as you perhaps noticed, there was no Newsletter in December 1999. This depended on misunderstandings between my secretariat and me. In general I always had the feeling that the dates February and July for the publication of the newsletter were not very handy. I discussed the theme of publications dates with some members of the SC and after all I propose May and October/November as publication dates if there is a further need for a half-yearly period. In this issue you therefore will find a review of the Bangkok conference and informations about the Jerusalem programmes, not only the Sections own session but also other sessions which might be of interest to members.

Announcement

Review of the Bangkok Conference

This was a year of elections for Sections, Committees and part of the Executive Committee. Werner Stephan was confirmed as Chair of the Section on Bibliography for two more years. John Byrum from the LOC was newly elected as Secretary. The Chair and the members of the Standing Committee present thanked Francoise Burdon for a successful cooperation and for the good job she made.

Section on Bibliography

The close cooperation not only with the other Sections of the Division of Bibliographic Control but also with the Sections on Information Technology and on National Libraries is remarkable. In 1998 the Section consisted of 105 members from all over the world. The Standing Committee, so to say the executive branch of the Section, consisted of 16 full members and 5 corresponding members. This is a size which allows intense cooperation in small groups or via "e-mail-conferences" between the yearly conferences.

In addition, some members participated actively in different conferences during the last year. For example, the "International Conference on National Bibliographic Services" in Copenhagen or the congress on "International and national cataloguing rules" in Moscow can be mentioned in this context. Another focal point is the contribution to several working groups, which are normally formed for two years and in which the members of the Section on Bibliography are warmly welcomed participants because of their expert knowledge. The projects on "Minimal Level of Authority Records (MLAR)", on "Guidelines for OPAC displays" and on "Metadata" can be emphasized here. In Bangkok a new project called "What makes a good bibliography" was initiated by the Section itself.

The program of the conference was - as is traditional - manifold. Besides a workshop which was held in cooperation with the Section on National Libraries, the open forum of the Section was best suited to obtain a general view of its efforts. The following talks were presented:

• ICNBS 1998: New Recommendations for the National Bibliography, by Mona Madsen, available IFLANET: http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla65/papers/015-123e.htm or -123d.htm
• National bibliography in Australia: moving into the next millennium, by Peter Haddad, available IFLANET: http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla65/papers/016-123e.htm or -123d.htm
• The bibliographic situation in Thailand, by Chirudee Pungtrakul, available IFLANET: http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla65/papers/148-123e.htm

John Byrum introduced the topic with a report on his survey on records of electronic documents in national bibliographies, available IFLANET:
http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla65/papers/124-153e.htm. One result has been that it is not a question of if but how bibliographic information about electronic documents should be recorded. What should the structure of these data be like? Is a cataloguing format, metadata like Dublin Core or a SGML-based document-type-definition the right answer? Sonja Zillhardt went more deeply into the problem with her report on "Biblink" available on IFLANET: http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla65/papers/120-153e.htm. as did Randi Digest Hansen, with her presentation on "INDOREG" and Werner Stephan with his contribution about the "Online Publication System of the University of Stuttgart (OPUS)" where a technique has been developed to produce structured bibliographic data from Dublin Core metadata which authors supply directly via online forms. It was also interesting to hear how the problem is being tackled in other parts of the world. Thus the report from Naoko Harai about the Japanese "Electronic Library Project" was very informative. All papers are available from IFLANET under the already mentioned address. It was a pity that the talk of a publisher had to be cancelled due to other appointments at the last moment, because the participants had hoped for a different point of view on the relations between national bibliographic agencies and publishers of electronic documents. However, the guiding contribution of our Australian colleague Peter Haddad and the lively discussion it initiated gave the participants some compensation instead.

To sum it up it is very well justified to say that the Conference in Bangkok has been quite successful for the section. Successful in this case also means that a set of new tasks has been defined which will have to be tackled in the next few years. This has manifested itself in the revised mid-term program for the years up to 2001 which can of course also be accessed via IFLANET.iflanet@ifla.org/IVV/s12/annual/med2001.htm#3

(Werner Stephan)

Workshop, Bangkok

Thursday, August 26, 09:00 - 13:00

Electronic Publications in (National) bibliographies

The fast pace of technological change is apparent and the impact on the competitive "book" environment is evident. But change yields also the opportunity to do things which are new and different. Not only in our field of work new responsibilities accompany new roles: Librarians have moved on from managing information within a library, with books on shelves within four walls, to information management. If we understand our job in this way, it is now the responsibility of librarians to know what information is available and to facilitate access to information, no matter where and in which form that information resides. One of our traditional tools to tell us what information is available is bibliographies, but the one or other may ask whether this is still valid for electronic publications. In other words, people may raise the question if bibliographies are still meaningful in the case of electronic documents and the given possibilities of using powerful Internet-based search engines. Is there really a need for bibliographic control for electronic publications, or as Edward Valauskas said a "desperate need for a bibliographic understanding" (ICBC, 28 No 1, 1999)? And if yes, how do we get from where we are to where we want to be? And do we really know what we want to have?

A host of electronic documents has appeared in the last years, beginning with "off-line" offers on physical data carriers but moving soon more and more to Internet-based online documents. The first category seemed to be no problem for librarians, except the problem of long term availability. In any case the creation of an bibliographiy record was solved easily by adding a field for the form. For the integration in catalogues and bibliographies these materials were mostly treated like print materials. Now the Internet-based online documents provide real challenges in terms of bibliographic citation and analysis, storage and archiving, and acquisition. The professional public is discussing these themes with emphasis, we all know. For this workshop we want to stress our attention mainly on the possibilities of bibliographic control for Internet-based electronic documents. John Byrum will give us an excellent basis for our discussion in presenting his survey about the intregration of electronic publications in national bibliographies.

Bibliographic informations in common is created for notification, selection and access to original documents. In theory the bibliographic record could be seen as an abstract of the original document, following given rules for it's creation. We all know the different cataloguing rules, not only different for alphabetical and subject cataloguing but also different form country and in some cases also different within a country for different forms of bibliographies. At all a lack of standardisation is evident.

In many cases this bibliographic information is accessible electronically and, more over, can give users direct access to the document if description and document are "linked". The question is still wheter this description must follow "bibliographic" or cataloguing rules or whether users can probably create their own "description" during the online research. Most of our colleagues, and I imagine most of the researchers anyway, are convinced that a difined description of electronic documents, using a controlled vocabulary or at least a defined format, is necessary for making the documents known and for an easy and comfortable access. And, as I said before, bibliographies or catalogues are still an instrument our customers are used to use for satisfying their information needs.

So the question seems to be not if but how the bibliographic information should be given: How should the structure look like, is it a cataloguing format, are metadata like Dublin Core the answer, or a certain SGML-based document type definition (DTD)? You all know that the professional public in connection with the Internet does not speak about cataloguing and bibliographic data but about metadata and metadata production. But for no misunderstanding: metadata are something that librarians have been dealing with for a long time. "Library OPACs are a good example for very-high-metadata (Juha Hakala, in: ICBC Vol. 28 No 1, 1999)".

Especially within the structure and use of the Dublin Core metadata set a lot of projects are running, in Europe and world wide. I only want to refer to some projects: to the EU sponsored BIBLINK project, of which we will get more detailed information from Sonja Zillhardt later on; the German Metadata Project, where I can show you, if we have the time, the solution of the university library of Stuttgart how we convert DC sets, created by the authors, into the German national MAB format; the Scandinavian Metadata Project, the INDOREG (Internet Document Registration) Project which, I assume, Randi Digest Hansen will mention in her paper.

DTD projects are concentrated in the US, they are based on using SGML (Standard Generalised Markup Language) for the creation of the electronic document itself and using the resulting structured text through the application of the principles of TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) to create a DTD SGML. Diverse DTD TEIs have been developed and tested in various projects, e.g. Electronic Text Centre (University of Virginia Library) and Library of Congress American Memory DTD for Historical Documents.

All in all, the various description possibilities represent only a part of all possible solutions and I am keen to hear whether colleagues in other parts of the world have found different solutions. So I am very happy to have Ms. Maoko Harai with us, presenting a report about the Japanese Electronic Library Project and how they will handle electronic publications in their national bibliography.

Earlier I talked about Metadata, unfortunately you will not find many of them in the Internet. This is not only the responsibility of librarians or bibliographic agencies, but also the responsiblity of publishers and authors.

Only in a few cases are there direct bibliographic links and standardisation is more or less an unknown word. To improve this situation the EU supports the already mentioned project BIBLINK under which one of the main objectives includes the development of a tool for a direct bibliographic link between publishers and (national) bibliographic agencies.This will facilitate adequate bibliographic control over electronic publications, especially those which are published via Internet.

Publishers are involved in our field of work in at least two ways: thex produce and offer the electronic document itself and they publish (national) bibliographies or bibliographic databases respectively. Some of them have much experience in running bibliographic databases and are quite succesful in selling them. Should we encourage publishers to set up their own bibliographic databases for the electronic documents they produce themselvess? We all know that some publishers work already in this way. The question is whether and how we can use or better reuse the records they create. I personally am convinced that we will find a way by fostering standardisation and cooperation, but if everyone wishes to keep the tradition while enhancing and improving content, we can not resolve the problem easily. Our last speaker today, Klaus G. Saur, will take a look on new working relationships between publishers of electronic material and national bibliographic agencies. It may be that we will hear some annoying truths, but I'm sure it will help us to see problems clearer and probably help in finding ways to make electronic publications easier accessible.

Jerusalem Conference (selection)

Friday, 11 August

Saturday, 12 August

Sunday, 13 August

10:30 - 12:20 -

Metadata (Startup meeting to consider discussion group) Social Responsibilitiers Discussion Group "The Growing Gap between the Information Rich and the Information Poor" (members of the Section might remember Ross Bowners survey!)

Monday, 13 August

10:30 - 11:30

"Get Together" for SC members of the three Sections withon the Division of Bibl. Control

Tuesday, 14 August

15:30 - 18:00

Classification and Indexing: Open Session "Current Issues in Information Retrieval"

Wednesday, 15 August

Cataloguing: Open Session "International Activities in Cataloguing"

Thursday, 17 August

Workshops, in most cases participation will be limited to 50 persons on a first-come, first-served basis.

08:30 - 12:30 Cataloguing: "Metadata"

13:00 - 17:00

• Classification and Indexing; "Crosswalks between Languages, Cultures, Religions in Classification and Indexing"
• Bibliography: "Teaching Bibliography Today"

Friday, 18 August

Programm Section on Bibliography

1. National bibliography of a small country in an international context BOHDANA STOKLASOVA (National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague, Czech Republic)
2. Bibliographic projects and tools in Israel ROCHELLE KEDAR (Department of Information Science, Bar-Iian University, Ramat-Gan, Israel)
3. Two national central libraries in Italy: bibliographic cooperation or competition? MARIA PATRIZIA CALABRESI (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome, Italy)

The workshop "Teaching Bibliography Today" will be a joint one with Education ond Training. Speakers from different countries (together with the audience) will discuss the role of Bibliography in the curriculum of library and information schools.

Of course there will be two Standing Committee meetings at the Jersualem conference, one at the beginning and one at the end. To both meetings not only members but also observers are welcome. Section members planing to attend the first Standing Committee meeting should try to arrive in Jerusalem on Friday, as the meeting has been scheduled for Saturday at 08:30! A provisional agenda will be sent to SC members due in time. Main subjects will be reports about our different projects and a discussion on our current action plan.

For SC members there will be a reception after the Division's Open Forum. All members are heartly invited to take part.

I hope our programme sounds interesting enough, so that all places will be occupied.

Election in 2001

Contributions to this Newsletter are welcome at any time. Please send news items, articles, comments to the Editor.

Further enquiries about this newsletter should be addressed to the Chairman at the Universitätsbibliothek Stuttgart, Postfach 10 49 41, 70043 Stuttgart, BRD
E-mail: Werner.Stephan@ub.uni-stuttgart.de