FAIR Authority Data, a First Step Towards a Linked Open Belgian Bibliography
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Date
2025-02-20
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International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA)
Abstract
In 2024 no one should have to manually read thousands of pages to nitpick relevant information in a National Bibliography. Instead users should be able to discover the bibliography by a modern facetted search based on available data.
However, unlocking the potential of National Bibliographies as Linked Open Data requires more than just publishing the underlying bibliographic records online. Text strings and opaque codes need to be understandable by humans and machines. In this presentation I will highlight the importance of FAIR authority data as a building block for Linked National Bibliographies. In particular I will focus on machine-understandable metadata at the Royal Library of Belgium and the current research infrastructure project MetaBelgica.
We are driven by the principle of a single source of truth: whatever the enrichment, we need to add it to our catalogue following best practices. This ensures that our MARC-based records with many multilingual text strings become MARC-based records filled with Linked Data-ready concepts. Thus also avoiding several copies of data at different locations and in different quality.
Practical considerations include the use of Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) throughout our catalogue and an entity management system that produces persistent identifiers (PIDs) for Belgian authority data. I will introduce how we use Resource Description and Access (RDA) terms in our catalog. Furthermore I will introduce the envisioned Wikibase-powered MetaBelgica platform. This will not only become the home for authority data, but also has the potential to onboard other controlled vocabularies or multilingual thesauri such as the concepts of the Belgian Bibliography. Like this, more and more concepts with PIDs can be referenced by our bibliographic records.
This methodology of enriching MARC records with Linked Data terms is not novel. But our future developments with respect to authority data and Wikibase might be of interest for the community.
Note about the author:
Sven Lieber works as data manager at The Royal Library of Belgium (KBR)
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Keywords
Linked data, Bibliographic data, National bibliographies, Linked open data