MARC and beyond: our three Linked Data choices

Abstract

It seems like forever that I have been promoting the benefits of Linked Data for libraries, and hence the suppliers/vendors of the systems they use — actually it’s only been just over a decade!

So where are we now? I believe we are [finally] on the cusp of establishing a de facto approach for libraries and their system suppliers – not there yet but getting there. Out of the mists of experimentation, funded cooperative projects, [mostly National Library] examples, and much discussion, is emerging a couple or three simple choices.

The proverbial $64,000 question being – what are those choices?

• BIBFRAME 2.0 – the currently promoted on the Library of Congress site BIBFRAME version, building on the previous disparate versions of BIBFRAME. • Schema.org – the structured web data vocabulary, supported by all the major search engines, actively promoted by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Yandex, and many others to aid indexing of resources, and implemented on millions of web sites in all sectors. • Linky MARC – the ability/recommendations by the PCC Task Group on URIs in MARC to include entity URIs for people, organisations, etc. in MARC records. Note: the name Linky MARC is of my own construction to differentiate from previous examples of MARC syntax for URLs etc. • Do nothing – kind of obvious!

So what is the correct answer? — Like most things in life, it depends on the answers to further questions.