From Scottish Bibliographies Online to National Bibliography of Scotland: Reinventing a National Bibliography for the 21st Century

Abstract

From the moment of its foundation in 1925, the National Library of Scotland has been involved in compiling and publishing Scotland’s national bibliography – at first purely dealing with a historical bibliography but from 1956 onwards maintaining the record of contemporary publications. This has resulted in a suite of different bibliographies being available in print and online in different formats. In the past few years, we have decided to unify all our bibliographies into one new National Bibliography of Scotland.

This paper gives the case history of this decision, what led up to it, and its consequences in the two years of the project to devise and then implement a new National Bibliography of Scotland fit for the 21st Century.

In particular it will discuss:

• The drivers behind the new National Bibliography o a new Library strategy which recognised the maintenance and publication of a national bibliography as a key strategic objective; o the rise of Linked Open Data; o the Library’s decision to publish datasets, including bibliographic data, for unrestricted re-use; o the move to a new Library Services Platform, leading to a review of how we manage our bibliographic databases. • The vision and structure of the new National Bibliography, and how the desire to make all our bibliographic metadata open access, re-usable and interoperable drove our decision-making; • The issues involved in changing the scope of the national bibliography to focus on imprint, authorship and language, exclude subject coverage, and integrate the scope of historical and contemporary bibliographies; • The issues involved in implementing changes across a range of Library staff including systems librarians, rare book curators, and cataloguing staff, all with different working practices and perspectives; • Internal and external advocacy and engagement with stakeholders, in particular the issues involved in persuading those outside the Library sector of the value of a national bibliography and what it can do for them.