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This paper summarizes a research program that focuses on how catalogers, other cultural heritage information workers, web/Semantic Web technologists, and the general public understand, explain, and manage resource description tasks by creating, counting, measuring, classifying, and otherwise arranging descriptions of cultural heritage resources within the bibliographic universe and beyond it. A significant effort is made to update the nineteenth- century mathematical and scientific ideas present in traditional cataloging theory to their twentieth- and twenty-first-century counterparts. There are two key elements in this approach: (1) a technique for diagrammatically depicting and manipulating large quantities of individual and grouped bibliographic entities and the relationships between them, and (2) the creation of resource description exemplars (problem-solution sets) that are intended to play theoretical, pedagogical, and IT system design roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) Board of Directors approved the Core Competencies for Cataloging and Metadata Professional Librarians, hereafter referred to as the "Core Competencies," in January 2017. The Core Competencies lists the skills required of professionals performing cataloging and metadata work in libraries of all types. In the six years since the document's release, the cataloging and metadata community has adopted new cataloging standards, experimented with new tools, and engaged in conversations and reparative efforts around inclusive metadata. In this paper, we, the authors of the Core Competencies, report the results of our survey research that assessed the current use of the document within the cataloging and metadata community and solicited comments on ways in which the document might be revised. We conclude with recommendations for immediate changes to the document, and for its future use and maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many academic libraries collect art exhibition catalogues and juvenile books to support the curriculum, but academic library review sources and book vendors have limited coverage of these niche areas. For more than a decade, Wichita State University has used purchase plans from Worldwide Art Books and Junior Library Guild to acquire print books. This paper discusses the assessment of both plans, how experience with this assessment has influenced development of an assessment plan, and reasons other libraries may want to assess their own niche collecting plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research study assesses preservation education provided by academic institutions in North America. Educators teaching preservation in graduate library and information science programs were surveyed about the type and number of courses offered, content of preservation coursework, faculty resources, future plans for curricula, fieldwork and internship opportunities in preservation, and postgraduate employment data. The investigators hypothesize that current preservation education within traditional library and archival studies programs does not provide adequate preparation in the areas of technical and managerial expertise to deal with the preservation of digital collections, audiovisual media, or visual materials. This paper reviews the literature pertinent to study of preservation education, describes the research methodology employed in designing and conducting the survey, presents the resulting data, and analyzes the trends revealed by the data in order to understand more fully the goals and objectives of preservation education during the last decade and to gauge future directions of the field. This paper concludes by presenting plans for further research, which will expand upon initial findings of this survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North American library community is looking at ways to enhance authority records with nonroman scripts. The Library of Congress Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) Authority File (LC/NAF) is limited to Latin script. This paper looks ahead to the use of other scripts in LC/NAF. The author examines the options for using Hebrew script in MARC 21 authority records, and considers the prospects for cooperative authority work between American and Israeli libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of challenges facing collection development. It considers the evolving nature of collections and the main players in the information exchange process as well as outlines six key challenges intended to inform discussions at the Janus Conference, held in October 2005. These challenges can serve as catalyst for further discussion in the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including trends in peer review process, challenges in academic review and development in library sciences.

The International Conference on Cataloging Principles (Paris, 1961) led to wide acceptance of Seymour Lubetzky's distinction between books and works, where books denoted particular physical objects and works concerned conceptual abstractions associated with the creative labor of particular authors. Lubetzky's formulation of works is included in many of the world's cataloging frameworks, including the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). Several conceptual and practical difficulties arise from the widespread adoption of Lubetzkian works in practices associated with knowledge organization. However, FRBR and other knowledge organization frameworks that utilize works as central entities could be made more useable and useful if work, as an organizing principle, were de-emphasized and seen as one among many concepts used for aggregating sets and supersets of objects according to how likely they are to be useful to users of knowledge organization tools like catalogs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) presents a complex conceptual model. Because of this, it is not easy for everyone to understand. The purpose of this paper is to make some of the more difficult aspects of the FRBR model, in particular the Group 1 entities work, expression, manifestation, and item, easier to understand by placing FRBR in the context of what it is: a conceptual entity-relationship model. To this end, a definition of the term ‘model’ is presented, a variety of types and functions of models are introduced, conceptual models are discussed in detail, modeling an abstraction is explained, and different ways of interpreting FRBR are suggested. Various models used in the history of cataloging are introduced to place FRBR in the context of the historical development of document models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientists produce vast amounts of data that often are not preserved properly or do not have inventories, placing them at risk. As part of an effort to more fully understand the data-at-risk predicament, researchers who were engaged in the DARI project at UNC's Metadata Research Center surveyed information custodians working in a range of settings. The survey collected information on the data characteristics and preservation plans. Forty-three information custodians completed the survey. The results indicate that at-risk data include a variety of formats subject areas, and ownership status, as well as compliance with a variety of standards. Although a majority of respondents agree that data preservation is important, they caution that time is the greatest barrier to sharing these data. The study has implications for data rescue and for training information custodians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bibliographic relationships have taken on even greater importance in the context of ongoing efforts to integrate concepts from the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) into cataloging codes and database structures. In MARC 21, the linking entry fields are a major mechanism for expressing relationships between bibliographic records. Taxonomies of bibliographic relationships have been proposed by Tillett, with an extension by Smiraglia, and in FRBR itself. The present exercise is to provide a detailed bidirectional mapping of the MARC 21 linking fields to these two schemes. The correspondence of the Tillett taxonomic divisions to the MARC categorization of the linking fields as chronological, horizontal, or vertical is examined as well. Application of the findings to MARC format development and system functionality is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]