Library Technology Glossary

glossary.md

Library Technology Glossary

• Access Points are the software "hooks" in the library catalog where patrons are able to search to look up the item. Typical Access Points include author, title, and subject. With the advent of Discovery Layers/Systems, more of the MARC records is exposed for searching.
• BIBFRAME, short for bibliographic framework, is a Library of Congress sponsored vocabulary for modeling bibliographic entities and relationships for library physical and digital collections.
• Discovery Layers/Systems a catagory of library systems with Blacklight being one of the most
  popular, that provide a faceted search built upon full-text search indexing using Solr or Elasticsearch.
• Dublin Core a basic metadata vocabulary with a simple, flat structure with common elements like creator, title, format, and date that is the most widely metadata vocabulary used in range of industries beyond libraries.
• ILS short for Integrated Library System, is the predominate enterprise software used by Libraries to manage their collections. Typically, an ILS has multiple functions for different library functions like acquisitions, cataloging, circulation, and other library functions.
• LCSH short for Library of Congress Subject Headings, is a controlled vocabulary of subject headings or terms that are organized in a hiearchical fashion and are typically grouped from more general to more specific headings in a left-to-right order.
• Linked Data a generic term associated with RDF data and related technologies with emphasis on data sharing between different institutions instead of duplicative services and data silos that is the current practice in cataloging and insitutional library systems.
• MARC short for MAchine-Readable Cataloging is the original data interchange format for libraries that was initially created in the late 1960s that is still the dominate representation for bibliographic information in use by libraries. The current version is called MARC21 while MARC XML is a serialization format that represents MARC as XML.
• MODS short for Metadata Object Description Schema is an XML vocabulary published by Library of Congress for describing typically born digital or digitalized objects like images. This schema is used primarily in digital repositories and not library catalogs.
• OPAC is an acronym for online public access catalog for an ILS service that public web access to a library's catalog.
• RDF or Resource Description Framework, is an W3C specification for describing data to faciliate data interchange on the internet.
• Semantic Web a term introduced in a 2001 Sir Tim Berners-Lee paper of the same name, is a vision of machine-actionable data embedded with web resources for richer functionality and user interfaces than the current (at that time) static web.
• schema.org a metadata vocabulary co-sponsored by Google, Microsoft, and Yandex for semantically marking up web resources with linked data.
• SPARQL query language for RDF and currently supported by full-featured RDF triplestores that allows for both simple and complex queries againest RDF triples using a syntax that is similar to both SQL and the RDF turtle serialization.
• Triples or RDF Triples is the basic structure of RDF. Each triple statement is made up of three components, a subject made up of an IRI (Internet Resource Identifier) or Blank Node, a predicate made up an IRI, and an object made up either an IRI, Blank Node, or literal value.
• Triplestore a data storage technology for RDF triples, popular triplestores include Blazegraph, Apache Jena, MarkLogic, and Amazon Neptune.

history.md

A Very Short History of Bibliographic Records and Metadata in Libraries

Early representations of bibliographic information predates computers with the standardization of subject, title, and author formats on paper cards used in card catalogs.

Libraries were early adopters of networked computering starting in the 1960s with the invention of MARC format by Henriette Avram a programmer at the Library of Congress for exchanging records between library systems. The MARC format includes both fixed and variable-length fields that start with a three digit number 001 except for the first field that is called a Leader that contains information about the record like length, type, encoding level, etc. Different fields correspond to different elements in the bibliographic record like author, title, call numbers, and subjects. Some MARC fields are repeatable while others are not. A fixed MARC field uses positioning to code a value while a typical variable MARC field has two indicator flags that vary depending on the field and usually one or more subfields that can either be a letter or number.