Standard Citation Forms Editorial Team report

Bibliographic Standards Committee

March 13, 2020 meeting

1. Changes since our last report

Since our last report at annual, we have welcomed one new member, Rafael A. Linares Blasini of La Casa del Libro.

Valerie Buck and Jessie Sherwood have taken over as co-editors. We would like to thank Ann Myers for her exemplary work as editor and now as an advisory member of the committee.

Our new submission form went live on June 7, 2019. The new process is going smoothly.

2. Statistics

Since the SCF’s report at the May 1, 2019 BSC meeting, it has published 74 new citation forms based on submitted proposals and updated the entries for the Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke. New citations are announced monthly on DCRM-L.

The site has averaged 1301 sessions during this period and 476 users per month, which is in line with past years.

3. Linked data recommendations and proposed pilot project

At the last BSC meeting, the SCF Linked Data working group made its recommendations: including persistent URIs linking to id.loc.gov entities on all resources; expanding the SCF’s working principles and scope to include adding URIs to existing entries in the SCF database; and reconvening the SCF LD WG as major developments related to linked data in library communities arise. It also identified a couple outstanding issues: namely, some SCF resources are not held by the Library of Congress so are not included in id.loc.gov and the evolving nature of BIBFRAME and linked data.

SCF met shortly thereafter to discuss the working group's recommendations. We agreed with the working group’s recommendation that using id.loc.gov’s URIs is presently the best course. We do have some reservations about the longevity and sustainability of Bibframe, as it is still a pilot project. We are also uncertain about what is best to be done for resources that are not in id.loc.gov, as most of us agree that the SCF does not (nor is it likely to have) the bandwidth to create authority records for resources that are not in id.loc.gov.

We propose a six-month pilot project during which we would create a field for the id.loc.gov URI, check to see if a resource exists in id.loc.gov, add the URL for the Instance to the citation if it does, and keep track of where it does not. We will then revisit the recommendations in September 2020 in light what we learned in our pilot and any new developments that arose in the meantime.

Questions:

Is the BSC in agreement with this proposal?

Have the members of the BSC and the working group any additional suggestions, questions, or concerns?

4. SCF website

As noted in our last report, there have been some issues with how SCF is running in WordPress, as many of the plugins that make the SCF site work are deprecated and have security issues. They continue to function, but will need to be replaced. We raised the possibility of hiring a developer and seeking additional funding for this. In consultation with the Web Team and the chair, the SCF decided to postpone addressing the site issues until after the SCF Linked Data group had made its report. According to the Web Team, the situation has not changed; they continue to work on back-end upgrades and changes that will make the site as a whole function more smoothly.

Report submitted for discussion at the Bibliographic Standards Meeting on February 24, 2020 on behalf of the Standard Citations Forms Sub-committee.

• ·         Valerie Buck (Co-Editor)
• ·         Jane Carpenter
• ·         Ellen Cordes (Advisory Member)
• ·         Emily Epstein
• ·         Alison Greenlee
• ·         Martha Lawler
• ·         Rafael Linares Blasini
• ·         Kate Moriarty
• ·         Ann Myers (Advisory Member)
• ·         Jessie Sherwood (Co-Editor)
• ·         Brian Stearns