Shipping BIBFRAME

Yesterday Kevin Ford and I gave a presentation (slides) at the LD4 conference about the use of BIBFRAME “bounded descriptions” at the Library of Congress (LC) and in the Blue Core project. BIBFRAME data is RDF that gets serialized in many different ways. One of the challenges of building tooling around BIBFRAME is that you don’t necessarily know if you have to follow your nose in the data (resolve URLs) to get some of the data or it will be present in whatever BIBFRAME data you have on hand. This may seem like a small thing, but when you are building BIBFRAME editors, or doing a large bulk loading operations (as LC and the Blue Core project are doing) it is helpful to have it on hand. The bounded description is a convention for making certain information available in the BIBFRAME data. The initial idea for the talk was to describe some interoperability problems that we experienced when loading data that had been designed for XML processing in a RDF processing centered workflow. But…