On BIBFRAME Interfaces

The Application of Linked Data in Libraries

At this year’s ALA Annual Conference, I noticed among my colleagues a common confusion regarding what BIBFRAME is going to do. Everyone gets what it is: an RDF-based data model for libraries. But questions about practical applications and user interfaces kept emerging.

A lot of the tutorials and documentation out there explain the BIBFRAME data model, but they seem to assume that the reader gets why Linked Data is an improvement over other data modeling and storage options. Here’s an attempt at some basic background info you might be missing about BIBFRAME and discovery.

BIBFRAME Will Put Library Data on the (Surface) Web

20 years ago, much experimentation was happening with search engines, and we realized we had a problem: there’s a lot of content out there that bots can’t crawl. The phrase “Deep Web” was coined to encapsulate the stuff that search engines can’t find. The big problem for libraries: our online catalogs are dynamically created when a user searches the database. We threw a lot of solutions at this problem: data dumps, saved searches, subject guides, permalinks, and more. We worked on search engine optimization. But our catalogs remain part of the Deep Web: generally speaking, users have to come to a library’s…