Additional documentation, tools, presentations, and useful links are available on the BIBFRAME Website.
Join the BIBFRAME Listserv in order to stay up-to-date on the lastest news, and to join in the discussion as ideas are aired on the Listserv. The BIBFRAME Listserv is your opportunity to provide feedback, respond to proposals, and make your requirements known. And, if you have the facilities, write code and experiment.
It is also possible to contact us by email or "snail mail." Contact information is available on each page of this guide directly below the navigation menu.
ID.LOC.GOV enables both humans and machines to programmatically access authority data at the Library of Congress.
This service is influenced by—and implements—the Linked Data External movement's approach of exposing and inter-connecting data on the Web via dereferenceable URIs.
ID.LOC.GOV is a critical component of the Library of Congress BIBFRAME Pilots. ID.LOC.GOV serves as the linked data source of the standard vocabularies used in describing bibliographic resources in the BIBFRAME Editor. For example, ID.LOC.GOV contains linked data versions of the LC/NACO Authority File (LCNAF), Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms (LCGFT). Values from ID.LOC.GOV are represented by dereferenceable URIs, with a choice of serializations.
Vocabularies in ID.LOC.GOV are updated regularly, depending on the dynamics of the vocabulary. LCNAF is updated daily in ID.LOC.GOV. LCSH and LCGFT are updated weekly. Other vocabularies are updated less frequently, as determined by the update schedule for the vocabulary.
Searches in the BIBFRAME Editor retrieve results from specific datasets in ID.LOC.GOV. In this sense, access to ID.LOC.GOV, and the minting of URIs, is done “transparently” by machine, allowing catalogers to select values as needed without actually querying ID.LOC.GOV directly. The arrows in the image on the right point to just a few of the vocabularies that are searched in ID.LOC.GOV through the BIBFRAME Editor.
It is important to note that the character of ID.LOC.GOV has changed since its inception in 2009, and its size and number of vocabularies has grown exponentially. At the time of its inception, ID.LOC.GOV was accessed primarily by machines, with requests for URIs over the HTTPS protocol. Machines would then specify the preferred serialization of the data. Today, ID.LOC.GOV has become a powerful discovery tool that allows humans to interact with the datasets in a user-friendly and detailed way. The number of vocabularies in ID.LOC.GOV has also grown dramatically from six vocabularies in 2010 to more than 100 vocabularies in 2019.
In June 2019, the entire Library of Congress MARC bibliographic database, and all MARC title and name-title authority records from the LC/NACO Authority File, were converted to BIBFRAME linked data and added to ID.LOC.GOV. 19,000,000 BIBFRAME Work descriptions and 21,000,000 BIBFRAME Instance descriptions were created from the MARC data. The related Works and Instances are linked and there are links to the authority data for Agents related to the resources.
The BIBFRAME Work and Instance descriptions in ID.LOC.GOV are a representation of Library of Congress MARC bibliographic and authority data as of June 2019. In the BIBFRAME Pilots, participants access BIBFRAME Work and Instance descriptions through the BIBFRAME Database, which is a separate source of data outside of ID.LOC.GOV. The BIBFRAME Database is interactive, and is updated and refreshed daily, as new descriptions are added from the BIBFRAME Editor, and new MARC data is converted and added from the Library of Congress Online Catalog.
Identity management is a concept that relies on the use of identifiers over “labels” (text strings) to provide access to entities. Identity management is perfectly suited to a linked data environment. In identity management, there is no need to provide unique text strings for identification, since the identifier used for the identity is unique. This can make authority work much easier. Disambiguation becomes of secondary importance to a dereferenceable URI identifier. ID.LOC.GOV has implemented identity management concepts as a means to discovery.
This is an image from ID.LOC.GOV for the authority record in the LC/NACO Authority File representing Abraham Lincoln. The dereferenceable URI is the linked data identifier for Lincoln. The label is the text string (the MARC 1XX field) that can be used in an access point in a resource description. In the current MARC environment, if a label changes, all representations of that label also need to be changed in associated records. In a linked data environment, if the label is changed, all representations of that label in associated records do not need to be changes, since the identifier is persistent. Any label can be displayed in an access point. In the image above, there are Hebrew and Chinese forms of Abraham Lincoln’s name. For users in countries where those languages are used, an access point could display Lincoln’s name in those scripts.
Identity management also provides more robust linking to other sources of identities, using semantic web “sameAs” techniques to assert that an entity in one controlled vocabulary is the same as an entity in a different controlled vocabulary.
In the authority record for Abraham Lincoln in ID.LOC.GOV, there are links to four other controlled vocabularies:
There is a powerful faceted search component in ID.LOC.GOV now that enables humans to interact with the datasets to enhance discoverability.
The screenshot from ID.LOC.GOV here shows the results on a search for "Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865"—over 1400 results are retrieved. Refinement of the search results can be achieved through the faceting filters on the left-hand side of the screen. A user may be interested in bibliographic resources by or about Lincoln. This result set can be retrieved through selecting BIBFRAME Instances or BIBFRAME Works. Additional faceting allows specific formats to be discovered. Another user may be interested in authority data on Lincoln. This result set can be retrieved through selecting Subject Headings or Name Authority.
