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BIBFRAME (Bibliographic Framework) is a data model for bibliographic description. BIBFRAME was designed to replace the MARC standards, and to use linked data principles to make bibliographic data more useful both within and outside the library community.
Contents
History
The MARC Standards, which BIBFRAME seeks to replace, were developed by Henriette Avram at the US Library of Congress during the 1960s. By 1971, MARC formats had become the national standard for dissemination of bibliographic data in the United States, and the international standard by 1973.
In a provocatively titled 2002 article, library technologist Roy Tennant argued that "MARC Must Die", noting that the standard was old; used only within the library community; and designed to be a display, rather than a storage or retrieval format. A 2008 report from the Library of Congress wrote that MARC is "based on forty-year old techniques for data management and is out of step with programming styles of today."
In 2012, the Library of Congress announced that it had contracted with Zepheira, a data management company, to develop a linked data alternative to MARC. Later that year, the library announced a new model called MARC Resources (MARCR). That November, the library released a more complete draft of the model, renamed BIBFRAME.
The Library of Congress released version 2.0 of BIBFRAME in 2016.
Design
BIBFRAME is expressed in RDF and based on three categories of abstraction (work, instance, item), with three additional classes (agent, subject, event) that relate to the core categories. While the work entity in BIBFRAME is roughly analogous to the work entity in the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model, BIBFRAME's instance entity is a conflation of the FRBR expression and manifestation entities. This represents an apparent break with FRBR and the FRBR-based Resource Description and Access (RDA) cataloging code. However, the original BIBFRAME model argues that the new model "can reflect the FRBR relationships in terms of a graph rather than as hierarchical relationships, after applying a reductionist technique." Since both FRBR and BIBFRAME have been expressed in RDF, interoperability between the two models is technically possible.
Specific formats
While the BIBFRAME model currently includes a serial entity, there are still a number of issues to be addressed before the model can be used for serials cataloging. BIBFRAME lacks several serials-related data fields available in MARC.
A 2014 report was very positive on BIBFRAME's suitability for describing audio and video resources. However, the report also expressed some concern about the high-level Work entity, which is unsuitable for modeling certain audio resources.