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Bibliothecae.it, Vol. 12 No. 1 (2023): Ranganathan’s multiple facets = Le molte faccette di Ranganathan. International conference Proceedings (University of Pavia, Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage, Cremona, May 23rd, 2022)

L’articolo presenta i risultati dell’analisi qualitativa e quantitativa delle voci di autorità di nomi di persona di SBN, confrontando due dataset, uno basato sui dati inviati al VIAF nel 2021 (PRE) e l’altro sui dati prelevati dall’OPAC SBN poco dopo la pubblicazione del portale Alphabetica (POST). Lo scopo dello studio era quello di stabilire se la qualità delle voci di autorità corrisponda effettivamente ai requisiti indicati da SBN per le voci di livello 90 e superiore. Inoltre, lo studio si è proposto di verificare se il sistema di produzione e pubblicazione delle voci di autorità, basato sui livelli di autorità delle voci e dei catalogatori, sia ancora attuale o meno, anche alla luce di Alphabetica. L’analisi evidenzia che una percentuale rilevante delle voci di autorità (PRE e POST) non risponde ai requisiti, che la scelta di pubblicazione delle voci in base al livello di autorità non è adeguata agli standard e alle scelte di altre agenzie bibliografiche nazionali e che le innovazioni introdotte in Alphabetica suggeriscono l’opportunità di un cambio di prospettiva nell’organizzazione del lavoro di autorità di SBN., Bibliothecae.it, V. 11 N. 1 (2022)

Traditional UBC provides for the standardization of bibliographic records, the creation of guidelines dedicated to national bibliographic agencies, the creation of the UNIMARC format, and the curation of authority data. Bibliographic Control has deeply evolved since IFLA theorization during the Seventies of the XX Century, due to the availability of a very large range of new bibliographic tools. At the beginning of the XXI century, UBC is quite different and involves new actors. Among these, Wikidata has a background greatly different from that of libraries as institutions: it is not devoted to bibliographic data, nor it is limited to personal authority control, but its value in AC tools like VIAF and National Libraries authority files is undiscussed. After a presentation on how Wikidata items describe and identify bibliographic entities, the authors underline how the existence, use and reuse of Wikidata affect the way the professional community thinks about UBC. Wikidata is a clear example of the need for a new approach to identification and description, that are deeply intertwined. Secondly, from a Wikidata perspective, the relevance of globally preferred and variant access points is lessened. Moreover, descriptions in Wikidata – although conceptually very similar to the traditional one – present differences and potentialities that a traditional description does not have and cannot have. Also from a theoretical perspective, Wikidata offers a pragmatic way to think globally and act locally. In fact, it shows that there is no need for one standardization of practices for establishing the headings and structure of authority records in one international form; instead, users’ convenience can be achieved by a technological infrastructure capable to present to each user the information about an entity in its own language and script. Additionally, Wikidata is the most evident example of the distributed and diffused approach of the semantic web to the issue of the universal identification of the entities. Also, Wikidata identification and description show that authority and bibliographic control must be tackled as just a part of the more general topic of the creation of a knowledge graph of all human knowledge by means of linked open data. Lastly, this objective cannot be achieved only by contribution, cooperation, and networking of large national agencies (as in VIAF), as a larger number of stakeholders must be involved to achieve a UBC also including the full indexing of any kind of scientific communication

RDA (Resource Description and Access) is going to promote a great change in cataloguing. In fact, guidelines - rather than rules - are addressed to anyone wishing to describe and make accessible a cultural heritage collection or tout court a collection: librarians, archivists, curators and professionals in any other branch of knowledge. RDA aims to make possible creation of well-structured metadata for any kind of resources, reusable in any context and technological environment. RDA offers a “set of guidelines and instructions to create data for discovery of resources”. Guidelines stress four actions - to identify, to relate (from FRBR/FRAD user tasks and ICP), to represent and to discover - and a noun: Resource. To identify entities of Group 1 and Group 2 of FRBR (Work, Expression, Manifestation, Item, Person, Family, Corporate Body); to relate entities of Group 1 and Group 2 of FRBR, by means of relationships. To enable users to represent and discover entities of Group 1 and Group 2 by means of their attributes and relationships. These last two actions are the reason of users’ searches, and users are the pinpoint of the process. RDA enables the discovery of recorded knowledge, that is any resources transmitting intellectual or artistic content by means of any kind of carrier and media. RDA is a content standard, not a display standard nor an encoding standard: it gives instructions to identify data and does not care about how to display or encode data produced by guidelines. RDA requires an original approach, a metanoia, a deep change in the way we think about cataloguing. Innovations in RDA are many: it promotes interoperability between catalogs and other search tools, it adopts terminology and concepts of the Semantic Web, it is a global standard, it can be applied by different agencies to create data. RDA is expected to be enriched by the wide community of professional, from the whole world, in a collaborative, well-aware, recognized and global perspective. By RDA, the great tradition of cataloguing goes one step further and enters in the digital age definitively.