National Library of China becomes National Institution Representative of RDA Board

Last week, I received a message from Simon Berney-Edwards, Director of Improvement and Development, CILIP, the library and information association, which is based in London. He told me that at the meeting of the RDA Board last week, the National Library of China was selected to be the National Institution Representative: Asia (To serve 2018-2020).
RDA is a continually evolving standard that aims to reflect the requirements of the description, cataloguing and metadata community. One of its original aims was to be applicable across cultures, sectors and perspectives.
RDA is a package of data elements, guidelines, and instructions for creating library and cultural heritage resource metadata that are well-formed according to international models for user-focused linked data applications.

The role of the representative is:

• To provide RDA Board with insight about the impact, challenges and opportunities from the perspective of a national institution that has implemented RDA.
• To provide any relevant feedback from other National Institutions in the region.
• To contribute to the development and delivery of the RDA Board strategic plan for the development of RDA.
• To contribute to the overall governance of the standard including oversight of strategy, delivery, finance and risks.

Xiaoguang Gu's New Book on the Beauty of Reading

A book on the beauty of reading, with 120 photos from 27 countries in 10 years by 1 photographer/librarian. It is a very special book! Mr. Xiaoguang Gu is a librarian of the Information Management Department, Peking University, and is very active in Chinese library community.
The Books is just published by the Tsinghua University Press, September 2017.

书名: 旅行之阅 阅读之美
作者: 顾晓光
出版社: 清华大学出版社
出版年: 2017-9
页数: 228
定价: 78.00
装帧: 平装
ISBN: 978-7-302-48003-7

Librarianship Studies & Information Technology: What is FRBR?

Librarianship Studies & Information Technology: What is FRBR?: (a) A content designation tool (b) A data model (c) A cataloging code or standard (d) All of above (e) None of above ...

IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM) Published

IFLA LRM is a high-level conceptual reference model developed within an entity-relationship modelling framework. It is the consolidation of the separately developed IFLA conceptual models: FRBR, FRAD, FRSAD.
I am very glad to see my name in this document.
Please see the following site:
https://www.ifla.org/node/11576
To download the document, please go directly to:
https://www.ifla.org/files/assets/cataloguing/frbr-lrm/ifla-lrm-august-2017.pdf

The Bookworm and Music

The Bookworm and Music is a book containing essays, book reviews and other blog posts related to books and music. Also included are several essays by the friends from the brass band of the Xincheng School about the old stories during the 1970s.

It was published by the Dolphin-Books in November 2016. It also contains some illustrations by Mr. Ying HAN, one of my favorite illustrators.

Call for Papers: IFLA Journal special issue on Privacy

IFLA Journal invites papers for a special issue focused on privacy, libraries, and information professions across all continents. The issue will be published in the summer of 2018 as Volume 44:2. In particular, the main goal of the special issue is to gather the latest theory, research, and practices from libraries and information professions to further the professional discourse on the definition and provision of privacy in the 21st century.

https://www.ifla.org/node/11327

FRBR / LRM Lectures in China

FRBR / LRM LECTURES IN CHINA

Ben Gu, National Library of China

Published in IFLA Metadata Newsletter, Vol. 2, no. 2, December 2016

http://www.ifla.org/cataloguing/newsletter

Pat Riva, Associate University Librarian, Collection Services at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, gave a lecture with the title "IFLA Library Reference Model: Overview" in the National Library of China (NLC), Beijing, China, October 21, 2016. As the chair of the FRBR Consolidation Editorial Group since 2013, Pat Riva spoke about the evolution of the IFLA models, describing the user tasks, modeling decisions, entities, properties, attributes, relationships, aggregates, seriality, and the plans for the next steps. About 120 librarians from NLC and other libraries in Beijing attended the lecture, and they asked many questions about the conception, the details and the future of the IFLA LRM.

Before the lecture in Beijing, Pat Riva gave the plenary session "Resource Discovery in the Internet Age" at the Zhejiang Forum on Public Digital Culture, Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, October 17-19, 2016, and also talked about the library models in the Semantic Web and the relationships among library, museum and archives models.

Prior to that, the Shanghai Library had invited Pat Riva to present a Workshop on the FRBRoo Model and its Environment, Shanghai, October 14. During the workshop, Pat Riva introduced FRBRoo and its relationships with FRBR(ER), CIDOC CRM and IFLA LRM to the colleagues from the Shanghai Library and other librarians in Shanghai.

Since the publication of FRBR in 1998, there had been little attention from the Chinese library community until September 2002, when Barbara Tillett visited Beijing and introduced it to colleaguesin China. During the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, there were quite a lot of articles on FRBR published in Chinese journals of library science, and there were also some experimental projects for the application of FRBR to Chinese library catalogs. The Chinese version of FRBR (jointly by librarians from Shanghai Jiao Tong University Library, the Shanghai Library, Peking University Library and the National Library of China) was finally released on the IFLA website in 2008. However, FRBRoo and LRM had not received much attention from China. Pat Riva's lectures in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing will therefore have a special importance. I hope more Chinese colleagues will pay attention to the future development of FRBR/LRM.