UKOLN
Raising Awareness

"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Bibliographic Management

What is Bibliographic Management?

Bibliographic data identifies, describes and assists the location of specific works of intellectual or artistic creation, in whatever physical or digital form they exist. Formerly the majority of bibliographic records (or item level descriptions) were for printed materials, whereas now many collections also hold sound recordings, digital files (or access to such files), images and objects, etc. Item level descriptions, once held in card catalogues and typed or printed documents, are now predominantly held digitally.

Bibliographic management work at UKOLN focuses on:

  • The standards used to create bibliographic records
  • The formats in which bibliographic data are stored, exchanged and retrieved
  • The quality of bibliographic records in terms of currency, accuracy, consistency and functionality.

A complementary type of metadata is that of collection level description.

About us

Bibliographic management work was part of UKOLN core activities from 1980 to 2011. The work was carried out by Ann Chapman. Other UKOLN staff who previously worked in this area of activity were: Philip Bryant, Lorcan Dempsey, Alison Holbrook, Janet Kinsella and Alan Seal.

Archive

An archive of the Bibliographic Management Web site is available on the Internet Archive. On 5 June 2013 this Web site had been crawled 80 times going back to 25 January 1998. The most recent archive was taken on 12 March 2013.

Note that this Web site is also available on the UK Web archive.