Posted by Lori Ayre on March 30, 2015

The most recent issue of Information Technologies and Libraries (ITAL) has an article b Karim Tharani that does a nice job of explaining why BIBFRAME matters to libraries. The article, Linked DAta in Libraries: A Case Study of Harvesting and Sharing Bibliographic Metadata with BIBFRAME sounds less exciting than it is.  It ends with this inspiring call to action:

As the amount of data on the web proliferates, users find it more and more difficult to differentiate between credible knowledge resources and other resources. BIBFRAME has the potential to address many of the issues that plague the web from a library and information science perspective, including precise search, authority control, classification, data portability, and disambiguation. Most popular search engines like Google are gearing up to automatically index and collocate disparate resources using Linked Data. Libraries are particularly well positioned to realize this goal with their expertise in search, metadata generation, and ontology development. This research looks forward to further initiatives by libraries to become more responsive and make library resources more relevant to the knowledge creation process.

If you are still unsure what BIBFRAME or Linked Data is all about, this article is a good one to use by way of introduction because the author explains both concepts simply and ties it to an actual project done with library metadata. As I've read more and more about this stuff, I've gotten more excited about the role that librarians could, and should, play organizing data out on the web and, perhaps even more importantly, bringing hidden special collections out into the light of day!