Exposing MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data As Linked Data With Provenance

Abstract

The library community has been using the MARC 21 standard to exchange library data for decades and all the information processed seems to be successful. However, due to the proliferation of tools and technologies, people started anticipating the data to be easily available for their use. But this is only possible by standardizing the data representation formats and sharing data on the Web. The MARC 21 standard has no possibility of distributing library metadata outside the library community. Besides, these standards focus only on data representation and storage, which causes the semantics of data to be hidden for machines. This paper presents an approach on transitioning the MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data into RDF triple representation based on the linked data principles. The linked data principles proposed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee state how the data alone can be shared and linked with each other regardless of the documents they are enclosed in and formulating the web as a Web of Data. Further, an automatic generation of the provenance information of the library metadata is considered.