Here is my summary of sessions I attended at the 2018 IFLA World Library and Information Congress, distilled from 7 pages of notes:
I attended both sessions of the Subject Analysis and Access Section. Development of standards: Impact of IFLA bibliographic standards. There was much talk of the impact of last year’s approval of the Library Resource Model (LRM) on a variety of other standards. Already there has been discussion of modifying the model from an entity-relationship one to an object-oriented one, to be called LRMoo. This is all about the theory underlying our cataloging rules, with the vocabulary being arcane and not a little bit obscure. Nevertheless, in the very near future, this will have an impact on RDA’s terminology and possibly actual cataloging rules. One of the terms bandied about was “diachronic works,” that is works that are issued over time – an addition to the terminology used for continuous resources. Such works can be indeterminate or determinate in duration as well as being successive or integrating, resulting in 4 classes of such works:
a. Serials – which are indeterminate and successive
b. Websites and databases – which are indeterminate and integrating
c. Websites of limited duration (such as a website set up for a particular Olympic games) – which are determinate and integrating
d. Dictionaries issues in several volumes over time – which are determinate and successive
If this doesn’t make sense to you, you are not the only one. I’m looking forward to seeing some training materials. The other term I heard for the first time was “WEMlock.” That refers to the idea that a manifestation determines the expression and the work.
The Global Vision project was another theme of the conference. A total of 200 reports from IFLA led sessions around the globe were received over the past few months in addition to another 18 locally-sponsored reporting sessions. All told the full report runs 740 pages. The OLA session on the Global Vision Project was one of the 18 local sessions mentioned.
With my project to create subject headings for Oregon Indian tribes in mind, I chose to attend the program sponsored by the Library Services to Indigenous Populations Section. All of the speakers were very good, but I especially liked hearing about Librarians without Borders. In Colombia, following the truce between FARC and the federal government, this organization did a project to bring mobile libraries to areas where FARC rebels had been active to help them transition back into civilian life and promote reconciliation. The presenter also spoke about the impact of the long civil war on indigenous peoples, many of whom were displaced by the war and whose children are in danger of losing their cultural background. About 41,000 people of 65 indigenous groups were displaced, leaving them vulnerable to slave trafficking, isolation from their own people, and impoverishment. One way that the organization supported them was by developing an “Ideasbox,” a popup library-in-a-box that can be used to promote access to indigenous culture, provide education, and support information exchanges between displaced persons and the local population. Library assistants were recruited from the indigenous communities themselves.
I also liked Decolonizing Academic Library Research with Indigenous Methodologies: A Collaborative Approach presented by Camille Callison, University of Manitoba, and Danielle Cooper, Ithaka S+R. Callison spoke about her own people, the Tahltan in BC, and the need to implement the UN statement on indigenous knowledge. Libraries need to preserve traditional knowledge, which can present a worldview much different from that of the dominant culture. Danielle Cooper spoke about how in the dominant culture, researchers typically gather data for interpretation, but the result is often something that benefits the researcher. In working with indigenous populations, this is often viewed negatively, that the researcher has taken something from the indigenous people without giving anything back. She provided a short list of resources on indigenous research methodologies. Ithaka S+R will be publishing a capstone report about this topic.
The Evolution of BIBFRAME: from MARC Surrogate to Web Conformant Data Model Philip Schreur, Stanford University, provided a history of MARC and the need to transition to
linked data and Bibframe. He pointed out how equipment (computers, phones, etc.) from the time that MARC was created are not around today and that we take for granted that machines will interact with another. Nevertheless, MARC is still around today even though it doesn’t readily interact with a variety of systems. Bibframe was launched in May 2011 and allows for translating MARC into linked data, the language of the semantic web. In September, 2017, the – first Bibframe workshop was held in Europe; a 2nd one is scheduled for Florence this month. The Program for Cooperative Cataloging recently created a sandbox for creation of cataloging workflows using Bibframe, an important development as many libraries internationally can take on the work of implementing it (as opposed to having LC be the guiding organization).

Other speakers at the Bibframe session discussed development of an in-house conversion project to move data from MARC to Bibframe.

The best named paper in the Bibframe session was “Still waiting for that funeral” presented by Sébastien Peyrard and Mélanie Roche, Bibliothèque nationale de France. They maintained that MARC is not dead yet and that MARC is adequate for their needs.

The metadata sections (Cataloging, Bibliography, and Subject Analysis/Access) did a joint session that covered a variety of topics. Their main collaborative achievement recently is the creation of an IFLA metadata newsletter. The Bibliography section is coming out with a revised Guidelines for National Bibliography in the Digital Age, due out in 2019. It has also worked on the NBR, national bibliographic register, which compiles information about national bibliographies for many countries (i.e., a directory of national bibliographic agencies, such as LC and the British Library).
The Guidelines for Authority Records and References (GARR) was being revised but is currently on hold while recent changes in ISBD are being considered elsewhere in IFLA.
Other work: ISBD review group received permission to start revision of ISBD after many years of waiting for the LRM model. “Names of Persons” was published in 1996 and is in desperate need of revision. Multicat project is a multilingual dictionary for cataloging and also needs revision, especially after LRM approval.
I attended my first meeting of the Form/Genre Work Group to which I was appointed this past year. We reviewed potential tasks for the group listed in a Google docs spreadsheet and decided to tackle creating a list of form/genre vocabularies with annotations to facilitate selection of a vocabulary when users are working on a project. A companion bibliography of articles about form/genre terms was also suggested

I attended two sessions of the lightning talks, a new feature of the IFLA conference. In addition to my providing an update to my project about Oregon Indian tribe subject headings, I heard about many different projects. Favorites were: “PD with a Passport” about how a burnt out librarian decided to volunteer for a number of different NGOs, including Librarians without Borders, to help develop libraries in Central and South America; providing mobile library services to IDP’s (Internally Displaced Persons) in Nigeria, promoting reading for pleasure as a way to both educate children and provide relief time from the worries of living as a refugee (and also including social workers, health workers, and translators to help with those challenges); and a project to digitize books in Iraqi libraries (particularly Mosul University) after ISIS had been driven out.
Next year: Athens! (and 2020 in Auckland, New Zealand)