ShareFamily:NewsAndUpdates

This section includes the latest issue of the Share Family Bulletin. More information on the current activities going on within the various branches of the Share Family can be found throughout this wiki website https://wiki.svde.org/, which is the informative hub of Share-VDE and the Share Family.

For a general presentation of the Share Family, of its mission and values, and to find out the latest news, you can also explore the brochure website https://www.share-family.org/.

To explore previous issues of the Share Family Bulletin, feel free to navigate through the following links:

• Number 1, December 2019
• Number 2, November 2020
• Number 3, October 2021
• Number 4, January 2022
• Number 5, May 2022
• Number 6, September 2022
• Number 7, January 2023
• Number 8, December 2023
• Number 9, July 2024

Number 10, April 2025

You can download a printable version at https://bit.ly/SFBulletin_n10_Apr2025

Citation: Share Family Team, Share Family Bulletin 10 (April 2025), https://bit.ly/SFBulletin_n10_Apr2025

Introduction

The Share Family is committed to fostering cooperation among its member institutions and within the broader GLAM community to showcase the immense value of being part of an initiative developed and driven by libraries for libraries.

The Share Family’s collaborative approach to linked open data results in advanced technology applications for bibliographic descriptions and shared data management tools. Member institutions embrace the recent progress of LOD Platform technology and are empowered by the advantages of linked open data for knowledge sharing.

Version 3.1.1 and LOD Platform developments

The version 3.0.0 of the LOD Platform that was announced in the latest issue of the Share Family Bulletin has introduced substantial changes to the technology framework supporting the system. JCricket entity editor and shared cataloguing tool is the major enhancement of v.3.0.0, but the system has undertaken important optimisations in the following software releases 3.1.0 and 3.1.1, which are currently being tested by member institutions.

The LOD Platform technology is shared across all environments of the Share Family initiative, and software releases are rolled out to the various tenants following a dedicated schedule.

Cluster Knowledge Base and data management

Entity model and Cluster Knowledge Base

The LOD Platform currently supports the latest version of the BIBFRAME ontology, and will upgrade the MARC-to-BIBFRAME mapping to the most up to date version. The use of BIBFRAME within the Share Family initiative has been extended to guarantee interoperability with IFLA LRM and with applications not based on BIBFRAME. The SVDE Ontology is the result of work that has been carried on since last year by the SEI - Sapientia Entity Identification Working Group, with the svde:Opus entity being the most prominent extension of the ontology.

The output of the SEI Working Group is being incorporated in the LOD Platform components, e.g. the OpusType property is available in the test environment and can be used in the JCricket entity editor that is being tested.

A key aspect of LOD Platform data management is the ability to manage data at a very fine granularity level. The aim is to have the CKB - Cluster Knowledge Base (or Entity Knowledge Base) as a single source of truth for the LOD Platform and Share Family installations. This will improve:

• a “format-agnostic” CKB where all input formats converge into one conversion source (eg. MARC21, UNIMARC, native BIBFRAME/RDF eg. from LD4P Sinopia application profiles…);

• improved conversion from MARC to BIBFRAME and vice versa;
• single conversion pipeline from the CKB – removing the conversion pipeline based on MARC.

One of the main pipelines we’re following in this context is the management of attributes through controlled vocabularies instead of literals. This is being achieved by:

• defining each controlled vocabulary in collaboration with the Sapientia Entity Identification Working Group;
• enriching each vocabulary with external authoritative sources (RDA, Library of Congress, FINTO…);
• clustering of controlled vocabularies and assignment of a URI to each value.

After completing the work on these vocabularies, they will be made available on JCricket.

UNIMARC

The direct management of UNIMARC records in clusterization and reconciliation processes without the “middle step conversion” from UNIMARC to MARC21 has been completed, and a Wikibase instance https://unimarc2bibframe.wikibase.cloud/ documents this work. An update has also been provided at the 6th IFLA UNIMARC Users Meeting in November 2024, with the presentation by Tiziana Possemato and Claudio Forziati UNIMARC-BIBFRAME Mapping: Evolving Interoperability in Data Modelling (recording available).

The related developments had as a result the migration of the SHARE Catalogue platform to the new CKB infrastructure and enhanced entity discovery portal https://www.sharecatalogue-lod.org/ (see also the updates on Share Family tenants below).

UAT – User Acceptance Testing environment

In the Share-VDE tenant, sets of real data from SVDE members institutions have been loaded to a UAT (User Acceptance Testing) environment that runs on the latest software version. The purpose is to test the most recent output of the clusterization of SVDE libraries’ data in a small-scale data pool. Members are validating the results of clusterization processes in the common CKB, ie. the quality of data processing, clustering, linked data conversion and entity display on the discovery portal. Input from the SVDE and Share Family community has always been the foundation of the initiative and an added value to developments.

Data update procedures

Incremental updates of data ingested from member institutions are managed through a dedicated module that has been continuously fine-tuned to streamline and automate the so-called “delta updates” imports. On the Natbib tenant, the institutional portal for the BNB - British National Bibliography currently supports a stable workflow of delta updates ingestion.

The delta updates workflow will be applied to all tenants as soon as massive data import and indexing will be stable.

JCricket Entity Editor

Upon the release of the LOD Platform v.3.0.0, JCricket was rolled out in a test environment dedicated to member institutions. The first round of tests has been done in the second half of 2024, and a new testing phase is ongoing. Feedback from testers will be incorporated in the application. You can explore more of JCricket in the Public Documentation section of the Share Family wiki at LOD Platform Entity Editor - JCricket and check out the demo of JCricket entity editor at the BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe 2024 (slides are also available).

JCricket operates on all layers of the LOD Platform entity model (ie. bf:Agent, svde:Opus, svde:Work, bf:Instance, Item). Also, JCricket users see multi-provenance data at individual attribute level. The tracking of the Provenance has been implemented since the beginning as a pivotal element to enable entity data curation by cataloguers from different institutions in a shared space.

The evolution of JCricket over time illustrates the progress of the tool and future goals.

Architecture and infrastructure

Multi-tenant architecture

Multi-tenancy is an infrastructure configuration that allows many clients to share a single instance of a software application and the related infrastructure resources. We have implemented and are rolling out this approach to reduce effort and machine resources needed to set-up and configure a new tenant or an institutional installation within it. This ensures that data is stored and managed in a unified way, optimizing security, scalability, and efficiency. While built for multi-tenancy, the architecture also seamlessly adapts to private deployments for those who require a dedicated installation.

New database

Because the scale of the Share Family environment has been growing at a big data level (particularly for the largest tenant Share-VDE), we are testing a new database solution that would rely on a NoSQL approach. This would ensure scalability and stable performance in massive data imports and incremental updates.

Third parties integration

The evolution of the LOD Platform technology encompasses the ability to mutually integrate the data produced with external systems, notably with local ILS and Library Service Platforms and authority sources. This is being achieved through the integration of the LOD Platform tools with local ILS and LSP, or cataloguing modules:

• Alma: connection to circulation processes have been established; exploration of CRUD APIs together with Alma libraries is in course, to push data from JCricket to Alma;
• FOLIO: pilot integration in progress with Lehigh University (Share-VDE member and FOLIO adopter); initial tests are completed for the automated data flow from JCricket into FOLIO’s Inventory module. The FOLIO Instance is automatically updated starting from input data in JCricket as the “source of truth”. Further use cases of mutual integration are being analysed and tested.
• Sinopia LD4P BIBFRAME cataloguing module: connection to Sinopia and parsing of Sinopia-generated data has been completed; after the testing phase, Sinopia data will be included in the LOD Platform CKB - Cluster Knowledge Base and edited through JCricket.

This work aims to facilitate a hybrid cataloging environment that retains support for existing MARC-based integrations while developing the flexibility and interconnectedness offered by Share Family-maintained entities. By automating this process, this integration project not only enhances the metadata management capabilities of libraries but also paves the way for seamless collaborative cataloging within the Share Family community.

Further references can be found at this wiki page Integration with third parties.

Lookup on authoritative sources such as Wikidata is also being developed to query and pull data while using JCricket. An endpoint has been set-up to query Wikidata Agents and Works via API and SPARQL. Currently, this implementation lives in the internal development environment.

Finally, efforts to integrate LOD Platform features in other applications are progressing steadily also on other fronts. Two conference presentations by Jim Hahn (University of Pennsylvania) have demonstrated some of the options for interoperability supported by JCricket and LOD Platform search APIs:

Finally, efforts to integrate LOD Platform features in other applications are progressing steadily also on other fronts. Two conference presentations by Jim Hahn (University of Pennsylvania) have demonstrated some of the options for interoperability supported by JCricket and LOD Platform search APIs:

• Integration of the Share Family Entity Editor and the Alma ILS, at the LD4 Conference, 11 October 2024;
• Browser plugin to enable linked data discovery in a Blacklight Catalog, at SWIB Conference 2024, 27 November 2024.

Front-end enhancements

The majority of front-end enhancements has been devoted to improving JCricket, also as a consequence of users’ feedback and tests, as well as following the evolution of the tool. Ongoing optimisations include not only design revisions, but also data curation features. Just a few examples:

• the Provision Activity block of information structures publication data by mirroring the corresponding RDF group of publication attributes, and ensures better identification and reconciliation of Publishers.
• The ability to edit svde:Work data (as mentioned above, JCricket operates on all layers of the LOD Platform entity model).
• A preview of RDF entity representation has been designed and will be implemented.

The presentation layer of the discovery portal is also being improved, especially as far as accessibility for visually impaired users is concerned. Work is ongoing to validate the accessibility features of the web portal to confirm compliance with international guidelines. Also, refinements are ongoing to the management of Arabic script on the user interface. This task complements the management of multilingualism of Share Family data, that is already handled in two fashions:

• Clusterization processes (automated processes): in this case, the variant forms in various languages and scripts retrieved from the available national and international data sources are used to enable the end user to perform searches on the discovery portal using different scripts and getting the same results.
• Using JCricket entity editor (manual process): in this case, cataloguers can enrich the entity cluster with variant forms in terms of both different languages and different scripts.

Community work

New Open Metadata Policy

The Share Family strives to support and invest in open data to freely share information, and an updated Open Metadata Policy has been approved by its Advisory Council. The community is committed, wherever possible, to share data transformed by its series of Linked Open Data (LOD) processes.

The previous version of the policy was published in 2023 to encourage open access to data produced by Share Family processes.

Share Family Community updates

As usual, exchanges within the Share Family community steer the vision and the evolution of the initiative and the output of working groups nurtures technical developments:

• The Sapientia Entity Identification Working Group is committed to the SVDE Ontology to define svde:Opus entity properties for different content types. RDA properties are also taken into account in framing the ontology, and this will ensure greater interoperability.
• The User Experience – User Interface Working Group continues working jointly with the National Bibliographies Working Group on a design proposal for the Publication page of the entity discovery portal, focusing on the aggregation of svde:Work and bf:Instance data. The group has narrowed down the core metadata for each material type and is now deciding how to display additional metadata that is not core to publication identification, with the aim of improving navigation and optimizing how end-users interact with and utilize the data.

On 19th September 2024 an informal Share Family meeting dedicated to members was held in Helsinki, at the National Library of Finland, after the two-day BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe. The engagement of the membership around key areas of development confirmed the added value of being part of an active and diverse community.

On behalf of the various Share Family tenants we are happy to mention important advancements:

• The Share Catalogue tenant has transitioned to the latest version of the LOD Platform, which includes the advanced entity discovery portal and JCricket. The new version is online at https://www.sharecatalogue-lod.org/ and will be enhanced in the next period as far as data quality and data curation functions.
• The NLN - National Library of Norway joined the National Bibliographies tenant. Already a member of the SVDE tenant contributing its catalogue, the NLN will also provide the Norwegian national bibliography data and will be the second institution feeding this tenant along with the British Library.
• The beta British National Bibliography in linked data is stable in the institutional portal https://bl.natbib-lod.org, which is populated with regular updates.
• The Parsifal tenant https://parsifal.urbe.it/parsifal/ is effectively enabling the URBE network in the curation of a shared authority file originally created through the aggregation of the catalogues from participating libraries. We are working on a dashboard that orchestrates the workflow between the central authority file and the Cluster Knowledge Base, to facilitate individual libraries’ operations.

All members are welcome to contribute expertise, specific experience and bibliographic information for the enrichment of a collective catalogue and the entire Share community.

Collaborations with the library community

The Share Family team and member institutions continue to nurture the liaisons with the library information experts and linked data and BIBFRAME communities, to increase interoperability to the advantage of new bibliographic and linked data workflows and to enhance existing ones.

Moreover, participation in international working groups and networks is strategic to the Share Family community, and responds to its core principle of creating connections and increasing communication across initiatives and projects.

RDA Steering Committee

A liaison protocol has been signed to establish the relationship at the strategic level between the Share Family Advisory Council and the RSC - RDA Steering Committee.

This step is considered particularly fruitful also in consideration of the activities that libraires from different countries and continents are bringing forward in the Share Family Working Groups with the scope of enhancing the practical implementations and the concrete interoperability of the emerging bibliographic ecosystem based on linked open data. The protocol has been published:

• on RDA Chair Documents page: https://www.rdatoolkit.org/rsc/chair-documents
• in RDA protocols and liaisons page: https://www.rdatoolkit.org/rsc/RSCprotocols;
• as a RDA news item: https://www.rdatoolkit.org/rsc/ShareFamilyProtocol;
• as a Share Family news item: https://www.share-family.org/news?id=67fe5ec16e504.

IFLA

As a member of theIFLA Bibliography Section, Tiziana Possemato is also the official liaison IFLA Bibliography Section / Share Family National Bibliographies group.

Highlights from two IFLA events:

• The British National Bibliography Experience in the Share Family Linked Open Data Environment, at the webinar Linked Open Bibliographies: Exposing, Linking, Reusing, 27 November 2024, by Thurstan Young and Anna Lionetti.
• UNIMARC-BIBFRAME Mapping: Evolving Interoperability in Data Modelling, at the 6th IFLA UNIMARC Users Meeting, 12 November 2024, by Tiziana Possemato and Claudio Forziati discussed the interoperability and UNIMARC-BIBFRAME conversion.

PCC - Program for Cooperative Cataloguing

Share Family representatives have been involved at various levels in PCC - Program for Cooperative Cataloguing activities including various stakeholders:

• The PCC Task Group on AI and Machine Learning for Cataloging and Metadata provides guidelines for the integration of AI and Machine Learning technologies into cataloging and metadata work. This includes emphasizing strategic planning and ensuring that AI augments rather than replaces the valuable work of cataloging professionals. For more information, visit the PCC Task Group on AI and Machine Learning for Cataloging and Metadata wiki and the PoCo-approved draft of the Guiding Principles for Use of AI and Machine Learning Technologies in Cataloging and Metadata Work.
• The Outcomes of the Linked Data Tactical Planning Meeting report on the meeting organised by the PCC in November 2024 about transitioning cooperative cataloging workflows to a linked data-based production environment. Share Family staff and members contributed to the discussion with the experience of SVDE environment and JCricket entity editor.
• The newly created EMCO - Entity Management program has kicked off the activities building on current PCC programs for authority control, to create an international cooperative program for managing linked data entities from any source PCC member institutions choose to use in their descriptive metadata practices.

BIG - BIBFRAME Interoperability Group

The Share-VDE participation in the BIG - BIBFRAME Interoperability Group is strengthening cooperation among institutions adopting BIBFRAME internationally. Recently, Xiaoli Li, Tiziana Possemato and Kalli Mathios presented at the IFLA Advisory Committee on Standards Symposium in Athens, on March 19th, sharing insights from BIBFRAME Interoperability Group: Tackling Implementation Challenges Across Institutions.

Consortia

We are striving to share the benefits of the Share Family approach to consortia and networks of institutions working with shared practices. The LOD Platform entity identification and reconciliation processes are suitable to environments that are already designed to be shared spaces. The potential for consortia of applying Share Family principles and tools is being investigated in a cooperative effort with consortia representatives. The Share Family Executive Summary for Consortia sketches the outcomes envisioned when supporting consortia in adopting linked data methodologies for enhanced collaboration.

Information resources

Publication documentation section in the wiki

The knowledge base of informative resources describing and documenting Share Family tools and activities continues to grow. The Public Documentation section includes detailed information on the LOD Platform workflow and components, the available APIs, the release notes, and public user guides.

A summary of useful resources was published in the previous issue of the Bulletin.

Publications

Among recent publications, it’s worth mentioning:

• Smithsonian Libraries & Archives: BIBFRAME linked data experiment with the Share Family technology, by Jackie Shieh, in «Art Libraries Journal»; 50:1, 12 - 18 (April 2025); online access https://doi.org/10.1017/alj.2025.5.
• Share-VDE and Beyond: Cooperation and Innovation to Bring Linked Open Data into Practice, by Jim Hahn, Sebastian Hammer, Tiziana Possemato, Nina Servizzi, in «Charleston Conference Proceedings, 2023», 309-333 (2024) https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14509768.
• Un esempio di entity modeling: l’Opus in Share-VDE, Proprietà delle entità svde:Opus, svde:Work e bf:Hub, L’ontologia Share-VDE: un’estensione di BIBFRAME per la discovery dei linked data, L'ontologia di Share-VDE come estensione di BIBFRAME, by Tiziana Possemato, in «Entity modeling: la terza generazione della catalogazione», 112-138, 281-302 (2024); free online access https://doi.org/10.36253/979-12-215-0393-7.

Dissemination channels

As part of outreach actions, we have issued an informative e-mail communication to publicize the Share Family promotional videos and the initiative as a whole. This type of broad communication runs in parallel with more specialized information such as the Share Family Bulletin, and will be issued from the new e-mail contact address info@share-family.org, which will be active together with info@svde.org.

Check out our presentation videos and learn more about the Share Family mission on Youtube: COOPERATION, SUSTAINABILITY, OPENNESS, INCLUSIVITY, DYNAMISM.

The Share Family website https://www.share-family.org/ remains the informative showcase and we are working to enrich it and expand it with new sections. See the latest news https://www.share-family.org/en/news.

Events

Regular virtual and in-person events, such as conferences, workshops, and working group meetings, provide opportunities for member institutions to connect, share ideas, and explore potential areas of collaboration.

Presentations not mentioned above are reported in this section. Full documentation is available on the page Resources.

BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe 2024

Hosted by the National Library of Finland, the BFWE 2024 has seen an important contribution from Share Family representatives, including a demo of JCricket.

WOLFcon 2024

A session featuring the evolution of the pilot integration in progress between Share-VDE and Lehigh University’s FOLIO installation has been presented at WOLFcon 2024:

MARC My Words: Navigating the BIBFRAME Frontier, by Wayne Schneider, Charlotte Whitt, Tiziana Possemato, Nate Trail, Boaz Nadav Manes, Lisa McColl; slides:

• MARC My Words;
• BIBFRAME in production.

DCMI 2024

Real-Time “RDFization”. Leveraging Linked Data Fragments for enhanced data publication: the Share-VDE case study, at DCMI 2024, 23 October 2024, by Andrea Gazzarini.

Charleston Conference 2024

New pathways for resource description and interoperability: innovative strategies from the Share Family Ecosystem, at Charleston Conference 2024, 14 November 2024, by Nina Servizzi, Jeanette Norris, Sebastian Hammer, Tiziana Possemato.

SWIB Conference 2024

Leveraging Linked Data Fragments for enhanced data publication: the Share-VDE case study, at SWIB Conference 2024, 27 November 2024, by Andrea Gazzarini; recording available.

IFLA webinar on National Bibliographies

The British National Bibliography Experience in the Share Family Linked Open Data Environment, at the webinar Linked Open Bibliographies: Exposing, Linking, Reusing, 27 November 2024, by Thurstan Young and Anna Lionetti; recording available.

Next events

Public presentations where Share Family staff or members contribute their experience are announced at https://www.share-family.org/en/events.

The cross-domain vocation of the Share Family will be represented in the art libraries sector at the ARLIS/NA 53rd Annual Conference: on May 14th, Jackie Shieh and Anne Evenhaugen will present Data Unleashed: Smithsonian Library Data for Artists and Artwork in Share-VDE BIBFRAME.

In the context of the Share Catalogue achievements with UNIMARC-to-BIBFRAME mapping, the Lightning talk Mapping UNIMARC to BIBFRAME: The SHARE Catalogue Knowledge Base on Wikibase.cloud will be presented by Claudio Forziati and Alessandra Moi on June 5th - 6th at Wikidata and research, at the University of Florence (Italy).

Like every year, the Share Family will be present at ALA Conference 2025 in Philadelphia. A Share Family Workshop is being organised on Monday June 30th. A full announcement will be shared as soon as more details for participation are available.

The yearly appointment with the BIBFRAME Workshop in Europe is confirmed on September 16th - 17th 2025, in Naples (Italy). This event is a major gathering for sharing knowledge and practices about BIBFRAME implementation.

Your opinion is always welcome: to provide feedback on the Share Family discovery website, report bugs and suggestions as external users reach out through the forumhttps://forum.svde.org/ or send a message to helpdesk@svde.org. For general information on the initiative, contact info@share-family.org.