What are the objectives of BIBLINK?

The BIBLINK project has the overall objective of furthering the development and improvement of national bibliographic services by establishing a link between the parties concerned.

It is intended to deliver an interactive prototype/demonstration system which will enable publishers of electronic documents to input and transmit an agreed minimum level of data describing the documents to national bibliographic services, allowing those services to enrich the data (for example, by the application of authority control for proper names or the addition of subject information) and retransmit it to the publishers.

Technology The prototype will employ an agreed standard format for transmission and will convert as necessary to library-based MARC formats for use by the national libraries. As it is in the nature of on-line publications to change, provision will be made for establishing a one-to-one relationship between a bibliographic record and the electronic document to which it relates. During the registration stage of an electronic publication at the national bibliographic service the document and its description will receive a digital signature, time stamp or fingerprint in order to facilitate verification of a publication and its bibliographic description.

Timescale BIBLINK has been divided into two distinct phases, each expected to last about eighteen months: Phase 1 : In addition to the scope of the project being more precisely defined, basic information is being collected about data formats, numbering systems, encryption, authentication and format conversion. Consensus about these will be sought with a representative group of publishers. Phase 2 : The prototype demonstration system will be developed and installed at the sites of the project partners and the participating publishers for trials.

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