The internet is flooded with a great quantity of conference information, proceedings and conference literature. Due to the distribution and the uneven quality of these Open Conference Resources (OCR), it is hard to use this information sufficiently. Therefore, Chengdu Branch of National Science Library of Chinese Academic Science (CB-NSL-CAS) implemented the Acquisition and Service System of Open Conference Resources (ASOCR) to gather these resources efficiently.



The resource description model used is: Resource Description and Access (RDA), a standard for cataloguing that provides instructions and guidelines on formulating data for resource description and discovery.

ASOCR is the earliest part of a digital library for NSLCAS. This first stage was finalized in December 2012 and collected 3532 conferences and 27485 conference literatures by March 7, 2013. The second stage of ASOCR aims to expand the quantity and quality of Open conference resources to achieve the conferences information of Commercial databases more efficient.

RDA model describes external and internal relationships of OCR

To relate the Open Conference Resources to each other and show resource content efficiently, proper resource description models were required. The paper “The Research of Open Conference Resources Organization Based on RDA Description”, presented at the International Conference on Dublin Core 2013, addresses the describable method of open conference resources with RDA.

At the beginning of this project, the Dublin Core metadata was selected as the OCR metadata description schema and 3 metadata sets were founded. However, with the progress of the project, this description schema was found inadequate for describing relationships. In order to handle this problem, RDA was taken into account.

The research was divided into 3 parts

1. Comparison between DC and RDA theoretically to find the advantages and disadvantages of RDA. Researchers compared the functional differences between RDA and DC in organization of information resources based on the theoretical framework of metadata.
2. Comparison between the DC description model and RDA model. The RDA model has the following advantages: the external and internal relationships in the RDA model can describe the complex relationships of OCR. In ASOCR, if a conference literature has multiple formats, like the RDA model whose formats might be integrated as one record in a work, while in DC model, these formats will be recognized as many records. In the ASOCR, the software analyzes word expression documents, e.g. PDF, PPT, Html and Word rather than voice image expression documents. Compared with the DC description model, the RDA model description uses a metadata record to organize all formatted documents. It is more convenient for users to obtain literatures.
3. Realization the mapping from DC to RDA.

At the end of the project, we took RDA as description standard and carried out the new metadata description schema.

Next steps

As for the future work, we will be focusing on following issues:

• On the basic of protecting intellectual property, perfecting conference and literatures resources metadata. 
• Generating metadata of user information resources.
• Exchanging metadata among different systems.

The research was supported by Young Talent Frontier Program of the National Science Library of CAS and the Digital-Library Phrase II Pre-start project of the National Science Library of CAS.