LODE-BD Recommendations 2.0 > 4. Entities, Properties, Standards, and Crosswalk. General Recommendations > 4.2. Groups of Common Properties

 

Common properties for describing bibliographic resources are identified and grounded in nine groups. They form the backbone of LODE-BD. About two dozen properties used for describing a bibliographic resource are included in Group 1 to 8. Two sets of properties for describing relations between bibliographic resources or between agents are included in Group 9. In the following list of the groups, some selected properties are emphasized in italic format. In the report the word ‘resource’ is used to represent ‘bibliographic resource’, a primary resource type to be described.

1. 1. Title Information: Title is one of the most important and relevant access points for any resource.  The information is usually supplied through a number of properties including title, alternative title- (handling subtitle(s), parallel title(s), translated title(s), transliterated title(s)), and title supplement.

2. 2. Responsible Body: This group contains the properties associated with any agent who is responsible of the creation and publication of the content of the resource, for example, the creator, contributor, and publisher or issuer of a resource.

3. 3. Physical Characteristics: Properties that describe the appearance and the characteristics of the physical form of a resource are placed into this group. They are: date, identifier, language, format, and edition/version.

4. 4. Location/Holdings (physical location): It is considered important for a resource to be located and obtained in the information exchange.  Properties that record the location and availability information are taken into account in this unique group.

5. 5. Subject: In contrast to the physical characteristics, the Subject group embraces the properties that describe or otherwise help the identification of what the resource is about or denotes, in the form of subject term, classification/category, freely assigned keyword and geographic term.

6. 6. Description of content: Two major types of descriptions that focus on the content of the resource rather than the physical object are considered in this group:  a) any representative description of the content, usually in the form of abstract, summary, note, and table of contents and b) type or genre of the resource.

7. 7. Intellectual property: Any property that deals with an aspect of intellectual property rights relating to access and use of a resource is included in this group, with special regard to rights, terms of use and access condition.

8. 8. Usage: Properties that are related to the use of a resource, rather than the characteristics of the resource itself, are considered to belong to this group.  Typical properties are: audience, literary indication, and education Level.

9. 9. Relation: This group has a different perspective for describing the resources from other groups that focus on describing the resource itself.  Here various relations between two resources or between two agents are the focus of description. Due to the significant number of such properties, no specific properties are listed under the Relation group in the following table.  Details of the properties designed for describing the relations are introduced in the sections 9.1 and 9.2 of the recommendations.   

These groups of information are listed together in Table 1, with the specific properties included in each group. Special attention should also be given to the additional recommendations on cardinality, value control, and important attributes. Table 1 comprises the following components in corresponding columns:

1. A. Groups of properties

2. B. Properties included in each group. Two special styles are used to signify the importance of the properties: two plus signs “++” (also in red colour) for the mandatory property;  one plus sign “+” (also in blue colour) for the highly recommended property in the context of bibliographic information exchange. The rest are recommended or optional.

3. C. Requirements of properties in the context of both non-analytical and analytical bibliographic descriptions, specified with (M)andatory, (H)ighly-(R)ecommended, (R)ecommended, and (O)ptional marked for either process.

4. D. Recommendation on the control of values, indicating (n)ot controlled, should use a name authority or a controlled vocabulary, or should follow a syntax encoding rule.

5. E. Some important attributes associated with individual properties, with special regard to the language and scheme attributes. A scheme can be either a value encoding scheme or a syntax encoding scheme.

Table 1. Groups of Common Properties