Lots of work is going on in the Jisc National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK) project to get the new database built and populated with data loads from UK HE and specialist libraries.
The database is being built by OCLC, on their CBS software which is already used to power national and regional bibliographic infrastructure in a number of countries, including in Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Users of CBS attend a partners meeting once a year, and last week the Jisc NBK team attended our first partner meeting.
This was an excellent chance to hear about the initiatives being undertaken by other CBS partners, and how they’re using CBS with other technologies to power bibliographic and knowledge services. We were particularly interested by work being done by BSZ and GBV (VZG) in Germany, ABES in France and SwissBib in Switzerland which reflects many of the needs and use cases of the NBK and other Jisc Library Support Services. It’s reassuring to know what we are in line with the forefront of European bibliographic development, and to identify potential partners for knowledge-sharing.
Another important factor was to hear about how data from CBS can be used and customised for use with other systems. The NBK is committed to the Jisc Library Support Services Transformation project, and we need to ensure that the services that are built on the NBK reflect and conform to the Jisc LSS principles.
The first of these services, and your first chance to see the outputs of the NBK project, will come in January 2018, when we will be releasing the beta version of the Jisc NBK Resource Discovery Service.
