Digital Librairies : The KBART Revolution

How to import (almost) easily ebooks records in library catalogs

The KBART ("Knowledge Bases and Related Tools") format is a recommended practice that facilitates the transfer of metadata from electronic book and journal holdings to libraries [1].

KBART was created by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), a nonprofit organization dedicated to standards in publishing, libraries, and information access.

Its original 2010 recommendation focused on journals only. Ebooks were addressed starting in 2014.

The latest (in theory, see below) Couperin/Global KBART files from the French legal publishers Dalloz and Lextenso are available on the Bacon database.

Here is our first feedback on the KBART files. We’d like to thank the CIO of Lextenso, Arthur Mayrand, for his collaboration and assistance.

Our remarks :

– Presence of the author is very practical and even essential for a. research and b. identification of the work without error. But the KBART format retains only the first author and without even his first name. This can make it difficult to identify some authors.
In most cases, this is not a real problem. In 90% of the cases, the first author cited in the bibliographic records is the true and only reference for lawyers. Due to lack of time, we private sector librarians, when cataloguing, sometimes do not retain the 2nd and 3rd authors, whereas the ISBD standard says you should do all three.
However, relying on the first author only can be annoying when he/she has been out of the picture for a long time. Here’s an example with the Lextenso platform : the treatises known as "the Ghestin" or "the Malaurie" but updated without them or with little participation from them since the 2010s (as I understand it). The "Malaurie" are actually updated by Laurent Aynès and Philippe Stoffel-Munck or Pierre-Yves. Gautier, Patrick Morvan etc.. Not mentioning those authors seems to me a clear mistake.

– The years in KBART (two fields are available) may correspond only to the year of uploading, not to the year of publication - which is the "real" year, the year of update, and the year visible on the Lextenso web site.

– In the Lextenso KBART file, you cannot isolate the titles belonging to the packs your organisation has subscribed to unless you do it by hand.

– Beware : despite the very regular transmissions from the editors, there may be a delay in updating the file on the Bacon database.

– What about updates (new editions, deletions, arrival of new titles) ? Is there an alert system, will we ever be able to automate the update of our catalog ? How will we do it in our catalog (probably by hand) ? At the moment, this point seems especially important to us.

– Importing into a MARC library system (ILS) requires some reprocessing - but it’s feasible.

– Internal cataloguing rules for the subscribing organisation : choice to be made : shall we create one record per title (and then manage at the copies level) or two records (one paper + one online) ?

Emmanuel Barthe
law librarian researcher