Page 83 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 42

082 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 8, 2016

1 Functional requirements

1.1 Library bibliographic control requirements

Libraries take on particular function and mission for bibliographic control. The General Catalog of
Chinese Genealogies published in 2005 was presided over by the Shanghai Library and compiled
by numerous genealogy research scholars. The investigation, textual research, and compilation of
collection distribution of Chinese genealogy documents were carried out around the world. The
catalog contains abundant and detailed literature description and content description information.
The requirements of bibliographic control in web-scale and providing services at any time and
any place can be realized if the new technology under network environment is developed and
utilized.
To be specific, key requirements of bibliographic control for genealogy catalog are embodied in
the following three aspects:
(1) Establishing global genealogy union catalog, and promoting the reuse and sharing of data.
One of the important functions of bibliographic control is to clarify the collection condition of a
certain resource in different institutions and provide clues on how to access the resource. With the
development of internet technology, it becomes possible to establish a national and even global
genealogy union catalog. The General Catalog of Chinese Genealogies has already provided a
very solid data foundation. The first step to constructing genealogy services platform is to import
the existing data and provide readers with information such as the existing editions of a certain
genealogy, its collection condition around the globe and the approach to access the document. At
the same time, the platform should facilitate the reuse and sharing of the knowledge created by
organizations and genealogy research experts among different institutions.
(2) Conducting Web-based authority control. Authority control is a critical part in bibliographic
control. The essence of authority control is to realize the concept-based description and matching
(Liu, Zhang, & Xia, 2015). It is necessary to differentiate different kinds of standard entities
such as person, institution, place, event from the conceptual level and represent the concept
by using unified text labels. For genealogy resources, to resolve problems like identification,
disambiguation, and merging of different expressions of the same names of persons, places, and
dynasties, the models of concepts including surname, people, institution, place name, dynasty
in Chinese historical calendar need to be established and the relationships among these concepts
need to be expressed through specific semantics. On the basis of Web-based authority control,
the controlled authority term is required to be uniquely identified and located in web-scale, and
the semantic description information of it should be acquired, recognized and understood by
machines.
(3) Supporting the sustainable development of bibliographic control. The printed version of The
General Catalog of Chinese Genealogies is a static and closed document and its bibliographic