A monthly-ish roundup of news from resource description groups and committees in Australia and overseas. To submit an item for the next Digest, use our contact form.
ALIA ACORD
ALIA recently convened an industry roundtable on LCSH and subject heading futures in Australia, in response to ongoing concern about the stability of LCSH and Australian use of international bibliographic standards and infrastructure. Following the roundtable, a steering committee and working group will be established to investigate potential options for the Australian use of subject headings. These groups will be able to respond to further developments in this space.
IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions)
IFLA has announced a new Statement on Universal Bibliographic Control. This Professional Statement, approved by the IFLA Governing Board in July 2025, defines the key principles and shared responsibilities of Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC). UBC refers to the global coordination and access to bibliographic and authority metadata through the timely creation and sharing of essential user-oriented bibliographic information.
The Statement has been maintained by the IFLA Bibliography Section since 2012, with the 2025 edition revised by a working group sponsored by the Bibliography, Cataloguing, Subject Analysis and Access Sections, together with the Advisory Committee on Standards, and in consultation with the National Libraries Section.
ORDAC (Oceania RDA Committee)
Following community feedback, the text of AACR2 and Original RDA Toolkit will continue to be available to subscribers of the RDA Toolkit in the ‘Resources’ tab, during and after the transition to Official RDA.
US Library of Congress
As part of the LC migration to the FOLIO ILS, the LC Authorities web interface has been relaunched at https://authorities.loc.gov/ with improved searching and filtering options for subject, name and title authorities. There have been no updates to LCSH or other authority data due to the migration.
Other
An article on Canadian efforts to create a First Nations, Métis, Inuit Indigenous Ontology has recently been published. Stacy Allison-Cassin spoke remotely about this project at the first Kummargii Yulendji symposium in 2023. The ontology itself is available at this Google sheet.
Allison-Cassin, S., Callison, C., & Desmeules, R. (2025). The First Nations, Métis, Inuit Indigenous Ontology and Challenges in the Development of an Indigenous Community Vocabulary in the Canadian Context. The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, 48(2), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.5206/cjils-rcsib.v48i2.19585