This article describes cooperation between Bradford University Library and the Department of Computing that has resulted in nine research projects over a twenty-five year period on various aspects of bibliographic control. It recounts the origins of the Universal Standard Bibliographic Code (USBC) and its development for the identification of both books and non-book material. It then describes various aspects of the projects including simulating the merging necessary to set up a national database, the cleaning of a database, its use in inter-library lending, and its application together with expert systems for the quality control of databases. The final project is BOPAC that has used modern technology to create faster and better access to a number of library catalogues worldwide and has demonstrated that authority control in its present form is not effective.

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) began as an alternative to distributed searching of scholarly eprint repositories. The model embraced by the OAI-PMH is that of metadata harvesting, where value-added services (by a "service provider") are constructed on cached copies of the metadata extracted from the repositories of the harvester's choosing. While this model dispenses with the well known problems of distributed searching, it introduces the problem of synchronization. Stated simply, this problem arises when the service provider's copy of the metadata does not match the metadata currently at the constituent repositories. We define some metrics for describing the synchronization problem in the OAI-PMH. Based on these metrics, we study the synchronization problem of the OAI-PMH framework and propose several approaches for harvesters to implement better synchronization. In particular, if a repository knows its update frequency, it can publish it in an OAI-PMH Identify response using an optional About container that borrows from RDF Site Syndication (RSS) Format.

Social cataloging sites---tagging systems where users tag books---provide us with a rare opportunity to contrast tags to other information organization systems. We contrast tags to a controlled vocabulary, the Library of Congress Subject Headings, which has been developed over several decades. We find that many of the keywords designated by tags and LCSH are similar or the same, but that usage of keywords by annotators is quite different.

A trial with academic social referencing software – also called social bookmarking software – has been carried out with members of the Research Group Systems- and Network Engineering (SNE) of the University of Amsterdam. The idea for a user trial started after Marten Hoekstra of the SNE group contacted the University Library of the University of Amsterdam for advice and recommendation on using one of the academic social referencing tools. The University Library recognized the value of the social bookmarking site Del.icio.us, but concluded that this was not optimal for academic work1. Three other academic social referencing software tools were identified and analysed. Possible advantages of these academic social referencing tools for academics are listed in the textbox below. In order to assess the potential value of Web 2.0 applications for library services, and specifically academic social referencing tools, a user trial was set up by the University library with the members of the SNE group. Pleiade Management and Consultancy was asked to document and report the feedback from the users during the trial. The user trial was supervised by Driek van Heesakkers of the University library and Marten Hoekstra of the SNE group.