The BACON knowledge base is provided by theAgence bibliographique de l'enseignement supérieur (Abes) to facilitate accurate and reliable reporting of electronic resources in the catalogues and discovery tools of institutions in the French-speaking academic community and beyond. This data warehouse provides libraries with accurate and up-to-date data on their electronic resource collections in a format that is tailored to their needs. As a result, the quality of the information displayed via the public interfaces is improved and the operation of the link resolvers, which allow access to the full text from the bibliographic references, is enhanced.
Why integrate resources into BACON?
Expertise and support
AtAbes, the team in charge of BACON assists content producers in the design of KBART files, analyses them and provides a diagnosis of the metadata supplied before they are made available in the knowledge base.
Valuation of data
The team in charge of BACON can award a label to files, guaranteeing the quality of the metadata provided and displayed. This label is a proof of the commitment of the content producer in its global approach to improve the description and reporting of the electronic resources it offers.
A unique warehouse with national and international visibility
BACON centralises the KBART files of the various content producers, in particular French-speaking publishers and scientific distributors, and feeds the commercial knowledge bases used by French libraries. This entry point saves time and visibility for the content producer.
Namely: the metadata of digital journal collections are also integrated into the Mir@bel portal, which is useful for library policy.
Simplicity and openness
A KBART file that complies with the NISO recommendation should have few requirements. It is a tabulated file with 25 ordered columns and defined headings. The mandatory data expected is basic: title, identifiers, dates, access URL, author, access type and content type. The production of a KBART file does not therefore require advanced technical skills.
The data, under the CCO open licence, are freely reusable, without having to specify their origin.
The frequency of updating is at the discretion of the content producers, at each modification on the platform or at regular frequency: daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly.
What resources are are affected?
The KBART files describe the resources making up the commercial offers (packages), the corpora acquired under national licences, as well as all the titles accessible on the content producers' platforms (masterlists). BACON makes available the metadata of a wide variety of documents:
- Magazines
- Digital and related works
- Encyclopaedias (including those designed as databases)
- Other documents: blogs, websites, teaching materials, reports
Any resource offering full text, even if it is only a part, sometimes a small part, can be collected in BACON.
- Journal / e-book portals (free / paid / embargoed...)
- Online Encyclopedias
- Databases providing documents according to the above typology