In nearly every community, a librarian sits behind a desk, surrounded by shelves that hold pieces of the human story — fragments of memory bound in print or stored in servers. For generations, their role has been to organize, preserve, and connect people to knowledge. But now, the very medium of memory is changing.

Librarians are being asked to do more than describe the past. They are being asked to weave it forward.

For decades, the invisible structure beneath every library collection has been a system called MARC — the Machine-Readable Cataloging standard created in the 1960s. MARC made sense in a world of cards, typewriters, and standalone catalogs. It allowed thousands of libraries to classify millions of books consistently.

But MARC was never built for the Web. It wasn’t built for multimedia, for oral histories, for community archives, or for the lived experiences that never made it into published form.

To face the future, librarians are now learning to think not only in records, but in relationships.

The Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME), created by the Library of Congress in 2011, is the evolution of that invisible structure. It replaces the old record-based model with a linked-data model that allows information to live as a network — where works, people, places, and subjects are nodes connected by meaning. (loc.gov/bibframe)

Instead of a single “record” for To Kill a Mockingbird, there is now a Work (the story itself), Instances (editions or translations), and Items (specific copies). Each connects to related data — the author, the publisher, the time period, even community resources that reinterpret it.

This is what makes BIBFRAME revolutionary: it moves libraries from cataloging objects to connecting contexts.
It’s how the metadata for a local oral-history recording could one day live beside a Pulitzer Prize winner — equally visible, equally valuable.

For most public libraries, BIBFRAME feels distant — something the Library of Congress and academic institutions are piloting quietly. But this new framework offers enormous promise for local and regional systems.

BIBFRAME allows a single “master” description of a work to exist while each library adds its local enrichment — a bit of color, texture, or cultural context unique to its community.

That’s where data-lake thinking comes in. A data lake is a shared repository where all these metadata contributions — structured, unstructured, and emergent — coexist. Instead of every cataloger recreating the same record, libraries could contribute their threads of information into a shared loom, creating a national tapestry of knowledge.

Each library holds its own threads — the oral histories, community projects, art exhibits, digital collections, and neighborhood memories that tell a local story.

BIBFRAME provides the structure — the loom — that allows those threads to be woven together with others from across the country.

The resulting fabric is a living tapestry: diverse, connected, and resilient. A story not dominated by official histories or publishers, but strengthened by the color and complexity of local lived experience.

When the threads of Indigenous knowledge, African-American oral tradition, immigrant histories, and rural memory are finally woven into the same digital fabric as the nation’s printed record, the tapestry begins to reflect the truth of who we are.

Many catalogers view BIBFRAME with hesitation, and understandably so. It asks them to unlearn decades of habit and to step into a new kind of authorship — one that feels less controlled, more collaborative.

Challenges librarians face include:

But the opportunity is profound. Libraries can:

Recorded history, as it stands, is incomplete. Textbooks, news archives, and published research reflect only part of the human experience. If libraries are to remain the stewards of democratic access to knowledge, they must extend their craft to capture and structure lived experience — especially the voices that have been marginalized or erased.

When a community library records oral testimony about segregation, or a tribal library catalogs stories in native languages, those aren’t just programs — they’re acts of preservation and reclamation.

When these local records are described in BIBFRAME and connected through a shared data lake, they gain permanence and visibility far beyond local walls. They become primary sources of the digital era.

In this vision, the librarian becomes both archivist and artist: spinning local data into threads that hold shape and color, then contributing them to a shared national loom.

They are translators between lived experience and digital structure — ensuring that meaning isn’t lost in technical systems but preserved through thoughtful description, ethical metadata, and community collaboration.

Every librarian who learns to describe a piece of local life in a linked-data context is strengthening the fabric of the national memory.

For librarians, technologists, and directors ready to explore, these resources are excellent entry points:

The tapestry metaphor isn’t simply poetic. It’s practical.

Every thread — every piece of metadata describing a person, a story, a local artifact — strengthens the structure of our collective knowledge.

If librarians across the country can begin to weave their local data into shared frameworks like BIBFRAME and data lakes, the resulting fabric will not only preserve the past but shape a more equitable, truthful, and connected future.

It’s time to bring color to the digital cloth of history.
And who better to do it than the people who’ve always known how to keep stories alive?
✍️ Author Bio

Jen Baxter is the Founder of The Common Collective, an independent nonprofit civic organization dedicated to truth, connection, and courage. A veteran public-sector and nonprofit leader with 15+ years of experience, she brings a unique perspective to civic storytelling, organizational design, and leadership rooted in empathy and impact.

Until next time,

Guiding Principles 

People first | Transparency | Equity | Creativity | Accountability | Joy
www.thecollectivestories.org