KBART files are standardized title lists in .TXT format, that specify electronic collections. This is to provide a short overview on what to expect from this metadata format and how to work with it as publisher or librarian.
KBART, which stands for “Knowledge Bases and Related Tools,” is a NISO Recommended
Practice↗.
Very simply, KBART recommends best practices for the communication of
electronic resource title list and coverage data from content providers
to knowledge base (KB) suppliers. KBART specifies file format, delivery
mechanisms and fields to include, and it applies to both serials and
monographs.
Thus, a single KBART file is basically a standardized list, separated by
TAB in .TXT format.
By specification KBARTs are not intended for rich bibliographic
description, but work in tandem together with MARC records and chunk
level data like BITS and JATS XML to provide the collection level
information for full scale title information and discoverability within
our model of the trinity of
discovery↗.
A knowledge base is an extensive database maintained by a knowledge
base supplier that contains information about electronic resources such
as title lists, coverage dates, inbound linking syntax, etc. Knowledge
bases typically organize the resources provided by a content provider
into collections or databases that reflect specific content provider
offerings, for example packages of e-journals, e-books, or other
materials. Knowledge bases can be customized by individual institutions
to reflect their local collections.
Knowledge bases are used to provide data for OpenURL link resolvers and
to populate library discovery systems with an institution’s e-resource
holdings data. Many libraries also use knowledge base data in library
catalogues, for e-journal title lists, in electronic resource management
systems (ERMs), and in other tools.
Knowledge base suppliers ingest the data into their KBs, and libraries
then select the packages and titles that they have access to.
Libraries can also use KBART to create files for custom local and
consortial packages and load them into their local knowledge bases. Some
librarians also find KBART title list files useful for understanding a
content provider’s offerings or determining the contents of a standard
package they have purchased.
are being created for
The workflow and toolchain I created for that will be laid out, as
far as possible, at a later stage, bringing together data from multiple
sources, utilizing SQL, bash and RStudio, loading the data to all
relevant data recipients, i.e. KBs and end customers etc. via FTP and
email, and host the data on a customized metadata portal for public
access and self-service1.
This development was necessary after switching from a couple of fixed
front list eBook packages a year to more and more complex and dynamic
products, like PDA/ EBA and publisher partners’ packages.
While this question seems a little odd, about how to open a simple
.TXT file, in reality it appears that the common librarian, or sales or
marketing person, is actually not necessarily that used to working with
.TXTs, that I got so many questions on how to read or use such a file in
Excel, that I even might make an instructional video about that, just
for reference.
Yet admittedly, there might be the one or other obstacle that we could
address here already, on …
after downloading the .TXT file
BUT “dragging&dropping” into as well as “right-click, open-with” Excel poses a special, UTF-8 related problem, as Excel is not smart enough to recognize the encoding this way, and naturally, we are dealing with lots of German, French and Greek characters in scientific literature, which causes special characters and Umlauts to get mangled in Excel.
A solution for that would be to convert or encode the KBART file to UTF-8 WITH BOM first, for example in notepad++↗
And while according to the Unicode standard the use of a “Byte Order
Mark” (BOM) is neither required nor recommended for UTF-82, it
can be crucial for UTF-8 recognition in Excel, and may make all the
difference between Gibberish and German.
Thus, it’s “allowed” in contexts where a particular protocol
(e.g. Microsoft conventions for .txt files) may require use of the BOM
on certain Unicode data streams, such as KBART/.TXT files. When you need
to conform to such a protocol, use a BOM3.
LibreOffice↗ on the other hand just works, yet won’t open right away, but will ask first.
For me the easiest solution is to open in notepad++ first, the copy&paste all into Excel, making sure that only TAB is used as delimiter, et voilà!
For pick&choose collections, where no off-the-shelf package and
thus no dedicated KBART file is available, we’ll filter the complete
KBART file based on an ISBN list, with each ISBN on its own line and EOL
in UNIX format, i.e. \n, e.g. ‘filter_file.txt’.
Also, we will keep one of the column names from the header in the first
line, to grep the header of the KBART as well,
e.g. ‘ONLINE_IDENTIFIER’
# our 'filter_file.txt' looks as follows:
$ cat filter_file.txt
ONLINE_IDENTIFIER
ISBN1
ISBN2
ISBN3
...
..
.
# assuming the complete KBART is in the same folder as the filter_file, we'll use 'LC_ALL=C fgrep' for faster execution:
$ LC_ALL=C fgrep -i -f filter_file.txt degruyter_global_ebooks_* > DG_KBART_$(date +%F).txtFor attribution, please cite this work as
Schmalfuss (2015, Feb. 3). OS DataMercs: Working with KBART files. Retrieved from https://www.datamercs.net/posts/2015-02-02-working-with-kbart-files/
BibTeX citation
@misc{schmalfuss2015working,
author = {Schmalfuss, Olaf},
title = {OS DataMercs: Working with KBART files},
url = {https://www.datamercs.net/posts/2015-02-02-working-with-kbart-files/},
year = {2015}
}