Purpose

The PCC Sinopia Cataloging Affinity Group provides a welcoming, collaborative, and supportive space to learn and discuss cataloging in Sinopia using PCC Sinopia Templates, PCC cataloging standards, and PCC authoritative vocabularies. The group aims to:

• Expand the use of Sinopia in the PCC community, contributing to the development of a body of original cataloging in a linked data context
• Influence the future development of Sinopia by coordinating feedback from PCC users to the Sinopia development team, and by serving as a community of users for usability interviews and testing
• Provide input on the creation and evolution of PCC Sinopia Templates: see the best practices question submission form and the best practices tracking sheet
  
• Identify training needs of new PCC Sinopia Users
• Explore how to cooperate effectively in a linked data cataloging environment

General Information

Co-Facilitators: Joanna Fuchs (jmfuchs@brandeis.edu),  Margarita Perez Martinez (mperezm@law.miami.edu), Kalli Mathios (kmathios@stanford.edu)

• Best practices in Sinopia
  • Submission form for questions and clarifications on Sinopia best practices
  • Tracking sheet for questions on Sinopia best practices
• Dedicated, open Google group for announcements and discussion
• #sinopia Slack channel in the LD4 slack community
• Running notes document for collaborative note-taking during meetings
• Shared Google Drive folder (contains slides, meeting notes, and other relevant resources)
• Meetings are recorded and links to the recordings can be found in the meeting notes and in the Google Drive folder

Calls

Calls feature presentations on specific topics in Sinopia.  For recordings, see the Past calls section below.  For notes, consult the Running notes document.

• November + December recess: see you in January!

Past calls

• Thurs. 23 October 2025. 10am PT / 1pm ET. Cataloging ETDs in Sinopia with TJ Kao. RECORDING | NOTES
• Thurs. 25 September 2025. 10am PT / 1pm ET. WORKING HOUR.
• Thurs. 21 August 2025. 10am PT / 1pm ET. OpenWEMI with Karen Coyle. RECORDING (Passcode: qW?L.6d4) | SLIDES
• Mon. 28 July 2025. 8:45am PT / 11:45am ET. Back to the Future: A Look at Sinopia's Conception and Evolution with co-convener Joanna Fuchs. RECORDING SLIDES
• Fri. 23 May 2025. 10am PT / 1pm ET. User forum. 
• Thurs. 1 May 2025. 10am PT / 1pm ET. Tricky and Multipart Monographs. RECORDING (Passocde: 5W*7NuQ$) SLIDES
• Thurs. 27 March 2025. 10am PT / 1pm ET. WORKING HOUR.
• Thurs. 20 Feb. 2025. 10am PT / 1pm ET. Demo: Copying and sharing descriptions in Sinopia. RECORDING (passcode: F3w^!@GZ) SLIDES
• Thurs. 23 Jan. 2025. 10am PT / 1pm ET. WORKING HOUR. 
• Thurs. 21 November 2024, 11am PT / 2pm ET. Demo: creating descriptions in Sinopia, a beginner's workshop. RECORDING (passocde: qO!^?+6U) SLIDES
• Fri. 11 October 2024, 11am PT / 2pm ET. LD4 2024: From Pilot to Production. RECORDING
• Thurs. 26 September 2024, 10am PT / 1pm ET. WORKING HOUR.
• The PCC Sinopia Affinity Group was on summer break during August 2024. 
• Thur. 25 July 2024. Working Hour. An open session to work on editing resources descriptions in Sinopia. All levels of experience are welcome! Come with a resource to catalog and your questions.
• Thur. 20 June 2024. Demo: creating templates in Sinopia. Kalli Mathios (Stanford Libraries) will demonstrate how to create basic templates in Sinopia. RECORDING SLIDES
• Thur. 23 May 2024.  BIBFRAME to WorldCat. TJ Kao (UC Davis Library) will discuss a pilot to send BIBFRAME descriptions to WorldCat. RECORDING SLIDES
• Thur. 25 April 2024. Sinopia-to-Alma demo. Margarita Pérez (U Miami Law Library) will demonstrate how to send descriptions created in Sinopia to the Alma ILS. RECORDING SLIDES
• Thur. 21 March 2024. Working hour. An open session to work on editing resources descriptions in Sinopia.
• Thurs. 22 Feb. 2024. WorldCat Entities and OCLC Meridian in practice. In this presentation Jeff Mixter and Anne Washington will provide a walkthrough of WorldCat Entities (an aggregation of authoritative linked data entities) and OCLC Meridian (an entity management application). They will demonstrate how WorldCat Entities data and the Meridian application integrate into today’s cataloging and metadata workflows, and enable library workers to add valuable linked data elements to existing records and workflows.  Jeff Mixter, Senior Product Manager, and Anne Washington, Product Analyst, work together on OCLC's Metadata and Digital Services team. Their work focuses on linked data applications and services. RECORDING SLIDES
• Thurs. 25 Jan. 2023. Working Hour. An open session to work on editing resources descriptions in Sinopia.  All levels of experience are welcome! Come with a resource to catalog and your questions.  We will discuss recent updates to Sinopia and the Questioning Authority lookup service from the December 2023 work cycle.
• Thurs. 16 Nov. 2023 WORKING HOUR. An open session to work on editing resources descriptions in Sinopia.  All levels of experience are welcome!
• Thur. 28 Sept. 2023 WORKING HOUR. An open session to work on editing resources descriptions in Sinopia.  All levels of experience are welcome! Come with a resource to catalog and your questions.
• Thurs. 24 August 2023. Usability in Sinopia with Astrid Usong (Stanford): an open discussion. RECORDING
• Friday 28 July. Working hour. RECORDING SLIDES  A short discussion covering the results of a survey we recently sent out regarding our programming and the working hours, talk about ways that our community can communicate better, and then move into an open editing session.
• Thurs. 25 May 2023. LRM-based templates in Sinopia at the University of Washington with Zhuo Pan and Benjamin Riesenberg. RECORDING SLIDES
• Thur. 23 Mar. 2023 Sinopia and the PCC test of the Official RDA Toolkit, with Adam Baron (Univ. of California, Berkeley ; PCC Standing Committee on Training) and Timothy Ryan Mendenhall (Columbia University ; PCC Sinopia Cataloging Affinity Group). RECORDING SLIDES (Baron) SLIDES (Mendenhall)
• 26 January 2023. Share-VDE and Sinopia with Tiziana Possemato and Anna Lionetti  (Casalini Libri) and Paloma Graciani Picardo (University of Texas at Austin) and Iman Dagher (UCLA) from the Share-VDE (SVDE) PCC Data Pool Evaluation Task Group RECORDING SLIDES (Casalini) SLIDES (Dagher, Graciani Picardo, PCC)
• 17 November 2022. Sinopia-ALMA connection with Jim Hahn (University of Pennsylvania) RECORDING SLIDES
• 27 October 2022: Discussion on maintaining our document of questions relating to best practices in Sinopia. RECORDING
• 22 September 2022: Questioning Authority (Sinopia's lookup service) with Steven Folsom.  RECORDING SLIDES
• 14 July 2022: Demostration at the 2022 LD4 Conference on Linked Data. RECORDING SLIDES
• 16 June 2022 LD4 Rare Materials Affinity Group and Sinopia. RECORDING SLIDES
• 5 May 2022: Tutorial and working hour during PCC Operations Committee (OpCo). RECORDING
• 28 April 2022.  Conversion of data to/from Sinopia with Justin Littman and Jeremy Nelson. RECORDING
• 24 March 2022. Templates and the PCC Metadata Application Profile Working Group, with T.J. Kao and Nancy Lorimer RECORDING SLIDES
• 24 February 2022. Linked Data discovery: developing a linked data front-end with Huda Khan (Cornell) and Astrid Usong (Stanford). RECORDING
• 27 January 2022. Sinopia usability with Astrid Usong. RECORDING
• 16 December 2021. Non-Latin scripts in Sinopia with Larisa Walsh (University of Chicago) and Patricia Thurston (Yale University) RECORDING SLIDES
• 18 November 2021. Sinopia, LD4, and the PCC. Michelle Futornick (Sinopia Product Owner, Stanford University) and  Melanie Wacker (PCC Chair, Columbia University). Recording. Slides (Futornick)
• 28 October 2021: Nancy Lorimer (Stanford) on the Intersection of Sinopia, BIBFRAME, and RDA/LRM: points of convergence and divergence. Recording.  Slides
• 23 September 2021.  Beth Picknally Camden: Overview of the PCC Sinopia training modules, and how new Sinopia users can use them to get started with Sinopia. Recording
• Thurs. 26 August 2021 Walkthrough of the PCC Serials templates in Sinopia. Recording
• 19 July 2021: LD4 2021 Conference Session Sinopia in the PCC Context: Intro and Study Group : introduction to PCC profiles in Sinopia and a walkthrough of the PCC Monographs template in Sinopia. Recording

Resources

• Running notes document for the group's calls
• Demonstration videos
  • Basic print monograph: work and instance (Feb. 2022, Sinopia 3.16.9)
  • Basic monograph: work, print instance, digital instance (Feb. 2022, Sinopia 3.16.9)
• Sinopia help page: Report bugs and other issues with the Sinopia application here
• PCC's Sinopia Training Modules
• Sinopia Linked Data Editor – request a free account here.  Sinopia is browser-based and requires no installation. NOTE: for the Affinity Group, we are using the Stage (test) instance of Sinopia, not the production instance.
• LD4 Slack (separate from this PCC group, but a valuable resource on Sinopia).  Useful channels within this Slack group include:
  • LD4 Sinopia Slack channel
  • LD4 Profile Slack channel
• Library of Congress BIBFRAME resource page