Genre/Form Treatment for Globes

In 2009 the Library of Congress’ Policy and Standards Division (PSD) and LC’s Geography and Maps Division (G&M) began a project to develop genre/form terms for cartographic materials. In 2010 approximately 60 terms were approved for use and implemented. However, an important issue has not yet been resolved: What is the appropriate genre/form treatment for globes?

PSD and G&M have collaborated on a discussion paper that proposes an answer to this question. Proposed Treatment of Globes in the LCGFT Environment is available on LC's web site.

Comments on the problem and suggested solution are requested.

MARBI Agenda and Papers

The MARBI ALA Annual Conference 2012 agenda is now available

The remaining MARBI papers are:

Discussion Paper 2012-DP02: Authority Records for Medium of Performance Vocabulary for Music in the MARC 21 Authority Format

Discussion Paper 2012-DP03: Chronological Aspects in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats

Discussion Paper 2012-DP04: Recording Audience Characteristics of Works and Expressions in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats

Proposal for Revision of the Belarusian Romanization Table

News from LC.

The Policy and Standards Division of the Library of Congress has received a revision proposal for the Belarusian ALA-LC romanization table from the ACRL Slavic and East European Section Committee on Automated Bibliographic Control. The proposal aims to bring the Belarusian ALA-LC romanization table in accordance with the modern standard Belarusian language, and also to support an expansion of the table by the inclusion of letters that are considered obsolete but which nonetheless occur in older Belarusian publications.

The revision proposal http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman_belarusian_proposal_120517.pdf [PDF, 117 KB] highlights all additions and changes. A separate document http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman_belarusian_proposal_explanation.pdf [PDF, 280 KB] enumerates changes in the revision proposal.

Related articles

• Proposal for Revision of Bulgarian and Russian Romanization Tables (catalogablog.blogspot.com)

ONIX to MARC Crosswalk

A new report from OCLC, A Crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for Books to MARC 21

This report describes the crosswalk developed at OCLC for mapping the bibliographic elements defined in Version 3.0 of ONIX for Books to MARC 21 with AACR2 encoding. It is an update to the previous report, Mapping ONIX to MARC, which was published in 2010 and focused on ONIX 2.1.

Written by Senior Research Scientist Carol Jean Godby, A Crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for Books to MARC 21 describes the layout of the crosswalk and a strategy for deriving ONIX 3.0 syntax from ONIX 2.1, including a note about how the translation logic is implemented at OCLC. It also builds a complex MARC record from ONIX 3.0 input, focusing on relationships that constitute an important source of shared value in the library and publisher communities, are newly introduced or extensively revised in ONIX 3.0, or illustrate unresolved conceptual problems with bibliographic description. In the process of creating this record, it becomes apparent that some of the concepts introduced in ONIX 3.0 are not easily expressed in a MARC record with AACR2 semantics. The report concludes by speculating about how the MARC output might be improved if the AACR2 semantics is replaced by RDA.

For a quick overview, watch the YouTube video of Carol Jean Godby summarizing the report. For more information about the work related to the report, see the Metadata Schema Transformation Services activity page on the OCLC Research website (links below).

More information

Read the report, A Crosswalk from ONIX Version 3.0 for Books to MARC 21
http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2012/2012-04r.htm

MARBI Papers Available for Review

Proposal 2012-02: Identifying Titles Related to the Entity Represented by the Authority Record in the MARC 21 Authority Format

Proposal 2012-03: Data Provenance in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

Proposal 2012-04: New data elements in the MARC 21 Authority Format for Other Designation Associated with the Person and Title of the Person

Proposal 2012-05: Making the 250 Field Repeatable in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

Proposal 2012-06: Defining Subfield $c (Qualifying information) in Field 028 (Publisher Number) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

Proposal 2012-07: Defining New Code for Vocal Score in Field 008/20 (Format of music) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

Discussion Paper 2012-05: Recording Creator/Contributor Group Categorizations of Works, Expressions, and Persons in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats

Open Annotation Core Data Model

The W3C has published the Open Annotation Core Data Model.

Annotating, the act of creating associations between distinct pieces of information, is a pervasive activity online in many guises but lacks a structured approach. Web citizens make comments about online resources using either tools built in to the hosting web site, external web services, or the functionality of an annotation client. Comments about photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, people's posts on Facebook, or mentions of resources on Twitter could all be considered as annotations associated with the resource being discussed. In addition, there a plethora of closed and proprietary web-based "sticky note" systems, and stand-alone multimedia annotation systems. The primary complaint about all of these systems is that the user created annotations cannot be shared or reused, due to a deliberate "lock-in" strategy within the environments where they were created, or at the very least the lack of a common approach to expressing the annotations.

The Open Annotation data model provides an extensible, interoperable framework for expressing annotations such that they can easily be shared between platforms, with sufficient richness of expression to satisfy complex requirements while remaining simple enough to also allow for the most common use cases, such as attaching a piece of text to a single web resource.

Seen on Digital Koans.

MADS 2.0 User Guidelines

News from LC.

The MADS 2.0 User Guidelines http://www.loc.gov/standards/mads/userguide/index.html are now available on the Library of Congress' MADS Web site: http://www.loc.gov/mads, along with the XML schema itself, an Outline of Elements and Attributes, and a mapping and XSLT from the MARC 21 Authority Format to MADS 2.0.

Crowdsourcing Cataloging at the Bodleian Library

Crowdsourcing cataloging at the Bodleian Library.

What's the Score at the Bodleian? is a project which aims to enlist the wider community's help in describing a selection of digitised scores from the Bodleian Library's extensive music collections, thereby facilitating access to valuable and interesting material which has not been catalogued and is therefore difficult to find. The approach is two-fold in that it combines a process of rapid digitization of the scores and the creation of descriptive metadata through crowd-sourcing, and it is hoped that the outcomes of the project can be used to inform an efficient yet cost-effective approach to creating access to other music-related material in the Bodleian in the future. It is hoped that there will also be scope in the final delivery of images and crowd-sourced data for additional enhancements such as the hosting of audio performances relating to the music scores and provision of external links to video performances.

My feeling is for some material this makes sense. For items that may take years or decades to fully catalog this may be a good interim solution. Or for items of low importance that may never get described some metadata is better than none. I'm reminded of the 4 levels of access and description once proposed. Most stuff, little importance, indexed by search engines. More important stuff, some metadata like PDF and Word description fields. Materials of still more importance, get Qualified Dublin Core so something on that level. Most important get full treatment by a trained professional. FGDC, MARC/RDA/ISBD, MODS, whatever standard fits. Crowdsourcing could move materials at the search index level up a level or two. It would improve access without using lots of resources.

Related articles

• An Experiment in Music and Crowd-Sourcing (googleresearch.blogspot.com)