Postings to Catalogablog

Later today I'm off to Dallas to meet with the Cataloging Focus Group. So there will be no postings again until Monday. These meetings are a real treat. I'm the only cataloger here at the Lunar and Planetary Institute. There is no one else about to talk shop with. Autocat, OLAC and this blog lessen the feeling of isolation but nothing can replace getting together, in person, with colleagues and talking cataloging. There are times I envy those who work at university and large public libraries. You can chat over lunch about issues and concerns of the profession. I'll be back Monday.

D-Lib Magazine

The latest issue of the always interesting D-Lib Magazine is now available.

The articles include:

A Metadata Registry for the Semantic Web
Rachel Heery, UKOLN, and Harry Wagner, OCLC / Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

Meta-Design of a Community Digital Library
Michael Wright and Mary Marlino, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research; and Tamara Sumner, University of Colorado at Boulder

Levels of Service for Digital Repositories
William G. LeFurgy, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights: A Digital Library Context
Robert Sullivan, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Keywords

The Extractor is "software for automatically summarizing text, developed by the Interactive Information Group. Extractor takes a text file as input and generates a list of key words and a list of key sentences as output." What you get is a list of keywords. I tried it on Catalogablog. It gave fair results. It did list "comments" and "links" as important. Those words appear at the end of each item so they appear to have some importance. This could be useful if someone had to apply keywords to lots of Web pages or e-mails. It does show that it is not time for catalogers to be replaced if quality is desired.

Genre Headings

On Despising Genres by Ursula K. LeGuin offers some food for thought concerning the use of genre headings and sections in libraries and bookstores. Do we separate the "good" from the "popular" fiction? Do we use it as a finding tool, as we should or as a rating system. Is the Ox Bow Incident in literature but the others in Westerns? Do we add a 655 to the latter but not the former? LeGuin is one of my favorite authors, so it was a pleasure to find this. Thanks to Rory at Library Juice for bring this to my attention.

Text Encoding Initiative

The TEI Consortium has released The XML Version of the TEI Guidelines This is from the introduction:

The primary goal of this revision has been to make available a new and corrected version of the TEI Guidelines which:

is expressed in XML and conforms to a TEI-conformant XML DTD;
generates a set of DTD fragments that can be combined together to form either SGML or XML document type definitions;
corrects blatant errors, typographical mishaps, and other egregious editorial oversights;
can be processed and maintained using readily available XML tools instead of the special-purpose ad hoc software originally used for TEI P3.

A second major design goal of this revision has been to ensure that the DTD fragments generated would not break existing documents: in other words, that any document conforming to the original TEI P3 SGML DTD would also conform to the new XML version of it. Although full backwards compatibility cannot be guaranteed, we believe our implementation is consistent with that goal.

RSS

I've created an RSS feed for this blog at: http://www.voidstar.com/rssify.php?url=http://www.catalogablog.blogspot.com/

Metadata

Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia by Cory Doctorow is worth a read and consideration. Grand visions of the Symantec Web where everything is easily found and accessed are shown to be a pipe dream. There are a few problems with implementing this scheme -- People Lie, People are Lazy, People are Stupid -- are the first few. A fun read as well as worth considering.

Metadata

Some interesting interfaces to controlled vocabulary schemes including LCSH which might help our users navigate our catalogs are being developed at the Metadata Research Program, School of Information Management and Systems, University of California Berkeley. I spotted this on the Library Techlog by Matthew Eberle

LC Classification

This was recently received from LC. "The Classification Web order form and end-user license agreement are now posted.

To expedite your order, please read all of the explanatory information carefully and fill out the order form as completely as possible. If the information that accompanies the order form as well as the product information is not sufficient to answer your questions, email your inquiries to cdsinfo@loc.gov.

We appreciate your ongoing interest in Class Web and look forward to having it ready for access on June 1, 2002.

Cheryl C. Cook
Cataloging Distribution Service"

MARC21

The following proposal is available for review by the MARC 21 community. They will be discussed in a meeting of the MARC Advisory Committee on June 15-16, 2002 in Atlanta. A draft agenda for that meeting is available.

Proposal no. 2002-11: Repertoire Expansion in the Universal Character Set for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.

Dewey Classification

Keeping up with the changes in Dewey Classification is easy because of a couple of services they provide.

The Library of Congress Subject Headings/DDC page is a "list of LC subject headings is selected from recent Weekly Lists accompanied by candidate DDC numbers from Edition 21. The purpose of the list is to provide classifier assistance for topics of recent interest not mentioned explicitly in Edition 21. The DDC numbers listed are not exhaustive, and the schedules and tables should be consulted before applying a number from this list."

The New and Changed Entries page provides PDF and Word versions of those entries. I have set a TrackEngine on the LCSH/DDC page to get the page e-mailed to me whenever it changes.

I've added the ability to make comments to the postings. Let me know if it is not working for you.

MARC21

The following proposals and discussion paper are available for review by the MARC 21 community. They will be discussed in a meeting of the MARC Advisory Committee on June 15-16, 2002 in Atlanta. A draft agenda for that meeting is available.

The following papers are now available:

Discussion Paper No. 2002-6R: Changes in Field 008 in the MARC 21 Holdings Format

Proposal No. 2002-10: Defining URI Subfields in Field 506 (Restrictions on Access Note) and Field 540 (Terms Governing Use and Reproduction Note) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

Proposal No. 2001-10R: Definition of Additional Codes in Field 007/10 (Type of Material) for Sound Recordings in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Holdings Formats

Other papers will be posted next week.

Profession

What is the future of the profession of cataloging? This lunch I read the article "Knowledge Access Management at Lied Library: Cataloging and Web Site Reengineering" by Brad Eden and Kenneth J. Bierman Library Hi Tech Vol. 20. no. 1. (2002) pp. 90-103. It concludes with visions for the cataloging department. Scanning and digitizing, shifting the focus to e-resources, an e-text center, finding grants, continuing education and collaboration with other technology departments on and off campus. I'm not sure all of these belong in the Knowledge Access Management department, which their cataloging department has morphed into. Surely, there is a place for metadata or cataloging in scanning and e-texts but I'm not sure we should be creating the content or even keying the data.

Resource Description Framework

The RDF Primer is an introduction to this possibly important standard.

"The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a general-purpose language for representing information in the World Wide Web. It is particularly intended for representing metadata about Web resources, such as the title, author, and modification date of a Web page, the copyright and syndication information about a Web document, the availability schedule for some shared resource, or the description of a Web user's preferences for information delivery. RDF provides a common framework for expressing this information in such a way that it can be exchanged between applications without loss of meaning. Since it is a common framework, application designers can leverage the availability of common RDF parsers and processing tools. Exchanging information between different applications means that the information may be made available to applications other than those for which it was originally created. This Primer is designed to provide the reader the basic fundamentals required to effectively use RDF in their particular applications."--abstract.

Standard Address Number (SAN)

Here is a standard, ANSI/NISO Z39.43 - 1993(R2001) Standard Address Number (SAN) for the Publishing Industry which has been around quite some time. Is anyone using it? Does it make life easier for anyone? Is number this on your letterhead? Just curious.

Summaries or Abstracts

I notice the 10th Biennial OLAC Conference is having a session on creating annotations. That is something I feel is long overdue. There has been little guidance on just how to construct a good abstract for field 520. There is a NISO standard ANSI/NISO Z39.14 - 1997 Guidelines for Abstracts but that is not a good fit. There is a very good article by Sheila S. Intner "Writing Summary Notes for Films and Videos" Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Vol. 9(2) 1988. That is now 15 years old. It is about time we made the effort to learn how to construct more useful summary notes. Thanks to the OLAC folks for having this session.

Another Controlled Vocabulary

The NASA Thesaurus is available in PDF format online. This is a huge document, over 1200 pages, so do not try this with a dial up connection. The whole print document is available including the introductory text.

Recently on AUTOCAT someone asked the question "what to read in the area of subject headings and classification?" I do believe that the introduction of several thesaurus and subject heading lists would be a valuable part of that reading list. They provide concrete examples of how and why the list was constructed. The AAT and DDC have perhaps the best introductions but the others give the reader some contrast and renforcement of principles.

Schedule G

The fourth edition (1976) of Class G (Geography. Maps. Anthropology. Recreation) included a section entitled Special Instructions and Tables of Subdivisions for Atlases and Maps, which included detailed information on how to construct call numbers and apply the various tables of subdivisions that are used with subclass G when classifying cartographic materials. These instructions were not included in the 2001 edition of Class G, but have now been updated and are available.

The pages are formatted to be trimmed down and tipped into the schedule book.

Genre Terms

I mentioned the classification scheme for recorded sound, ANSCR. The Library of Congress has a short list of genre terms to use with sound recordings of radio programs, the Radio Form/Genre Terms Guide. None have to do with music. The list is fairly short. If used it would seem necessary to use it in conjunction with another source for terminology.

Controlled Vocabulary

There are plenty of subject, name, genre and form controlled vocabulary lists available. Most commonly used in libraries are the name and subject lists from the Library of Congress. Another source is the Getty lists. Besides being useful in themselves, they are an excellent source of terms for the SACO and NACO programs.

The Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) is a structured vocabulary of around 125,000 terms, scope notes, and other information for describing fine art, architecture, decorative arts, archival materials, and material culture.

The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) is a structured vocabulary of around 1,000,000 geographic names, including vernacular and historical names, coordinates, and place types, and focusing on places important for the study of art and architecture.

The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) is a structured vocabulary containing around 220,000 names and biographical information about artists and architects, including a wealth of variant names, pseudonyms, and language variants.