Metadata

First Monday has the article "A Metadata Approach to Preservation of Digital Resources: The University of North Texas Libraries' Experience" by Daniel Gelaw Alemneh, Samantha Kelly Hastings, and Cathy Nelson Hartman.

This paper discusses the issues related to digital resources preservation and demonstrates the role of preservation metadata in facilitating the preservation activities in general. In particular, it describes the efforts being made by the UNT libraries to ensure the long-term access and preservation of various digital information resources.

RSS for Acquisitions

A new and rather interesting RSS application is the notification service of Amazon. Using a news aggregator, the link http://www.yaywastaken.com/amazon/amazon-rss.asp?keywords=???? will deliver a list of books. Just replace ???? with the keyword of interest. This could be useful in acquisitions on keeping up on a current topic. For more details see Amazon RSS - books delivered to your news aggregator! A poor title IMHO, it does not deliver books, only information about books.

"Oh, and in the interests of full disclosure, note that I have hooked my Amazon affiliate code up to the links returned by the feed. " Is at the end of the the article. I've nothing against someone picking up a few bucks for being clever and talented, just be aware.

Maybe a library or non-profit could duplicate the feed and either not collect or have it go to a library.

SACO

The Library of Congress’ Cooperative Cataloging Team is pleased to announce that two subject proposal web forms are now available on the SACO Home Page

The web form for new subject heading proposals had been in an experimental phase since 1998 and available only to BIBCO and select contributors to the SACO Program. Since the form’s inception over 3,500 proposals have been processed successfully and internal studies indicate that the majority of these proposals were approved and available to the library community via the OCLC and RLG authority files within 4-6 weeks of submission. The form for proposing changes to existing LCSH headings is newly developed and will continued to undergo development and improvements as contributions and comments are received.

In an effort to expedite the growing number of new and changed proposals the web proposal form is now the mainstream mechanism for processing subject proposals contributed to the SACO Program. Regretfully, there is no “save file” mechanism to facilitate internal review practices and prevent re-keying. Review of all proposals before submitting to the SACO Program is highly encouraged. Coop will continue to accept e-mail proposals; however, resources in Coop can no longer support an expeditious processing of proposals submitted via that mechanism.

To facilitate the approval of a proposed heading, please consult the appropriate LC Subject Cataloging Manual (SCM) instruction sheets and/or the proposal guidelines and FAQs on the SACO home page. Prospective SACO contributors are encouraged to attend the SACO workshops presented in conjunction with ALA before submitting new or changed subject proposals. Proposals that fail to follow the SCM guidelines to a reasonable degree will be deleted without further processing.

To facilitate the processing of the web form proposal read and follow the editorial instructions provided on the form before clicking the submit button. The web form programing is simple and will work best provided that ASCII characters are not used in any field, diacritics are copied and pasted from the list of diacritics linked to the form, and that initial subfields are left off in all fields.

Proposals submitted via the web form will be available for searching through LC web authorities within two working days of receipt.

Comments, questions, suggestions for improvements to the forms, etc. may be sent directly to acri@loc.gov

****************
Ana Lupe Cristán
Acting Team Leader/BIBCO Coordinator
Cooperative Cataloging Team
Library of Congress, LM 537
Washington, DC 20540-4382
tel: 202.707.7921
fax: 202.252.2082

LC Classification

Dear Colleagues,
The Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS) wishes to announce that, with the highly successful introduction of Classification Web, Classification Plus, our CD-ROM product, will be discontinued with 2002, Issue 4.

Effective immediately no new full-year subscriptions to Classification Plus or the combination product Classification Plus /Cataloger's Desktop will be taken.

Renewing subscribers must purchase Cataloger's Desktop and Classification Web separately. For details on ordering these products visit the following Web sites:

• Classification Web
• Cataloger's Desktop

Customers who are currently completing subscriptions to Class Plus or the Desktop/Class Plus combination product may switch to Classification Web immediately and apply the remaining portion of their Class Plus subscription to Class Web or switch to Classification Web with the beginning of their next subscription year.

The final two issues of Classification Plus will be available on a prorated basis. For further information check the CDS Web site

Library of Congress, Cataloging Distribution Service,
Customer Services Section
101 Independence Avenue, S.E. Washington, D.C. 20541-4912
E-mail: cdsinfo@loc.gov CDS Web site

Cataloging Resources

Anyone who has read AUTOCAT for even a week knows the name McRee (Mac) Elrod. (And if you are not reading AUTOCAT what are you doing here?) I have benefited many times from his clear, considered comments on many cataloging issues. What I never knew was that his Web site, SLC, contains some resources useful to the catalogers. Some of the information is specific to his company and their approach but many of the resources are more general. For example, his "cheat sheets" include:

• Brief Government Documents
• Common MARC Fields
• Cuttering and Years
• Electronic Resource Cataloguing
• Form Subdivisions Coded $v
• Government Documents
• MARC Authority Records
• MARC Punctuation
• MARC Tag Mapping for OPACs
• MARC Title Fields
• Monograph Cataloguing
• Reclassification: DDC to LCC
• Serial Cataloguing
• Selected Cataloguing Tool Acronyms, etc.
• Sound Recording Cataloguing
• Video Cataloguing

Indexing

Improving Usability with a Website Index by Fred Leise.

Indexes are important information-finding tools that can enhance website usability. They offer easy scanning for finding known items, they provide entry points to content using the users’ own vocabulary and they provide access to concepts discussed, but not named, in the text. Perhaps most importantly, site indexes provide direct access to granular chunks of information without the need for traversing multiple links in a hierarchy.

Thanks to Noteworthy for this item.

Comments on this 'Blog

The ability to add comments to the posts is available but has never been used. Is this something that I should eliminate? Or do you feel the ability to comment is useful, even if never used?

NewBreed Librarian

You'll be missed. Thanks for all the work done so well. There is quite a bit in this last issue for cataloging folks.

The last 18 months have been chock-full of sweat and joy as we've worked indefatigably to create a resource we hoped would inspire and resonate with progressive librarians of all ages and at all libraries. Pilgrims that we are, we poured our hearts into this emprise, growing and learning throughout the entire process. But now, even though there's plenty of love left, there's simply not enough time to keep NewBreed Librarian afloat. So, borrowing from Tom, goodnight to the street sweepers, the night watchman flame keepers, and goodnight to NewBreed, too.

But we're not leaving you empty-handed - we've got one more issue of NewBreed Librarian to share with you:

• FEATURE: Corey Harper argues that cataloging is a public service
• INTERVIEW: Eric Miller on the Semantic Web
• PEOPLE: Fiona Bradley, Aussie music librarian
• TECHTALK: What's new and cool in library technology
• ASK SUSU: How do you propose a new subject heading?

MARC Tools

I've added links to MARC tools in the sidebar. If you know of any I've missed, please let me know.

OPACs & the Web

The Catalog vs. The Homepage Best Practices in Connecting to Online Resources by Georgia Briscoe, Karen Selden, and Cheryl Nyberg. Includes a Powerpoint presentation from American Association of Law Libraries 95th Annual Meeting, Selected Web Sites of Interest and bibliography.

NISO

NISO Z39.7-2002 Draft Standard for Trial Use Information Services and Use: Metrics & statistics for libraries and information providers--Data Dictionary

This standard identifies categories for basic library statistical data at the national level, and provides associated definitions of terms. In doing so it deals with the following areas: reporting unit and target population, human resources, collection resources, infrastructure, finances, and services. The standard is not intended to be comprehensive in scope. Instead, it presents a framework for comparable library data by describing common elements pertaining to libraries of various types in the US. It does not address detailed statistics for specific areas where it seems more appropriate for experts in those areas to make recommendations (e.g., music, government documents, maps). The standard also integrates metrics for electronic network use (e-metrics) into each section as appropriate.

XLM & Dublin Core

A new version of the "Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML" document is available. The principal change in this version is to Recommendation 7 in line with the conventions adopted in the proposed XML schemas for qualified DC.

Comments on this proposal can be posted on the DC-Architecture list until 16 August 2002

XLM & Dublin Core

Proposed XML Schema for Qualified Dublin Core is now available for Comment.

A small group has been working together to formulate a proposed XML schema for qualified Dublin Core. This work builds on a number of efforts including the joint work by the OAI and DCMI that led to the release of an XML schema for unqualified Dublin Core and the metadata work within the Harmony Project.

The proposal is available.

Comments on this proposal can be posted on the DC-Architecture list until 16 August 2002.

Open Source ILS

This from the Koha mail list. More details at the Koha site

Koha 1.2.2 has been released. Special thanks (again) to Steve Tonnesen, who drove this release to completion. 1.2.2 is a significant bug squashing release.

Many people have combined in testing this release, and we expect it to be the best Koha yet!

We encourage you to get this new release and give it a spin. We think you'll like what you see. We plan on continuing to improve Koha, and would love to have you come along on this exciting journey.

As always, downloads and more information are available from Sourceforge.

Weeding

On Library Stuff, there is an article about the Toledo Public School libraries outdated collection "Imagine the world before the Vietnam War, before men on the moon, back when cloning only appeared in fiction. Imagine a world unaffected by the changes of the last few decades." This is inexcusable, were these libraries run by professionals?

The Sunlink Weed of the Month Club is an excellent resource to help keep the collection current.

OAI

GNU Eprints (EP) 2.1, free software which creates web-based archives containing documents and metadata, was released in early July. EP 2.1 supports OAI 2.0 and still supports OAI 1.1 as well. EP 2.1's new subscription service allows registered users to store one or more searchers. Eprints' name change to GNU Eprints reflects its acceptance into the GNU project. Eprints allows organizations to create web-based archives (e-print services) for their research articles, lecture notes and other documents and associated metadata.

From SPARC e-news June-July 2002.

Advanced Search Facility

The Advanced Search Facility is an open source project worth notice. It supports MARC, GILS, XML, FGDC, Dublin Core, PICS and other standards. It also provides support for Z39.50.

The Advanced Search Facility provides tools for gathering and organizing information within and among information communities. If you want to:

• Collect information and publish on the Internet
  -- ASF provides a search facility for the collection
• Point to information elsewhere on the Internet
  -- ASF provides a "gatherer" to index other Web information resources and files
• Point to information not on the Internet or more complex than text documents
  -- ASF provides for building locator records for all manner of information resources
• Bridge among multiple information communities
  -- ASF provides for referral of searches within and between information communities

Publishing

Washington, DC - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today released a major white paper, "The Case for Institutional Repositories: A SPARC Position Paper," which examines the strategic roles institutional repositories serve for colleges and universities. The paper asserts that institutional repositories are a natural extension of an academic institution's role as a generator of primary research, and envisions such repositories as critical components in the evolving structure of scholarly communication. It is available in HTML and PDF.

Z39.50

Here is the announcement of a new mail list for Bookwhere users, a popular Z39.50 client.

Hello BookWhere users,

Over the past few years the Bookwhere list has been used almost exclusively by Sea Change to communicate about new releases of the software. As a vendor run and moderated list it tends to be both quiet and uncritical of the product.

Many software packages have lists that are independent of the software vendor. These lists tend to be a lot more dynamic that the vendor run lists and really present a way for the user community to communicate directly with each other.

I've just established an independent, un-moderated "Unofficial BookWhere list" to provide you with an opportunity to communicate directly with other BookWhere users. The list can be used to discuss just about anything related to the product.

In case you're wondering who I am, my name is Paul Nixon and until recently I was in charge of the BookWhere product at Sea Change. I now run Neptune8.com which is an Authorized Reseller of BookWhere and other products. I'll be a regular contributor to the list and hope to offer tips and insights into the product.

Information on how to join this new list

By the way, there is information on this BookWhere list

I look forward to seeing you on the new list!
----------------------------------------------
Paul Nixon
Toll Free:(888)369-8889
Neptune8 Corporation
www.neptune8.com
pnixon@neptune8.com
(905)474-5285
Fax (905)474-3820

XML & MARC

XML and bibliographic data: the TVS (Transport, Validation and Services) model by Joaquim de Carvalho and Maria Ines Cordeiro.

This paper discusses the role of XML in library information systems at three major levels: as a representation language that enables the transport of bibliographic data in a way that is technologically independent and universally understood across systems and domains; as a language that enables the specification of complex validation rules according to a particular data format such as MARC; and, finally, as a language that enables the description of services through which such data can be exploited in alternative modes that overcome the limitations of the classical client-server database services. The key point of this paper is that by specifying requirements for XML usage at these three levels, in an articulated but distinct way, a much needed clarification of this area can be achieved. The authors conclude by stressing the importance of advancing the use of XML in the real practice of bibliographic services, in order to improve the interoperable capabilities of existing bibliographic data assets and to advance the WWW integration of bibliographic systems on a sound basis.

Thanks to pate at /usr/lib/info to directing me to this.

FRBR

“Furber” Debuts at ALA Exhibits" By David Dorman. If I had any doubt that cataloging theory could make a real difference for the library patron, it was dispelled at this year’s ALA Annual Conference." Notice of the award given to Seymour Lubetsky and ILS systems beginning to implement FRBR.

Ontologies

Deborah L. McGuinness. "Ontologies Come of Age". To appear in Dieter Fensel, Jim Hendler, Henry Lieberman, and Wolfgang Wahlster, editors. Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential. MIT Press, 2002.

In this paper, we will discuss ontologies and requirements in their current instantiations on the web today. We will describe some desirable properties of ontologies. We will also discuss how both simple and complex ontologies are being and may be used to support varied applications. We will conclude with a discussion of emerging trends in ontologies and their environments and briefly mention our evolving ontology evolution environment.

Serials

The proceedings of the NASIG annual conference are now available to members online. They will be published as The Serials Librarian Volume 42, Numbers 1/2 and 3/4 (2001). Some of the items of interest to catalogers include:

• Taming the Aggregators: Providing Access to Journals in Aggregator Databases by John Riemer and Jina Choi Wakimoto
• Journal Holdings Lists on Web Sites: Designs That Non-Specialized Staff Can Build and Maintain by Susan E. Pulsipher
• Cataloging Web Resources on the OCLC-CORC: Issues Identified in an Empirical Study by Tschera Harkness Connell
• Using the ONIX Standard to Manage Serials by Brian Green
• Providing Web-Based Listings of Electronic Journal Titles the Low-Maintenance Way; or, Automating Ourselves Out of a Job by Rob Withers and Rob Casson

The North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) is an organization that is a best buy. Dues are only $25.00 a year, benefits far outweigh that cost.

LC Cataloging

The Library of Congress has a severe shortage of catalogers. They have finally started advertising to fill the positions. If interested the position description and application are both available. Due to poor mail service at LC, they suggest applying online.

Not Cataloging, Reference

Last week I attended the Summer Workshop for Distance Learning Librarians, a week of training on providing service to remote patrons. Very well done and interesting. One session was on using Chat for reference. I was surprised to see how many libraries are doing this. I was given the opportunity to try it, and found it easy. This was my first time to use Chat. I can see how it can become a part of reference service with little training and investment in equipment.

A good introduction to the topic is "Digital Reference" at the Teaching Librarian. It gives an overview, describes the technologies, links to other sites and links to libraries using Chat for reference.

XML

World Wide Web Consortium Issues Exclusive Canonical XML as a W3C Recommendation.

This specification augments the previous Canonical XML Recommendation to better enable a portion of an XML document (i.e., a fragment) to be as portable as possible while preserving the digital signature. It works in combination with XML Signatures, the W3C Recommendation produced jointly by W3C and the IETF in February, representing cross-industry agreement on an XML-based language for digital signatures.

Exclusive XML Canonicalization meets this need by providing a method of serializing an XML fragment into a portable and canonical form. This functionality, when combined with XML Signature, is critical for electronic commerce because it ensures the integrity of documents and protocol messages that travel between multiple XML processors.

Ensuring the document is authentic is also important in academic research. This is an important piece of structure.

OCLC

OCLC-Cat is a discussion forum for library staff using or considering any OCLC cataloging and metadata services, such as WebDewey, Passport, CatME, Connexion, and MARS.

TEI

"The Text Encoding Initiative invites proposals for the development and delivery of training courses and materials to be recognized by the TEI. We invite interested parties to contact us or submit proposals in writing that will meet the training needs of the community. We are committed to working with one or more parties to help develop the proposals so that they can be certified by the Text Encoding Initiative."

Electronic Records Research

FOS News broght this to my attention. The 25 questions will help the NHPRC set priorities.

The State Archives Department of the Minnesota Historical Society is managing an effort to revisit and analyze the electronic records research agenda currently guiding the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

XML

A List Apart has the paper "Using XML by J David Eisenberg.

More than a rulebook for generating your own markup, XML is part of a family of technologies that work together in powerful ways. Eisenberg demonstrates some of that power by creating an XML-based markup language from scratch and transforming it for a variety of formats, using nothing but his noggin and some off-the-shelf tools.

Cataloging & Search Engines

Here is an interesting article comparing search engines and OPACs. Before the comparison, there is much discussion of the purpose of the catalog and how it is achieved. "On the Theory of Library Catalogs and Search Engines" by B. Eversberg.

CONSER

The latest issue of CONSERline, No. 21, Summer 2002, is available.

• From the editor
• Jean Hirons awarded Margaret Mann citation
• Chapter 12 is almost here!
• SCCTP update
• CONSER publication pattern initiative sets future directions
• Highlights from the CONSER Operations Committee meeting
• CONSER people

Distance Learning

Next week I'll be attending the Summer Workshop for Distance Learning Librarians. I'd love to hear any suggestions on how distance affects cataloging. My initial assumption is that good complete cataloging is more important in a distance environment. The user cannot easily scan the shelves in an area. Nor can they pick up an item and flip through to see if it what they need. TOC's, abstracts, references to reviews and links become more important. Any other thoughts?

Since I'll be in class all day and I expect readings in the evening, postings here may be made less often.

Open Source

A very interesting looking book is now available from LITA, Open Source Software for Libraries

This guide introduces the reader to OSS and how it could benefit libraries, and illustrates this with a variety of library projects that have both used and developed Open Source Software. Includes practical information on installation of the software and links to additional resources.

One of the chapters is "Managing MARC with Open Source Software" by Kevin Clarke.

IFLA

IFLAThe latest issue of SCATNews: Newsletter of the Standing Committee of the IFLA Section on Cataloguing is available in PDF format. News of the section and news from Australia.

ISBD(M)

The IFLA Section on Cataloguing's ISBD Review Group is pleased to announce publication of the 2002 Version of the International Standard Bibliographic Description for Monographic Publications (ISBD(M)). The document is available in PDF format on IFLANET. This version incorporates changes necessary to make the provisions of this ISBD consistent with the "optionality" features described in IFLA's Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), published in 1998.

In general FRBR produced recommendations to make "optional" certain data elements hitherto considered "mandatory". In the new version of ISBD(M), inclusion of a data element is considered "mandatory" in all cases for certain data elements, and in other cases is considered "mandatory" when necessary for identification of the publication being described or otherwise considered important to users of a bibliography or a catalogue. To facilitate the application of the practices stipulated, ISBD(M) designates particular data elements as optional, i.e. a cataloguing agency is free to choose to include or exclude these elements. The policy is further explained within the document at 0.1.3, and a review of the Outline provided at paragraph 0.3.2 will reveal which data elements are optional.

The 2002 revision of the ISBD(M) will be published only on the Internet because the ISBD Review Group views it as an interim document subject to further review and revision in the near term. This continued attention to its provisions will be undertaken in an effort to take into consideration changes to national and multi-national cataloguing codes resulting from the need to adjust practices to fit the evolution of publications that has occurred in recent years -- in particular, the emergence of electronic resources. The Review Group is hopeful that the investigations and rule changes resulting from these code revision activities will facilitate its efforts to maintain the currency of the ISBDs as well.

jbyr@loc.gov

John Byrum, Jr., Chair, ISBD Review Group
Chief, Regional & Cooperative Cataloging
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C. 20540-4380
USA
Tel: +(202) 707-6511
Fax: +(202) 707-2824

LC Cataloging

With the approval of the Board of ALA's Reference User Services Association (RUSA), the Library of Congress has begun adding to its catalog records the annotations for the sites selected annually by the RUSA Machine Assisted Reference Section (MARS), Best Free Web Sites Committee. The lists, which have been compiled since 1999, appear in the fall issue of the RUSA Quarterly and on the ALA RUSA MARS website. Usually, 25-30 sites are selected each year. The Library of Congress project to add the annotations has been undertaken under the auspices of the Library's Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT), a cross-departmental R & D group whose mission includes enriching the content of Library of Congress bibliographic records. The project follows a similar on-going undertaking to add annotations to the catalog records for the titles included in the annual list of print Outstanding Reference Sources produced by the ALA RUSA Collection Development and Evaluation Section (CODES). Additional information about BEAT projects is available from the BEAT web site.

jbyr@loc.gov

John D. Byrum, Jr.
Chief, Regional & Cooperative Cataloging
Library of Congress
Washington, D. C. 20540-4380
USA
Tel: +(202) 707-6511
Fax: +(202) 707-2824

UNIMARC

MARC21 and AARC are both not as clear as they could be on some topics. That is why there are the large binders with the LCRIs in cataloging departments. On a couple of these topics IFLA has provided guidance, it might be useful to review their guidelines as well as the Library of Congress Rule Interpertations.

Guidelines for Using UNIMARC for Component Parts The following guideline indicates how the UNIMARC format is to be used when creating records for two types of component parts: journal articles and articles in books. The focus here is on articles, although the treatment of other components that are one part of a larger physical piece would follow the same model.

Guidelines for Using UNIMARC for Microforms The following Guidelines indicate how the UNIMARC format is to be used when creating records for items which appear in the original hard copy publication and microreproduction forms. The focus here is on microforms, although the treatment of different kinds of reproduction would follow the same model.

Persistent URL

There is another PURL service available U-ID. This is a for profit organization. Seems to me the OCLC PURL system would be a better option for libraries. There is the need for these services. I just wonder why the OCLC service has not caught on more widely. The service there is free and so is the software to start your own service. When it first appeared I thought state libraries would establish PURL servers for their library systems and scholarly organizations would do the same for their fields. Hasn't happened.

A good introduction to persistent URL's is "URLs, PURLs & TRULs : Link Maintenance in the Web-accessible OPAC" by Tom Tyler. Or see my "Persistent Links, One Solution to a Common Problem"

MARC21

The updated proposals and discussion paper from the ALA Annual 2002 meetings of the MARC Advisory Committee are now available from the MARC Web site. They include a brief review of the discussion and status of the paper.

The updated papers are located at:

Proposal No. 2002-13

Discussion Paper No. 2002-DP08

Proposal No. 2002-11

Proposal No. 2002-06R

Proposal No. 2002-12

Proposal No. 2002-15

Proposal No. 2002-14

Proposal No. 2002-10

Proposal No. 2001-10R

Sincerely,

Jackie Radebaugh

Network Development and MARC Standards Office
Library of Congress
Washington, DC
USA
Phone: +1-202-707-1153
Fax: +1-202-707-0115
E-Mail: jrad@loc.gov

Open Source Library System

Exciting news from the Koha project:

To the Koha community;

Bonjour,
Our first French translation did in fact come out last week, which sets the stage nicely for this weeks news. We've also seen continued growth of our developer and user bases (including an installation of FreeBSD -- Hooray!!)

The entire message is available. This project continues to go from one accomplishment to the next.

Library Open Source

The Callimachus Group exists to promote interaction between Open Source Library software projects. The page only lists tasks and members. The membership list does include the name of the open source project so it is a good place to begin a search on what is available.

MARC Transformations

Some notes on open source projects this morning. MARC4J is currently at beta version 6.

The goal of MARC4J is to provide an easy to use Application Programming Interface (API) for working with MARC records in Java.

Using MARC4J it is easy to write any kind of Java application or servlet that involves MARC or MARCXML data. MARC4J provides SAX2 consumers and producers for conversions between MARC and MARCXML, including support for character conversions between MARC-8 and UCS/Unicode environments. Together with the SAX2 interface it is possible to write robust MARC to XML conversion programs simply by implementing the methods in the MarcHandler interface. The MARC record object model can be used to convert XML back to MARC tape format. The record object model is also suitable for in-memory editing of MARC records, just as DOM is used for XML editing purposes. The MARC4J library can also be used for reporting purposes, to import MARC records into databases, or to provide transformations between different MARC formats.

Bibliography Tool

zNote is an open source bibliography management tool.

Here is zNote, a web-based bibliography-management tool built with Zope and XML.

zNote is intended to ultimately be a replacement for tools like EndNote, ProCite, and to a certain extent, bibTeX. It uses a hierarchical XML data format which is more flexible than flat data, and it works using a set of pretty simple DOM calls to format, edit, etc.

zNote is currently at version 0.6. It is now a complete, functioning Python-classed product. It is totally usable (I have a couple of hundred entries in the one I'm using), but it has some rough edges that could be sanded off.

Like all open source projects, the more folks who contribute the fewer rough edges it will have.

E-Serials Cataloging

I just received this note from Gerry McKiernan. Be aware this is one large PDF file, not one for each paper. So it does take a while to load.

I am pleased to announce that free full-text (PDF) access to the entire contents of "E-Serials Cataloging: Access to Continuing and Integrating Resources via the Catalog and the Web," (The Serials Librarian 41 (3-4) 2002) edited by Jim Cole and Wayne Jones is now available from this site and here

This special issue contains my latest article "E is for Everything: The Extra-Ordinary, Evoluntionay [e-]Journal" which is a review of key features of The Eclectic Journal.

Here's a partial Table of Contents for the issue.

E-Serials Cataloging in the 1990's: A Review of the Literature by Ann Copeland

ISBD(ER) and Its Role in the Management of Electronic Resources by Sten Hedberg

The Integration of Electronic Resources into Cataloging Instruction in the LIS Curriculum by Taemin Kim Park

Teaching Seriality: A Major Education Challenge by Arlene G. Taylor

Web Resources for Cataloging Electronic Serials and Continuing Resources: An Annotated Bibliography by John Blosser, Tim Hagan, and Yvonne W. Zhang

Internet Resources Cataloging in ARL Libraries: Staffing and Access Issues by Jeanne M.K. Boydston and Joan M. Leysen

Notes for Remote Access Computer File Serials by Beatrice L. Caraway

On Pins and Needles: Using Structured Metadata for Collocation and Browsing Capability by Gregory Wool

NESLI MARC Records: An Experiment in Creating MARC Records for E-Journals by Ross MacIntyre

Improving Access to E-Journals and Databases at the MIT Libraries: Building a Database-Backed Web Site Called 'Vera' by Nicole Hennig

The Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek: A Successful Library Service for Electronic Journals in Germany by Evelinde Hutzler and GeraldSchupfner

E is for Everything: The Extra-Ordinary, Evolutionary [e-]Journal
Gerry McKiernan

Don't forget to visit EJI(sm) for The Eclectic Experience

I am most thankful to Bill Cohen, Publisher of Haworth Press, for providing the PDF copy and for his permission to offer free access to the issue.

Gerry McKiernan
Extra-Ordinary Librarian
Iowa State University Library
Ames IA 50011
gerrymck@iastate.edu

Not Cataloging

Apollo 13 and 14 have now been added to the Apollo Image Atlas

With the addition of 584 Apollo 13 images and 1336 Apollo 14 images, the Atlas now has over 10,000 images available for internet browsing.

Comments or suggestions about the Atlas are welcomed, just drop me a note.

Spanish Subject Headings

Oakland Public Library & San Francisco Public Library have combined their Spanish subject heading lists and made them available on the Web.

Currently there are approximately 1500 Spanish subject equivalents. The file is in alphabetical order by the LCSH followed by the OPL Spanish subject and the SFPL Spanish subject. The Spanish subject headings here are primarily those that are not represented in Bilindex. However, there are several that revise or update Bilindex terms or phrases to reflect current or preferred terminology. Due to the limitations of the dBASE program as well as to allow for proper indexing in the local system, all diacritical marks and tildes are omitted from the Spanish terms.

Thanks to Marylaine Block for this listing in Neat New Stuff.

Online Catalogs

This site is very well designed. It has information about each of the national libraries, hours, access, collections and contact information. It is possible to search a particular library or cross search all the collections. The Web design is clear and usable and in several languages.

Gabriel is the World-Wide-Web service covering 41 European national libraries from the 39 countries that are represented in the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL). This multilingual Internet service offers access to consistently structured information about European national libraries, with details about their printed and electronic collections as well as instructions on how to gain access to their online catalogues and services. Information is offered in the most commonly-used European languages, namely English, French and German.

It is available at these sites:

The Netherlands

United Kingdom

Germany

Finland

Slovenia

Information Retrieval

The new issue of First Monday has the article After the Dot-Bomb: Getting Web Information Retrieval Right This Time by Marcia J. Bates.

In the excitement of the "dot-com" rush of the 1990's, many Web sites were developed that provided information retrieval capabilities poorly or sub-optimally. Suggestions are made for improvements in the design of Web information retrieval in seven areas. Classifications, ontologies, indexing vocabularies, statistical properties of databases (including the Bradford Distribution), and staff indexing support systems are all discussed.

This author suggests hiring information professionals. Maybe this idea is catching on.

Metadata Extraction

Parser::Citation is a Perl module for extracting reference metadata from scholarly eprint papers.

Currently, Citation.pm attempts to parse the following metadata from references to other journal papers (it is not good at parsing metadata from references to books, conference proceedings, theses, etc.) :

name of the authors

name of the first author

journal title

volume

issue or supplement

start page

year

Sometimes the title of the referenced paper is also extracted if it is in an easy-to-recognise form (e.g. enclosed in double quotes). These data are sufficient to identify a journal paper uniquely for reference linking purposes.

That last line is interesting, they have linked to arXiv.org sucessfully.

Not Cataloging

A great article by Janis Ian, the singer, on music downloads, copyright and the music industry. The Internet Debacle: An Alternative View

Free exposure is practically a thing of the past for entertainers. Getting your record played at radio costs more money than most of us dream of ever earning. Free downloading gives a chance to every do-it-yourselfer out there. Every act that can't get signed to a major, for whatever reason, can reach literally millions of new listeners, enticing them to buy the CD and come to the concerts. Where else can a new act, or one that doesn't have a label deal, get that kind of exposure?

Taxonomies

An article in Intelligent Enterprise Managing Spaghetti Content by Philip Russom

Every content management application demands a well-ordered taxonomy. The challenge is to maintain taxonomy quality as content evolves over time.

One suggestion is to hire librarians. Excellent idea.

Bliss Classification

A new list LIS-BCA is now available via JISCmail. The list is intended as a discussion forum for anyone with an interest in faceted classification and facet analytical theory. It will be also be used to disseminate information about the activities of the Bliss Classification Association.

Thanks to Library News Daily for this info.

This 'Blog

Using Blogrolling I've added links to some standards organizations to the Web page. It seems straightforward. However, if this causes problems in your viewer, please let me know. Also, if there is an organization I've overlooked let me know.

URLs in MARC

The latest issue of the Marcive Newsletter includes a short piece about placing a Uniform Resource Locator in a MARC record. It does include links to other sites and some illustrations.

Markup

The Rogue Librarian mentioned a markup standard that was new to me, Model Editions Partnership (MEP)

This document provides a reasonably non-technical introduction to the SGML-based markup scheme developed by the Model Editions Partnership (MEP) for the production of historical documentary editions in electronic form. The most important element types (or `tags') in the MEP markup system are introduced with examples.

Reading

The latest issue of First Monday is out. This issue includes:

Electric Symbols: Internet Words And Culture by John Fraim

The Next Stage: Moving from Isolated Digital Collections to Interoperable Digital Libraries by Howard Besser

The Soundproof Book: Exploration of Rights Conflict and Access to Commercial EBooks for People with Disabilities by George Kerscher and Jim Fruchterman

Cave or Community? An Empirical Examination of 100 Mature Open Source Projects by Sandeep Krishnamurthy

Open Source Intelligence by Felix Stalder and Jesse Hirsh

Censoring the Internet: The Situation in Turkey by Kemal Altintas, Tolga Aydin, and Varol Akman

The Place of Law in Cyberspace by David Altheide

The Medical Journal Meets the Internet by Charles Curran

FM Interviews: Stephanie Mills

Book Reviews

MARC Edit

A new version of MARC Edit by Terry Reese is now available. Here are some of the new features:

Enhanced MarcEngine -- for faster MARC manipulation and more exposed functions/methods

Global Indicator editing tools and enhancements to all existing editing tools

MarcEdit Script Maker -- Generate vbscripts that tap into MarcEdit's power to modify and manipulate MARC records

MarcEdit Delimited Text Translator -- Generate MARC records from delimited text files

New MARC extraction utility that allows users to Extract and Delete individual MARC records from a larger batch file using a simple title list

Updated MARC => DC conversion to DC 1.1 unqualified

Updated MARC => XML conversion to conform to the Library of Congress' new MARCXML Schema

Improved documentation

Copyright and Open Source

In my professional reading recently, two books complemented each other very strongly. I have just finished Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity by Siva Vaidhyanathan an historical overview of the extension of protection to greater areas. Like mint in my garden, vast areas are now covered, too much for the public good. We should not use the term "Intellectual Property" since that is using the language of those with the greatest interest in protection their personal interests. Information policy, is a good alternative, or information monopoly, to use the terminology of Jefferson who opposed all copyright. This expansion of protection has hindered the progress of the arts and sciences, reversing the intention of copyright as understood by the founding fathers. Some fascinating ideas and history I had not been aware of.

The next book I have begun to read, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond tells the story of the Open Source movement. This seems like an example and solution to the problems outlined in Vaidhyanathan. The protection of computing source code has led to bloated office suites, unstable platforms and slow development. Compare hardware advances with software advances to see how protection has affected the industry. The Open Source movement has arisen to bring innovation, and user communities back into software. Librarians will agree with much in this movement. Intellectual freedom, for example, is important to both communities. There is even some intersection of the library and Open Source community (it can only benefit both) at oss4lib

Both books are worth reading and considering. Reading one after the other provides a concrete example of the historical and abstract treatment of the other.

Metadata

A paper on metadata use by the federal government "Hydra-headed Metadata" by Jamie Callan, W. Bruce Croft and Eduard Hovy

Recently, the Digital Government program of the National Science Foundation has funded a number of projects to address the challenge of integrating large, heterogeneous, widely distributed and disparate Government data collections. In this paper, we describe two complementary approaches: large ontology-based data access planning using small domain models semi-automatically acquired, and dynamic metadata creation from language.

Open Source ILS

Koha 1.2.1 is ready! After almost a month of planning, coding, testing, and tweaking we've put together a new version of Koha for your book lending pleasure.

Koha 1.2.1 represents a major improvement over 1.2.0. We've spent a great deal of time working on the installer/upgrader, and using these tools are now the recommended way of installing Koha on your system. Koha 1.2.1 includes our new manual, which should help you get up and running faster. The Z39.50 sub-system has been overhauled and is now much better (and easier to install to boot!).

We've also cleaned up a number of bugs that crept into the 1.2.0 release -- and begun to build up our testing procedures to reduce new bugs in future releases.

Please download the latest release of Koha (and find out lots more about the project).

We encourage you to get this new release and give it a spin. We think you'll like what you see. We plan on continuing to improve Koha, and would love to have you come along on this exciting journey.

Chris Cormack
1.2 Release Manager
the Koha Project

Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki/Manager
the Koha Project

Koha mailing list
Koha@lists.katipo.co.nz
http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha

Not Cataloging

First draft COUNTER Usage Reports: librarians invited to take part in online survey

An important part of the COUNTER Code of Practice will be the collection of Usage Reports to be provided by vendors to customers. Vendors will have to meet specified reporting standards in order to be designated 'COUNTER compliant'. The first drafts of the Usage Reports are now available and librarians are invited to participate in an online survey that will collect their comments on them. There are ten reports proposed for Release 1 of the Code of Practice, of which six cover journals and four cover bibliographic databases. These will be added to as the Code of Practice is extended and covers a wider range of content types.

The online survey, as well as the full list of Usage Reports, may be accessed by clicking on Online Librarian Survey. We recommend that Microsoft Internet Explorer be used as the browser for the online survey.

'The survey will be available only for a limited time, so please complete it as soon as possible so that your opinions are recorded'.

OAI, MARC & Z39.50

FOS News alerted me to this tool.

ZMARCO is an Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) 2.0 compliant data provider. The 'Z' in ZMARCO stands for Z39.50; 'MARC' stands for MAchine-Readable Cataloging; and the 'O' stands for OAI, as in the Open Archives Inititive. Essentially ZMARCO allows MARC records which are available through a Z39.50 server to relatively easily be made available via the OAI-PMH.

XML

A recent CENDI meeting focused on projects and developments in the federal government using XML. CENDI is an interagency working group of senior Scientific and Technical Information Managers from nine U.S. Federal Agencies. Reports from NASA, the National Agricultural Library, National Library of Medicine, and DOE were given.

Archives

I've just noticed I've yet to mention the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC). This co-operative effort ranks with OCLC and RLIN as one of the most useful in the history of information description.

The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC) is a free-of-charge cooperative cataloging program operated by the Library of Congress.

On the basis of cataloging data supplied by eligible repositories to the NUCMC program, NUCMC catalogers create MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) bibliographic records in RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network), a national-level database, describing collections held by participants, and establish pertinent name and subject authority headings. Descriptions and locations of the material are then available to researchers on RLIN throughout the United States and around the world.

CONSER

"CONSER OPERATIONS COMMITTEE MEETING, MAY 1-3, 2002

The annual CONSER Operations Committee meeting, May 1-3, 2002, began with presentations on the _Amendments 2002_ to AACR2. The presentations described the complete revision of chapter 12, new title change rules in chapter 21, and other related rule changes. Most of the meeting focused on the cataloging of electronic resources" A full summary is available. (LCCN Cataloging Newsletter July 2002). Other topics include the PURL Project and the FRBR.

Not Cataloging

The latest issue of Info Career Trends is now available. Articles include:

On Your Own? Lessons From a First-Time Manager

Promotions: In Your Own Back Yard, and Far Afield

Blogging and the Shifted Librarian

Tips for Creating a Successful Dossier

Promoting Yourself: Creating a Marketing Plan as a Professional Development Tool

Life After the Ph.D.

What's Online? Recommended Resources

But I Want To Hold It In My Hand! Print Resources

Authority Records

Great news! LC authority records are now available online from LC. They are updated daily. For far too long smaller libraries, those without access to OCLC or RLIN have had no access to authority records. There was the searchable file at DRA but that did not provide MARC format. Now even the smallest church or elementary school library has access to these records. "Using Library of Congress Authorities, you can browse and display authority headings for Subject, Name, Title and Name/Title combinations. This service is being offered on a trial basis so that we can assess its usefulness and impact."

RSS Tutorial

The Shifted Librarian alerted me to this nice tutorial, Publish and Syndicate Your News to the Web They are using Metabrowser, a Web browser I use to check Dublin Core metadata on our pages. They mention a workshop, they mean on-line workshop.

In this workshop you'll learn how to create, validate, syndicate, and view your own RSS news channel. The emphasis will be the practical application of RSS XML/RDF metadata for dynamically publishing:

news headlines

events listings

announcements

lists of publication titles

press releases

interactive directories

catalogs

project status updates

breaking news

reviews

in-depth features

You'll learn how to use RSS channels to keep current with topics of interest. We'll show you how others can incorporate your news into their pages automatically. The workshop will showcase the use of public domain tools and the Metabrowser editor

OLAC

Just received this notice. OLAC is a most worthwile organization. And membership is cheap, compared to the big library organizations. It is a Best Buy.

"This is a reminder to send in your OLAC registration if you have not already done so. Remember that postage rates go up on July 1st, so use up your last stamps on your OLAC registration envelope.

2002 OLAC Conference

The OnLine Audiovisual Catalogers Conference 2002 Local Arrangements and Program Committees invite all OLAC members, A/V and special format catalogers, and others with interest to make plans to attend the 2002 Conference in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The conference will be held Friday-Sunday, September 27th-29th at the Radisson Riverfront Hotel.

Jean Weihs will give the opening keynote address. Charles F. Thomas will give a presentation on IMAGES, a metadata sharing initiative at the University of Minnesota. Sheila Intner will give the closing keynote address. The program committee has put together nine workshops on special format cataloging. For full information, please visit the conference Web site at the URL given below. NACO-AV funnel training and the SCCTP Electronic Serials Cataloging Workshop will be offered on Thursday, 26 September. Both classes are all-day events which will begin at 8 or 9 am. and class size is limited. Please watch the OLAC-List for a separate call for NACO-AV participation. SCCTP registration is now closed.

Conference registration is now open through 30 August 2002 . The registration form is available. Registration fees are $125 for personal members of OLAC, $75 for students, $150 for non-members.

Call for Poster Presentations: Have you developed creative methods to deal with special format materials? Completed some research studies? Found an imaginative solution to a special format materials problem in your library? If so, why not consider sharing your expertise through a poster presentation at the upcoming OLAC conference to be held 27-29 September in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Visit the Conference Web site for full poster session information and an application.

Full conference information, including keynote speaker information, workshop descriptions, local attractions and information, and reception information is available on the conference Web site. As always, please feel free to contact the conference cochairs with any questions you may have.

Bobby Bothmann
bobby@bothmann.org
612-626-1637

Betsy Friesen
b-frie@umn.edu
612-626-4981"

Commercial Cataloging

One of the questions that comes up often on public and school library lists is: "Where can I find MARC records for AV?" I've just found a commercial source that may be useful for some institutions, marc4media. They provide MARC records tailored for the grade level being served.

Marc4media is a content-rich cataloging product designed to be the foundation tool for library media programs across North America. Our purpose is to align educational resources to learning tasks using language that encourages access by a wide range of teachers and students. Providing instant access to appropriate learning materials, marc4media is the key to integrating media into all aspects of curriculum development and student research.

I'm not endorsing these folks, just pointing to them as one place to explore.

Distance Education

Over on the RadCat (Radical Cataloging) list there has been some discussion about justification for cataloging in light of pre-processed books. It has been mentioned that it would be nice to have someone check the cataloging, there are often mistakes. Also mentioned was there is a need for local decisions based on the users of a particular library. Another reason would be distant users. As we put our catalogs on the Web and begin serving remote users and as the push for distance education becomes stronger better cataloging will be necessary.

A remote patron cannot check out the book on the shelf and waste a few minutes if it does not suit their requirements. They must either make a trip to the collection or have the item sent to them. Either way it could be a significant investment in time for either the library or the user. Inclusion of a summary note and/or the table of contents would pay for itself if only used once to decide the item was not what was wanted. To serve the distance learning community our records need to be richer and more descriptive.

Later this summer I'll be attending a workshop on distance learning. The place of good cataloging in that context is sure to be an impotant topic. Post a comment if you work with distance students.

Authority Resource

The OLAC folks have put together Authority Tools for Audio-Visual and Music Catalogers: An Annotated List of Useful Resources. Originally compiled by Subcommittee on Authority Tools Cataloging Policy Committee OnLine Audiovisual Catalogers, Inc. David Procházka, editor: 2001- Looks like I'm going to NACO training at the end of the summer, so I'm keeping my eye out for good resources.

Open Source

OCLC has released SiteSearch as Open Source. It looks like it could be used to place a catalog on the Web, but would not be a good choice for the main library system. Here is their description:

The OCLC SiteSearch toolkit provides a comprehensive solution for managing distributed library information resources in a World Wide Web environment. WebZ™ is java-based Z39.50 client/server component used to create an interface to information resources. Database Builder provides the tools to build local databases in various record formats, that can then be accessed through the WebZ interface.

Open Archives Initiative

Liu, Xiaoming, et.al.. [28]"Federated Searching Interface Techniques for Heterogenous OAI Repositories" [29]Journal of Digital Information 2(4) (May 21, 2002).
(http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v02/i04/Liu/). - The [30]Open Archives Initiative is our latest, best hope for a technology that can knit together access to a variety of dispersed repositories of information. Although the underlying protocol for "crawling" (fetching information from) such repositories is now in place, there remain some thorny issues -- not the least of which is how to handle disparate sets of metadata. In building the [31]ARC Cross Archive Search Service, the authors had to make decisions on how to handle this issue, which they share in this piece. They determined that to federate metadata from disparate sources, no single approach would work well in all cases. One relatively easy method is to use keyword searching, but then any additional functionality offered by well-described metadata is lost. Another approach is to map each set of elements into a common set. Their decisions on how to handle this dilemma (not surprisingly, a hybrid approach), as well as a thorough accounting of the over 1 million records from dozens of archives with which they were working, round out this very informative article. As libraries try to build cross-archive search services, we will need to become very good at dealing with the challenges outlined here, as well as others. This early work should prove helpful. - [32]RT

Current Cites 13(6) (June 2002) ISSN: 1060-2356 Copyright B) 2002 by the Regents of the University of California All rights reserved.

Copying is permitted for noncommercial use by computerized bulletin board/conference systems, individual scholars, and libraries. Libraries are authorized to add the journal to their collections at no cost. This message must appear on copied material. All commercial use requires permission from the editor. All product names are trademarks or registered trade marks of their respective holders. Mention of a product in this publication does not necessarily imply endorsement of the product. To subscribe to the Current Cites distribution list, send the message "sub cites [your name]" to [50]listserv@library.berkeley.edu, replacing "[your name]" with your name. To unsubscribe, send the message "unsub cites" to the same address.

Not Cataloging

This is a great idea, the Librarians Book Club. How did I miss this for so long? Here is how they describe their mission:

The Librarian's Book Club is a group to read and discuss books that are about libraries and the library profession. Every two months the Librarian's Book Club will select a new book to discuss. All you need to do is get yourself a copy of the current book and subscribe to the discussion list. Click on the book covers to learn more about the current selection. (Note: Although this book club discussion group is focused towards librarians, we welcome members that are not librarians.)

Thanks to Blake on LISNews for alerting me to this.

GILS & Dublin Core

This is a note I recently received.

"Colleagues,

I am gratified to report the Web Metadata Standard for Minnesota has been approved by the MN Information Policy Council. This Dublin Core-based standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.85) has been in use by many agencies, beginning with the Foundations Project in 1998. The standard is integrated into the new North Star Portal content management templates, and the state search engine is tuned to use the DC elements in results ranking. It is part of the Enterprise Architecture, along with the GIS metadata standard and the recordkeeping metadata standard.

Located at http://bridges.state.mn.us/bestprac/mn_dc_standard.pdf

Eileen Quam
Information Architect
Minnesota Dept. of Natural Resources
eileen.quam@dnr.state.mn.us
651.297.2341
651.297.4946 FAX"

Resume Online

I've wanted to post something about myself to satisfy those curious about such things. However, Blogspace does not allow for such Web pages. While reading The Information Professional's Guide to Career Development Online I got the idea of posting my resume at one of the free services. I picked the one at SLA. This seems to be working just fine. There is an "About me" link in the left column. Please let me know if there is any problem. If you are in the job market, the SLA job center would be a good place to visit, if only to post your resume. It's free and easy.

Metadata

An article in D-Lib magazine which may be of interest, Primary Multimedia Objects and 'Educational Metadata' by Paul Shabajee.

"Large multimedia database systems have great potential for educational use. Their assets can often be used to support educational and research activities in a wide variety of educational contexts, supporting learners and educators from many subject areas. This article focuses on what appears to be a fundamental dilemma for the developers of such systems regarding how to tag or index their assets with metadata so as to support discovery of the assets by these educational users."

MARC21

MARC 21 Data Elements in LC Bibliographic and Authority Files gives info on some minor changes.

Resource Description Framework

The jena semantic web toolkit is a java API for manipulating RDF models. Its features include:

statement centric methods for manipulating an RDF model as a set of RDF triples

resource centric methods for manipulating an RDF model as a set of resources with properties

cascading method calls for more convenient programming

built in support for RDF containers - bag, alt and seq

enhanced resources - the application can extend the behaviour of resources

integrated parsers (ARP and David Megginson's RDFFilter)

Markup Languages

The DAML (DARPA Agent Markup Language) language is being developed as an extension to XML and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). The latest release of the language (DAML+OIL) provides a rich set of constructs with which to create ontologies and to markup information so that it is machine readable and understandable.

Open Source Library System

What was once Open Book seems to have morphed into LearningAccess.

"The LearningAccess ILS is a full-feature Open Source library automation system developed for use by small public and school libraries in the U.S. and the rest of the world. The Institute will make this system available free to libraries that, because of cost, have been unable to achieve the benefits of automation.

Main Components
The LearningAccess ILS consists of three modules: the patron or user module (OPAC), the cataloging module and the circulation module. In future releases it may also include an acquisition module. All modules are Web-interface based and are multi-lingual user capable, with our initial release supporting English, Spanish and French.

The system supports the full MARC21 format for bibliographic, holding, authority and community records. It has an intuitive importing program to add records to its database. The cataloging client includes Z39.50 searching capabilities to allow for copy cataloging against OCLC or other larger union databases. Future releases will also support Z39.50 searches against the database."

Customizable Local WebPAC Pages

The Index to Creating Customizable Local WebPAC Pages by Raleigh Muns. "This program will demonstrate how to easily create and modify local Web pages external to the "official" WebPAC pages, allowing extensive local control over the features of your own, and others, WebPACs."

Text of Presentation, Nashville TN 1998, Innovative Users Group Conference

Quick Guide for Creating Customizable Local WebPAC Pages

Templates for Hacking Your Own

Directory of Hacked PACs (they work if you're on the Internet)

An AWFUL example of a Hacked PAC (Cautionary Tale)

Missouri's Omnipotent Research Online Network (Same techniques)

OPACS On the Web

British Library Public Catalogue accessible from COPAC
Joint Press Release from the British Library and the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL)
The British Library and the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) are delighted to announce that from 17 June 2002 the British Library Public Catalogue (BLPC) will be accessible online, free of charge, from COPAC.

COPAC is an online union catalogue, hosted at MIMAS, which gives free access to the merged catalogues of 22 of the largest university research libraries in the UK and Ireland. Now that the British Library has become a full member of CURL and the BLPC has been added to COPAC, COPAC users will have free online access, via a single search interface, to more than 20 million catalogue records, which they can search simultaneously by title, author or subject.

The National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales / Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru have also become full members of CURL and their records will be available via COPAC within the next twelve months. Meanwhile their catalogues can be searched simultaneously with the COPAC database, which also includes the BLPC, using the experimental version COPAC V3.

More details about the content of the BLPC are available.

More information about CURL and MIMAS can be found on their respective web sites.

Information Architecture

In the context of the U.S. Federal Government "Disaster Help" e-Government initiative, I am helping draft a two-page paper: "Agreement on Certain Information Architecture Principles".

Our focus is on the specification of shared interfaces among systems operated by e-Government initiative participants. The current draft calls out five minimum and critical agreements required for interoperability:

(1) Avoid non-standard data syntaxes

(2) Register the semantics of shared data elements

(3) Document service interfaces in a standard way

(4) Implement the standard interface for information discovery

(5) Implement the standard interfaces for geospatial data

There is also a short paragraph noting some requirements applicable to Government participants, such as open and equal public access, permanence of public access, privacy, security, records management, and information management.

Anyone who would like to review the draft or advise on other major principles, please contact me by e-mail to echristi@usgs.gov

(Also, please forward this note to other groups interested in information architecture principles for e-Government.)

Thanks!
Eliot

Wireless Access?

The RSS (Rich Site Summary) feed seems to be working fine. I think many folks have switched from visiting the Web site to getting the items on a news reader. Now the next frontier is wireless. Does anyone (Shifted Librarian, Handheld Librarian) have their content available for use in Palm devices? How can this be done? It should be fairly simple.

Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS)

"The Library of Congress' Network Development and MARC Standards Office, with interested experts, has developed the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), which is a bibliographic element set that may be used for a variety of purposes, particularly for library applications. Information about MODS and the schema (version 1.2) is available

As an XML schema it is intended to be able to carry selected data from existing MARC 21 records as well as to enable the creation of original resource description records. It includes a subset of MARC fields and uses language-based tags rather than numeric ones, in some cases regrouping elements from the MARC 21 bibliographic format. The elements inherit MARC semantics, so are more compatible with existing library data than other metadata schemes.

MODS could potentially be used as follows:

as a Z39.50 Next Generation specified format

as an extension schema to METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard)

to represent metadata for harvesting

for original resource description in XML syntax (using MARC semantics)

for representing a simplified MARC record in XML

for metadata in XML that may be packaged with an electronic resource

MODS includes a subset of data from the MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data. As an element set that allows for the representation of data already in MARC-based systems, it is intended to allow for the conversion of core fields from a MARC 21 record, while some specific data may be dropped. As an element set for original resource description, it allows for a simple record to be created, in some cases using more general tags than those available in the MARC record. The Library of Congress has developed transformations to move MARC 21 records from 2709 form to MARCXML to MODS, with the software available from the MARCXML Web site.

There has been wide review and input to the development of the schema, which is now available for trial use. It will remain stable for the next six months, during which we invite comments as a result of experimentation.

For questions or comments please email the Office at ndmso@loc.gov

Sally McCallum, Chief
Network Development and MARC Standards Office
Library of Congress, Washington, DC, USA"

This is very much like MARC in XML with name tags rather than numeric.

The British Library Public Catalogue

"The British Library has today launched its new BLPCZ service, which provides Z39.50 compliant access to the British Library Public Catalogue for the first time. The international standard for communications between computers in the library and information sector, Z39.50 allows simultaneous searching of multiple bibliographic resources via the Internet.

The service allows quick and easy access to bibliographic records from the catalogues of the main British Library collections - already available online at http://blpc.bl.uk. In addition to this, the new feature will allow users with suitable retrieval software to download and make use of the Library's bibliographic citations for their own personal research purposes. This should prove of particular use to researchers and students compiling bibliographies for monographs, research reports or theses.

Developed and hosted by MIMAS (Manchester Information and Associated Services) at the University of Manchester, BLPCZ is the latest result of a co-operative alliance between the British Library and CURL (the Consortium of University Research Libraries) which is aimed at providing wider access to the Library's catalogues. "Further details are available.

Open Source OPAC

"Its finally here!

Nearly a year since the last release, we have a new stable release of koha.

The main new features in this version are:

Can search by dewey number

Keyword Searches can be restricted by a dewey number

Can restrict a catalogue search by a class of items

Simple acquisitions module

Deleting borrowers checks their accounts for reserves, current issues, and fines

New catalogue maintenance section

MARC importing from a file, and from z39.50

Main Bugfixes:

Keyword searches are a lot faster

Combined author and title search is now also searching series title

Adding children and institutions works as advertised

There have been numerous little fixes and a lot of code clean up.

The structure of the tarball has changed to a more sensible layout, and the INSTALL document has been rewritten.

There is also now a installer script, as well as a functioning database update script.

All this should mean its the easiest Koha to install or upgrade yet."
Info
Download

MeSH

"In early April, the Health Sciences OCLC Users Group (HSOCLCUG) conducted an anonymous survey on MeSH authority control practices in health sciences libraries. There were 105 respondents to the survey. Here is a summary of our findings.

Half the respondents (overwhelmingly the largest group) do their authority control manually. Half have brought their MeSH authorities up to date sometime in the last two years, but a third never have. About 70 percent have a mixture in their OPACs of pre-1999, post-1999 and NLM distributed MeSH.

A third of the respondents are using post-1999 MeSH practices in their original cataloging, and almost half are applying post-1999 MeSH practices in their OPACs. The number who would prefer that NLM provide records to bibliographic utilities with post-1999 MeSH nearly equals those who prefer NLM to continue its current practice of providing records with distributed MeSH structure. Thus, respondents appear to be divided on the post-1999 MeSH vs. distributed MeSH structure issue.

The survey also reveals that most vendor systems' global modification functionality are not adequate to convert old records in catalogs to agree with either NLM's current practices (post-1999) or NLM's distributed structure (distributed through utilities like OCLC).

Almost 60 percent enrich OCLC records with NLM classification and MeSH on a regular basis. Almost three-fourths would download MeSH authority records from OCLC if available.

Finally, an unexpectedly large number of comments probably indicate that MeSH authority control is a topic of very high interest to respondents.

For the entire survey results, including graphical displays, please refer to this PDF file, using Adobe Acrobat reader or click the survey link on this webpage

We hope you will enjoy examining the survey results and that you will contact the survey coordinators if you are interested in the work that HSOCLCUG is doing. MeSH authorities, OCLC new directions, changes at NLM, and resource sharing/universal MARC Holdings are four areas of special interest to HSOCLCUG.

The survey coordinators:

Dan Kniesner (kniesner@ohsu.edu) and Judith Dzierba (Judith_L_Dzierba@rush.edu)."

Wireless Web Browsers & the OPAC

Another OPAC I've not seen, but sounds interesting. If you catch it at SLA or ALA let me know how it looks. The III AirPAC is designed for mobile phone, wireless PDA and other mobile devices.

"Patrons can interact with the Millennium system from anywhere accessible by wireless networks, allowing a user to place a hold from a classroom, check due dates and renew items during a long commute, or search the catalog while running errands to find the closest library branch where a desired title is held."

Does the Handheld Librarian know about this one?

Vacation

I'll be on vacation for the next week and a half. Posts will be very intermittent, if they occur at all. I will be checking my e-mail a few times and if I see anything screaming to be posted I'll get up. Otherwise, I'll be back on June 24.

Cataloging in Other Languages

The other day I mentioned the problem of identifying just what the language is on some materials. Ukrainian and Russian or the Scandinavian languages can appear very similar to someone who does not speak them. Owen Massey brought language guessers to my attention. For example, the Content Analysis Language Identifier has the ability to distinguish between 47 different languages. It uses UNICODE so it can take most character sets. Thanks Owen for the tip.

Preservation Metadata

OCLC AND RLG WORKING GROUP RELEASES REPORT ON 'METADATA FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT PRESERVATION OF DIGITAL OBJECTS'

DUBLIN, Ohio, June 11, 2002--The Working Group on Preservation Metadata, an initiative jointly sponsored by OCLC and RLG, has released 'A Metadata Framework to Support the Preservation of Digital Objects,' a new report available on the OCLC Web site.

The report is a comprehensive guide to preservation metadata that is applicable to a broad range of digital preservation activities. Preservation metadata is the information infrastructure necessary to support processes associated with the long-term retention of digital resources, and is an essential component of most digital preservation systems.

The report represents the consensus of leading experts and practitioners comprising the working group, and is intended for use by organizations and institutions managing, or planning to manage, the long-term retention of digital resources.

The working group based its work on preservation metadata element sets developed by several leading institutions and organizations in the digital preservation community, as well as the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model. OAIS is a conceptual framework that articulates the primary functional components of a digital archive and establishes concepts and terminology for describing and comparing architectures and data models.

The report follows on the working group's earlier white paper, 'Preservation Metadata for Digital Objects: A Review of the State of the Art,' which defined and discussed the concept of preservation metadata, reviewed current thinking and practice in the use of preservation metadata, and identified starting points for consensus-building activity in this area. The white paper is also available on the OCLC Web site.

"The working group's report illustrates the value of cooperatively resolving the challenges of digital preservation," said Brian Lavoie, research scientist in the OCLC Office of Research. "The most effective solutions for the long-term retention of digital resources are likely to emerge from collaboration within the digital preservation community, pooling the expertise of researchers and practitioners from a variety of institutional and geographical backgrounds. Taken together, these consensus-building efforts will establish the necessary infrastructure, in the form of standards and best practices, to support digital preservation activity."

"For institutions creating and preserving digital objects, this new OCLC/RLG report is a good resource for both preservation metadata and its relationship to the OAIS reference model," said Robin Dale, RLG program officer. "It broadens the digital preservation toolset we've been building, which includes such aids as the RLG/OCLC report on the attributes of trusted digital repositories and RLG's OAIS practitioners' Web page."

"The work of the OCLC/RLG Working Group on Preservation Metadata has been an extremely important effort as libraries and related cultural institutions begin to tackle issues concerning digital preservation," said Rebecca S. Guenther, senior networking and standards specialist, Library of Congress, and working group member. "The working group document takes the OAIS information model closer to the goal of actually implementing archival information systems that document preservation requirements and processes and is particularly relevant to the needs of libraries. This document is an important contribution to the development of preservation metadata standards in information technology, an area where much additional work is needed."

The Working Group on Preservation Metadata is part of a cooperative effort between OCLC and RLG to support consensus-building activity in the development of key infrastructure for digital preservation.

Dewey in Spanish

A Spanish language version of Dewey to the 1000 level is available. This would be a good guide to have available where some of the patrons are Spanish speaking. I'd not want to use it for classification. The Spanish in Our Libraries (SOL) site has some other valuable resources for libraries serving a Hispanic population.

Open Archives Initiative

my.OAI is a full-featured search interface to a selected list of metadata databases. They have recently made some inprovements

The following changes/improvements were made:

Added a recommender system which suggest other documents perhaps worth looking at based on prior search and retrieval patterns of other users.

Changed the way in which databases are selected, now they are displayed as a list rather than databases with checkboxes, this is to accommodate their growing numbers.

Added the ability to run a meta-search, displaying the total number of results per database before displaying the search results, the user can then pick which database(s) they want to see results for.

Added the ability to group the search results by database, the user can then pick which database(s) they want to see results for.

Added documents viewed to the search history, now you can see both your previous searches and all the document you viewed in reverse chronological order.

Thanks to FOS for bringing this to my attention.

FRBR & the OPAC

Here an announcement of an OPAC that displays records in FRBR format. I've not seen it. If anyone does see it at ALA or SLA I'd be interested in hearing comments.

"VTLS Inc. Announces FRBR Implementation
VIRTUA ILS NOW SUPPORTS FRBR
ALA JUNE 2002

Blacksburg, VA -- Virtua ILS – Integrated Library Systems newest release is currently the only commercially available ILS system in the marketplace to support the IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). The FRBR model is the latest development in cataloging practice. It is designed to serve as a conceptual framework for systems that share and use bibliographic data, nationally or internationally. The concept was developed by IFLA with participation from National Libraries like Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada.

Present cataloging practices do not support "linked hierarchic metadata records" making it difficult to catalog certain types of materials. The FRBR model is designed to address this difficulty. The basic FRBR record consists of three entities - work, expression and manifestation. In addition, item records (holding records) can be attached to the manifestation. For example, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony represents a work. It can be independently cataloged. The performance of the symphony by, say, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra represents an "expression" of the work. A CD by Columbia records containing the particular performance represents a "manifestation" of the work. Two copies of the CD in the library represent two "items" of this manifestation.

Using the FRBR model, librarians do not have to re-catalog the entire work again for different performances or for different manifestations of the same performance. Instead, FRBR allows the new performance to be cataloged separately and linked to a previously cataloged "work". This hierarchical parent child relationship in metadata records is the key feature of FRBR. The example above was from music; however the hierarchic relationship can exist in other material types like printed materials with different editions or language versions.

In implementing FRBR, VTLS has created an environment in which records in the FRBR model and records in the traditional cataloging model can co-exist in the same database. Such an implementation allows libraries to ease into the use of the FRBR model without requiring massive record conversions. It is clear that not every metadata record lends itself to FRBR. For example, many records do not have alternative expressions or manifestations. For this reason, Virtua ILS supports classic cataloging of metadata records along with FRBR records in the same database. The software is "FRBR aware" and automatically changes display formats depending on the type of record (FRBR or regular).

With a click of a button, the Virtua software converts a regular record to three records of the FRBR model and attaches all items to the manifestation record. This process can also be performed in a batch mode.

Refinements on the FRBR implementation continue as we receive valuable input from interested parties.

For more information on FRBR please see:
IFLA web site
VTLS web site"

Cataloging in Languages Other than English

The Glossary of Bibliographic Information by Language can be a real help when dealing with materials in a language you are not fluent in. It provides translations for common terms used in publishing in Danish, Dutch, French German, Italian Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish Swedish and Turkish. Now the trick is finding out just what the language is. I recently cataloged a map in Czech, Coratian, Polish and Hungarian. It took a good bit of time figuring out that Coratian was one of the languages.

Thesauri and Web Logs

On the High Context 'blog this short article shows how a controlled vocabulary could benefit resource discovery in Web logs. Thanks to the Shifted Librarian for pointing this out.