Metadata Object Description Schema Revision

MODS version 3.3 is now available. Changes from version 3.2 are documented online.

ISBN Service

LibraryThing has a new API, one that corrects ISBNs and returns both a 10 and 13 digit ISBN. Very Restful. Just send an ISBN to http://www.librarything.com/isbncheck.php?isbn= and it will:

• Give it any old ISBN and it does the math to return the ISBN10 and ISBN13 forms, if both exist.
• It removes dashes and other junk.
• It transparently fixes missing initial zeroes. This is a common problem with data from Excel files, which turn 0765344629 into 765344629.
• If the ISBN isn't valid and can't be easily fixed, it returns an error.

They ask not to send more than 10 requests per minute second.

Photo Preservation Metadata

Photoplus: Auxiliary Information for Printed Images Based on Distributed Source Coding by Ramin Samadani and Debargha Mukherjee (HPL-2008-2) discusses some metadata for photographs that may be useful for preservation.

A printed photograph is difficult to reuse because the digital information that generated the print may no longer be available. This paper describes a mechanism for approximating the original digital image by combining a scan of the printed photograph with small amounts of digital auxiliary information kept together with the print. The auxiliary information consists of a small amount of digital data to enable accurate registration and color-reproduction, followed by a larger amount of digital data to recover residual errors and lost frequencies by distributed Wyner-Ziv coding techniques. Approximating the original digital image enables many uses, including making good quality reprints from the original print, even when they are faded many years later. In essence, the print itself becomes the currency for archiving and repurposing digital images, without requiring computer infrastructure. Publication Info: To be published and presented at VCIP 2008 - Visual Communications and Image Processing 2008, San Jose, CA

Cataloging Streaming Media

Good news from OLAC.

The Best Practices for Cataloging Streaming Media document is available on the OLAC website. Created by the CAPC Streaming Media Best Practices Task Force, it presents best practice guidelines and examples for cataloging both streaming video and audio, based on AACR2. It also presents definitions and examples of resources that can be considered as streaming media.

This document is available in both HTML and PDF formats.

Thanks.

Freebase Books Schema

Freebase is an interesting project, they accept data sets and then provide a platform to access them. Something like the Talis platform? They have a section for books and have a schema for book information. I'm not sure of the mechanics behind it all. I'd guess RDF would make the cross data set links easier. Here is an example of bibliographic data being just one type of data in a much larger system with connecitons to other data sets. Interesting.

Freebase is an open database of the world’s information. It is built by the community and for the community--free for anyone to query, contribute to, built applications on top of, or integrate into their websites.

Already, Freebase covers millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC, it contains structured information on many popular topics, like movies, music, people and locations--all reconciled and freely available via an open API. This information is supplemented by the efforts of a passionate global community of users, who are working together to add structured information on everything from philosophy to European railway stations to the chemical properties of common food ingredients.

In fact, part of what makes Freebase unique is that it spans domains--but requires that a particular topic exist only once in Freebase, even if it might normally be found in multiple databases. For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger would appear in a movie database as an actor, a political database as a governor and a bodybuilder database as a Mr. Universe. In Freebase, there is only one topic for Arnold Schwarzenegger, with all three facets of his public persona brought together. The unified topic acts as an information hub, making it easy to find and contribute information about him.

For books they have a work-like idea, a bit FRBR-like.

"Book" represents the abstract notion of a particular book, rather than a particular edition. It is on this level that articles or discussion about a book should generally occur (e.g., the article about Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" is on the book topic, rather than on one or more of the hundreds of editions it has gone through). The book topic should also be used for connections to other types, such as films that have been adapted from a book.

Addition to the MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions

The code listed below has been recently approved for use in MARC 21 records. The code will be added to the online MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions.

This code should not be used in exchange records until after March 18, 2008. This 60-day waiting period is required to provide MARC 21 implementers time to include newly defined codes in any validation tables they may apply to the MARC fields where the codes are used. Term, Name, Title Sources

The following code is for use in subfield $2 in fields 600-657 (Subject Added Entries) in Bibliographic and Community Information records, field 662 (Subject Added Entry) in Bibliographic records, fields 700-788 (Heading Linking Entries) in Authority records and in subfield $f in field 040 (Cataloging Source) in Authority records.

Addition:

qlsp

Queens Library Spanish language subject headings (Queens, NY: Queens Library) [use only after March 18, 2008]

Authority Tools

OLAC has announced an update to one of their resources.

The online resources Authority Tools for Audiovisual and Music Catalogers: an Annotated List of Useful Resources, has been revised and updated. Along with some editorial updates of URLs and new edition information, reviews were added for the following titles:

• Opera : an encyclopedia of world premieres and significant performances, singers, composers, librettists, arias and conductors, 1597-2000
• A dictionary-catalog of modern British composers
• Encyclopedia of the blues (ISBN: 0415926998)

I've also just received my OLAC Newsletter.

FRBR Talk

Wiliam Denton mentions on his FRBR Blog that he will be speaking at the Ontario Library Association’s 2008 Superconference. I just finished his essay in Arlene Taylor’s Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools (Amazon WorldCat) and if speaks even half as well as he writes it should be an enjoyable session. If you want or need a history of cataloging, his essay would be a good start.

LOC Tagging Experiment on Flickr

The Library of Congress has uploaded two collections of photographs to Flickr and invited people to add tags. The sets are 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s. It will be interesting to see how sucessful the tagging project is.

These images have the rights statement "no known copyright restrictions", an experimental rights statement for Flickr. Reaction from Flickr users seems to be extremely positive.

NISO to Develop Standard Identification for Institutions

FOAF for institutions from the folks at NISO.

Members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have voted to approve the creation of a working group to explore issues surrounding institutional identification. This working group will be charged with proposing an identifier that will uniquely identify institutions and that will describe relationships between entities within institutions. This new NISO group will also consider what minimum set of data is required for unique identification as well as what other data may be used to support the business models of respective organizations, while also taking into account privacy and security issues.

There are and have been other schemes to identify institutions. The MARC Code List for Organizations is a good source for libraries and their parent institutions. You can even request codes there. Does your institution have a code? Then there is the SAN (Standard Address Number) for organizations in (or served by) the publishing industry. Once there was someone who kept track of institution numbers in barcodes, but I'm sure that has gone the way of the 8-track.

Next Generation Catalog

The Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science has made available 3 podcasts of recent talks on the next generation catalog.

• Anne M. Prestamo / AquaBrowser
• Jennifer Ward/WorldCat Local
• Next Generation Library Catalogs: David Lindahl

The cataloger in me wants to see title / statement of responsibility, it just looks backwards.

This is part of a larger podcasting series by GSLIS at Simmons. All are well worth a listen, even if they are out of scope of this weblog.

Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control

The final report of the working group, On the Record: Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, is now available.

SCATNews

The latest issue of SCATNews , the Newsletter of the Standing Committee of the IFLA Cataloguing Section, is now available on the IFLA website.

2007 Annual MARBI Meeting Minutes

The 2007 Annual MARBI Meeting minutes are now available online.

MARC module for Drupal 5

Drupal, an open-source CMS, now has a MARC module.

This module provides a way to map data in the MARC record to Drupal content types and import sets of MARC records.

The module currently supports mapping to the default node fields, taxonomy fields and CCK text fields.

Why
By importing a library's MARC records directly in to Drupal as nodes, you can easily recreate your library's catalog in a rich social environment.

Seen on oss4lib.

Institutional Repositories

Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite, the latest Digital Scholarship publication, is designed to give the reader a very quick introduction to key aspects of institutional repositories and to foster further exploration of this topic though liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent websites. It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose in accordance with the license.

From the e-mail announcement.

Genre/Form Headings for Radio Programs

Adapted from the e-mail distributed to many lists.

As the next step in the development of genre/form headings at the Library of Congress, the Cataloging Policy and Support Office (CPSO) would like to announce the beginning of a project to add genre/form headings for radio programs to the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). These headings will join those already being established for moving images.

The genre/form headings will be based chiefly on the concepts represented in the Radio Form/Genre Terms Guide (RADFG). Existing form headings in the area of radio programming from LCSH (currently coded with MARC authority field 150) will also be considered for inclusion.

Catalogers in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, in cooperation with CPSO, have begun to create "proposed" authority records to aid in discussions related to the development of these genre/form headings. Although these records are not yet approved, they may be consulted in the Library of Congress authorities database. As with other proposed subject headings, these sample records may not reflect the final forms, reference structures, et cetera, but are provided to assist in the development process:

• Audience participation radio programs (sh2007025534)
• Christmas radio programs (sh2007025570)
• Horror radio programs (sh2007025535)
• Radio adaptations (sh2007025531)
• Western radio programs (sh2007025532)

A draft instruction sheet detailing the creation and application of these headings is also being written for inclusion in the Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings and will be posted on CPSO's web site for public comment. An alert will be sent to various discussion lists when that occurs.

PB Core Metadata

Nope, PB Core isn't Peanut Butter Core, rather Public Broadcasting Core, metadata for public radio and television.

Yes, you can now download our starter kit including a free, fully functional FileMaker database for cataloging your content, and it’s custom-integrated with PBCore, the standard metadata dictionary worked out for you by public broadcasters!

Not sure how or why to dive into metadata? Your starter kit includes training resources and an online user guide. And if you download NOW, we will throw in a Listserv so you can trade information with media-makers just like you!

All of the scary but tedious work has been done for you! Over nearly six years, with CPB funding, a committee of your colleagues with an above-average geek quotient has ventured into this shadowy world and come back, bruised but living, with a metadata standard designed by and for both public TV and radio!

Catalogablog

This makes post number 3,074 since 5 March 2002. Just an EOY summary. Happy New Year.

Flock

Version 1.0 for Flock, the social Web browser has been released. They also had the smarts to release an API, so others can continue the development.