LibraryThing Local

LibraryThing Local maps libraries, bookstores, and book events.

LibraryThing Local is a gateway to thousands of local bookstores, libraries and book festivals—and to all the author readings, signings, discussions and other events they host. It is our attempt to accomplish what hasn't happened yet—the effective linking of the online and offline book worlds. Books still don't fully "work" online; this is a step toward mending them.

LibraryThing Local is a handy reference, but it's also interactive. You can show off your favorite bookstores and libraries (eg., mine include the Harvard Bookstore, Shakespeare and Company and the Boston Athenaeum) and keep track of interesting events. Then you can find out who else loves the places you do, and who else is going to events. You can also find local members, write comments about the places you love and more.

Is your library included? If not it is easy to add it. I added the Lunar and Planetary Institute Library.

Oreo Ad

Here in the States there is a new Oreo ad that has pitched percussion music, sounds like something from the Orff's Schulwerk. Is that so? Which volume?

ORE Specification and User Guide

The latest version of the ORE Specification and User Guide has been released.

Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources. This document provides an introduction and lists the specifications and user guide documents that make up the OAI-ORE standards.

FRBR in Chinese

A translation of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) into Chinese has just been made available on IFLANET

Peeps @ the Library

Peeps are in the stores, so it is time once again to point to Peep Research. Brings a smile every year.

New Look

Back on March 5, 2002 I started Catalogablog. Over the years I made many changes to the look and contents of the weblog, but always within the same template. Now I feel the need to change. Let me know what you think about the new look.

FRBR & RDA

The FRBR e-mail list brought the news that Barbara Tillett has updated the RDA section of her chapter in the book Understanding FRBR (WorldCat Amazon) edited by Arlene Taylor.

"Due to publishing schedules, the section published in the book reflected the way RDA was shaping up prior to the October changes that now more clearly show the relationship of RDA to FRBR."

Radical Cataloging

Soon to be available Radical cataloging : essays at the front by K R Roberto with an introduction by Sandy Berman. (Amazon WorldCat)

Interactive Course Assignment Pages

I saw the Interactive Course Assignment Pages (ICAP) mentioned on the Library Web Chic's weblog. not cataloging related, but still looks useful. For colleges and universities, of course, but how about for the homework help area at the public library? School libraries? So many places this could be useful.

Librarians have enough to do and maintaining static HTML pages is tedious and time-consuming. The ICAP tool enables librarians with minimal technical expertise to create dynamic web pages that integrate Web 2.0 features, such as chat and RSS feeds, with traditional library content, such as catalogs and article databases.

The ICAPs use a module layout to display content written and produced by librarians, as well as library resources and interactive widgets.

PICS -> ICRA

Somewhere along the way the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) evolved into the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA).

As a web author, we invite you to use our system to describe, that is, label, your online content in a way that can be processed by computers. The system is designed to be as objective as possible: ICRA makes no value judgements at all about any content.

Users, principally parents of young children, then apply their own judgement in deciding which sites should and should not be available in their homes or workplaces. This is done by means of software that can read and interpret the labels found.

Simple Knowledge Organization System Document

The W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has announced the publication of the SKOS Primer as a W3C First Public Working Draft.

This is a substantial update to and replacement for the previous SKOS Core Guide W3C Working Draft dated 2 November 2005. It is a companion document to the SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference W3C Working Draft dated 25 January 2008.

The Weblog

I was thinking of moving this weblog over to Wordpress. It is just time for a change. However, that would break too many links. I think I'll just do a complete redesign of this site for March 5. That was the date in 2002 this got started. Just seems like a good time for a new look. Comments?

FRBR and Moving Image Materials

Greenwood Publishing Group kindly gave Martha Yee permission to post her chapter (Chapter 11, FRBR and Moving Image Materials: Content (Work and Expression) versus Carrier (Manifestation)) from Arlene Taylor's book, Understanding FRBR, at the UC eScholarship repository.

Some of the major problems with Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2R) stem from the failure to clearly analyze the FRBR entities work and expression (content) so as to distinguish them from manifestation (carrier) for nonbook materials such as moving image materials. In this chapter, a clearer and more logical analysis of these concepts is attempted, and, at the end of the chapter, the progress made so far in RDA (Resource Description and Access) development is assessed as well.

Tagging and Culture

Collaborative and Social Tagging Networks by Emma Tonkin, Edward M. Corrado, Heather Lea Moulaison, Margaret E. I. Kipp, Andrea Resmini, Heather D. Pfeiffer and Qiping Zhang appears in Ariadne issue no. 54. Covers "a series of international perspectives on the practice of social tagging of documents within a community context".

Yee's Cataloging Rules

Martha M. Yee has updated her suggested cataloging rules and RDF model.

This is still a work in progress, so I would love to hear more suggestions for improvement from anyone who can afford the time to look it all over. James Weinheimer is helping me work on a wiki site for the cataloging rules, so keep your eye on this space (smile)...

CONSER/BIBCO ALA At-Large Meeting Summary

The CONSER/BIBCO ALA At-Large Meeting Summary is now available. Topics discussed include:

• CONSER standard record
• Title presentation on e-resource web sites
• PCC Series discussion paper
• Integrating resource cataloging manual issues

Omeka Now Public

Omeka 0.9.0 is now available to the public.

Omeka is a web platform for publishing collections and exhibitions online. Designed for cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators, Omeka is easy to install and modify and facilitates community-building around collections and exhibits. Omeka is free and open source.

Here is the news release.

The Omeka team has worked very hard over the past few months to bring you the public beta, Omeka version 0.9.0, which is now available for everyone to download.

Here’s what you get bundled in your installation:

• Basic themes that are easy to adapt with simple CSS changes
  
• Exhibit building with 12 basic page layouts
  
• Tagging for items and exhibits
  
• RSS feed for new items
  
• COins plug-in making all Omeka content readable by Zotero (zotero.org);

Find additional functionality by downloading plug-ins :

• Bilingual plug-in for adding language fields to item metadata
  
• Contribution plug-in for collecting items from visitors
  
• Dropbox plug-in for batch adding items
  
• Geo-location plug-in for displaying items on a map
  
• Sitenotes plug-in for administrators to leave instructions for users
  
• Tag Suggest plug-in for suggesting tags based upon their frequency in the item text areas

Lots of metadata there, COinS, tags, and RSS.

Work Begins on the RDA Vocabularies

The DCMI/RDA Task Group was formed in April of 2007, when members of the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA, Dublin Core and the W3C Semantic Web Deployment Working Group met in London. At that meeting, two tasks relating to RDA vocabularies were identified:

1. definition of an RDA Element Vocabulary
   
2. disclosure on the public web of RDA Value Vocabularies using RDF/RDFS/SKOS technologies

The RDA Vocabularies Project proposes to surface these underlying bibliographic elements in the form of Semantic Web vocabularies, thereby making them reusable in Semantic Web applications and citable with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). This will be based on RDF (Resource Description Framework), a generic grammar for expressing data for use not just by humans, but also in automated processes of data integration and "intelligent" reasoning.

The work will be lead by the DCMI/RDA Task Group chairs: Gordon Dunsire of the University of Strathclyde and Diane Hillmann of Cornell University (with support from Tom Baker of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative). Other participants working closely with the project are:

• Karen Coyle (independent consultant well known in the library world)
  
• Alistair Miles (editor for the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) and member of the W3C SWDWG)
  
• Mikael Nilsson (researcher in the Knowledge Management Research Group, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden and co-chair of the DCMI Architecture Forum)

Partial funding for the effort has been secured, and sources of additional funding are still being sought. Potential funders should contact Diane Hillmann at dih1@cornell.edu for further information.

Public information on the progress of the project is available on the DCMI/RDA Task Group wiki. Continuing discussion on the work of the Task Group will take place on the public mailing list maintained by the task group and available for open subscription. Feedback, comment and experimentation with the products that the group will be presenting is both welcome and essential to the success of the work.

MARC and RDF

Semantic MARC, MARC21 and the Semantic Web by Rob Styles, Danny Ayers, and Nadeem Shabir is available as a preprint.

The MARC standard for exchanging bibliographic data has been in use for several decades and is used by major libraries worldwide. This paper discusses the possibilities of representing the most prevalent form of MARC, MARC21, as RDF for the Semantic Web, and aims to understand the tradeoffs, if any, resulting from transforming the data. Critically our approach goes beyond a simple transliteration of the MARC21 record syntax to develop rich semantic descriptions of the varied things which may be described using bibliographic records. We present an algorithmic approach for consistently generating URIs from textual data, discuss the algorithmic matching of author names and suggest how RDF generated from MARC records may be linked to other data sources on the Web.

Consolidated Edition of the International Standard Bibliographic Description

The consolidated edition of the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) is now available online.

Due to arrangements with the publisher, K.G. Saur, the file cannot be printed or copied from.