FireFox Problems

I got the new improved FireFox, version 3, yesterday and now I'm using MS Explorer. FF3 is SLOW. I can't get into Blogger. Several add-ons I liked, TinyURL Creator, Link Evaluator, Persistent URL Bookmarker, and Map+ (opens a map for any address) don't work. I'm going to have to investigate wither it is possible to roll-back to the old version. I sure hope so. My advice, FWIW, wait.

It is the portable version of FireFox, maybe the regular version would not be so slow. It still wouldn't have the add-ons.

Operator+, an add-on that allows working with microformats is not working properly. I can't seem to export hCal events to Outlook.

June 24, I've reverted to an older version of FF Portable. All my tools are working again. At home I plan on moving to FF3. It will not be the portable version and the add-on tools are much less important.

OCLC Group Services

I've just heard of OCLC Group Services, a way for small libraries to participate in OCLC. Anyone have any experience with a group? Any group willing to have the Lunar and Planetary Institute Library become a member?

The Future of Cataloging: A PALINET Symposium

MP3s and slides from The Future of Cataloging: A PALINET Symposium are now available. The talks were:

• Keynote Address, Karen Calhoun "Traveling Through Transitions in Technical Services: From Surviving to Thriving"
• Response to Keynote, Panel Discussion / Beth Picknally Camden
• Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Current Development and Implementation Plans for Resource Description and Access (RDA) / John Attig
• On the Record, One View of the Future – Library of Congress Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control / Nancy Fallgren
• Making Special Collections Not So Special? The Implications for Archives and Special Collections of the Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control / Christine Di Bella
• High Quality Discovery in a Web 2.0 World: Architectures for Next Generation Catalogs / John Mark Ockerbloom
• Summary & Closing Remarks / Dina Giambi

Tagging

@toread and Cool : Subjective, Affective and Associative Factors in Tagging. In Proceedings Canadian Association for Information Science/L'Association canadienne des sciences de l'information (CAIS/ACSI), Vancouver, British Columbia (Canada).

This paper examines the use of non subject related tags in social bookmarking tools. Previous studies of tagging determined that many common tags are not directly subject related but are in fact affective tags dwelling on a user's emotional response to a document or are time and task related tags related to a users current projects or activities. These tags have been analysed to examine their role in the tagging process.

While not an academic study, the experience of LibraryThing in cleaning up tags for sale to libraries might be an interesting comparison. The study compares Del.icio.us, Connotea and CiteULike. It would be interesting to see how other tagging sites compare. What is the difference between tagging books, articles, websites and toasters? Is tagging different in different cultures? Do people in Japan tag differently than those in France? How about folk in Economics and Astrophysics? Lots of room for more research here. The next step would be to use the findings to inform our construction of subject headings. The FRBR group working on subjects might have a new body of knowledge to use in their work.

MARBI @ ALA

The remainder of the June 2008 MARC Advisory Group proposals have been posted and linked to the agenda for the meeting.

Chopac.org

Chopac.org has some interesting cataloging tools. There is an Amazon to MARC converter, DDC22 summaries, Amazon review server, and some others. They also have an ILS to download. Runs in the LAMP environment. They seem to have it up and running on their site. It gets additional info from Amazon and Google Books to enrich the records.

On Descript

When I started this weblog back in 2002 nobody was covering cataloging. There was AUTOCAT, great place for discussion. But no one place was acting as a news source. Now there are plenty of other place to keep current in cataloging, check Planet Cataloging for a good list of weblogs in this space. Now another voice joins the chorus, On Descript, and we are richer for it.

On Descript is a forum dedicated to all things description in Library and Information Science (LIS). Here, you'll find information on subjects like cataloging, indexing, abstracting and the foundations of description practices in LIS. Please share your ideas!

Not yet covered by Planet Catalog, so visit his site.

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records

A German translation of the text of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) as amended and Japanese translations of the recently published errata and the amendment to the expression entity have been made available through IFLANET.

DCMI Registry Task Group

From the DCMI page.

DCMI Registry Task Group: call for participation.

A DCMI Registry Task Group has been set up with the primary aims of developing shared functional requirements and inter-registry interoperability issues. This group is currently recruiting participants. Those with an interest in metadata schema registries, terminology registries, ontology registries and metadata vocabulary management are invited to visit the Task Group's Wiki for further information, news, upcoming events and opportunities to contribute.

OLAC-MOUG 2008 Conference

Registration for the OLAC-MOUG 2008 Conference is open.

The joint conference of OLAC (Online Audiovisual Catalogers) and MOUG (Music OCLC Users Group) will take place in Cleveland, Ohio, between Friday, September 26 and Sunday, September 28, 2008. Attendees will enjoy four workshops on cataloging various non-book materials, keynote speech by Lynne Howarth (former Dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto); closing address by Janet Swan Hill (Associate Director for Technical Services, University of Colorado); and a session on RDA, to name just a few highlights.

Preconference: space is limited for Thursday September 25th's Map Cataloging preconference, given by Paige Andrew.

Please see the conference website for more information and the registration form.

Posted to many distribution lists.

OAI-ORE Resource Maps

Posted to several lists.

The Foresite project is pleased to announce the initial code of two software libraries for constructing, parsing, manipulating and serialising OAI-ORE Resource Maps. These libraries are being written in Java and Python, and can be used generically to provide advanced functionality to OAI-ORE aware applications, and are compliant with the latest release (0.9) of the specification. The software is open source, released under a BSD licence, and is available from a Google Code repository.

You will find that the implementations are not absolutely complete yet, and are lacking good documentation for this early release, but we will be continuing to develop this software throughout the project and hope that it will be of use to the community immediately and beyond the end of the project.

Both libraries support parsing and serialising in: ATOM, RDF/XML, N3, N-Triples, Turtle and RDFa

Foresite is a JISC funded project which aims to produce a demonstrator and test of the OAI-ORE standard by creating Resource Maps of journals and their contents held in JSTOR, and delivering them as ATOM documents via the SWORD interface to DSpace. DSpace will ingest these resource maps, and convert them into repository items which reference content which continues to reside in JSTOR. The Python library is being used to generate the resource maps from JSTOR and the Java library is being used to provide all the ingest, transformation and dissemination support required in DSpace.

Please feel free to download and play with the source code, and let us have your feedback via the Google group:

foresite@googlegroups.com

More MARBI News

Some more MARBI news.

The following papers are available for review by the MARC community:

• Proposal No. 2008-04: Changes to Nature of entire work and nature of content codes in field 008 of the MARC 21 bibliographic format
• Proposal No. 2008-09: Definition of Videorecording format codes in field 007/04 of the MARC 21 Bibliographic format
• Proposal No. 2008-10: Definition of a subfield for Other standard number in field 534 of the MARC 21 bibliographic format

Additional proposals and discussion papers will be posted shortly.

The draft agenda for the 2008 ALA Annual MARBI meetings is available online.

Please note that there is a strong possibility that MARBI may meet during its Monday afternoon time slot of 1:30-3:30 for continuation of the discussion.

Skype News

Skype now lets you set your mobile number as your caller-id on outgoing calls. Very nice. I'm set up.

ALA Annual MARBI Meeting

Posted to many e-mail distribution lists.

The following papers are available for review by the MARC community:

• Proposal No. 2008-06: Adding information associated with the Series Added Entry fields (800-830)
• Proposal No. 2008-07: Making field 440 (Series Statement/Added Entry--Title) obsolete in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
• Proposal No. 2008-08: Definition of subfield $z in field 017 of the MARC 21 Bibliographic and addition of the field to the MARC 21 Holdings formats
• Discussion Paper 2008-DP06: Coding deposit programs as methods of acquisitions in field 008/07 of the MARC 21 holdings format

Additional proposals and discussion papers will be posted shortly.

The draft agenda for the 2008 ALA Annual MARBI meetings will be made available soon.

Yahoo Search Monkey

Another step towards the Semantic Web, Yahoo SearchMonkey.

SearchMonkey is fundamentally about transforming the way search results are compiled and displayed by leveraging the same structured data that powers the millions of pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. By sharing structured data with Yahoo!, site owners and content publishers can build more useful, relevant and visually appealing search results, which can increase the quantity and quality of traffic from Yahoo! Search....

You can share data by embedding microformats, using semantic web standards such as RDF, sharing an XML data feed directly with Yahoo! Search, or using the SearchMonkey developer tool to build custom data services that extract structured data from your pages.

LibriVox

LibriVox is becoming a valuable resource for free audio books. They just reached 1500 titles in the collection.

We’ve had a pretty extraordinary May. We cataloged our 1,500th book, James Baldwin’s children’s history book, Four Great Americans, which was a great accomplishment. (Considering seven months ago we were at 1,000).

But we also had an impressively productive month: we released 115 (!) audiobooks into the public domain, almost four per day. Our previous record for monthly production was 77, reached in July 2007.

Is anyone cataloging these and adding them to their collection? Burning them to CDs and adding those to the collection? A few months back the Nebraska Library Commission made news by adding a few books licensed under Creative Commons to their catalog. Anyone doing the same for the LibriVox materials? Adding the records to OCLC for sharing or making them available via OAI-PMH?

Code4Lib Conference

The video from the Code4Lib Conference is now on Archive.org. Note that you can get the MPEG2 high def format there. Some talks include:

• MARCThing Casey Durfee discusses MARCThing, a self-contained web service which aims to do for MARC and Z39.50 what Solr did for searching.
• OpenURL Ross Singer and Jonathan Rochkind describe Ümlaut, an open source OpenURL middleware layer intended to improve the link resolving chain by analyzing incoming citations and intelligently querying resources to better enable access to them.
• Blacklight Bess Sadler describes Blacklight, a Solr based OPAC replacement being developed by University of Virginia Library.
• Scriblio Casey Bisson describes Scriblio, the OPAC replacement based on the WordPress authoring system.
• A Metadata Registry Jon Phipps gives an introduction to the Metadata Registry, an open source vocabulary, metadata schema, and DC application profile manager and registry.

And plenty more.

Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE ) Specifications

The Open Archives Initiative has announced the public beta release of Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications.

Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, web, library, and eScience community to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of online information resources. These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. Although a motivating use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of “web 2.0”.

FGDC Digital Cartographic Standard for Geologic Map Symbolization

Found this sitting in the draft folder for quite some time. Here it is at last. The PostScript version of the FGDC Digital Cartographic Standard for Geologic Map Symbolization is now available as a USGS Techniques and Methods publication.

Geologic Map Symbolization

The PostScript version of the FGDC Digital Cartographic Standard for Geologic Map Symbolization is now available as a USGS Techniques and Methods publication.