eXtensible Catalog & Koha

News from LibLime about Koha and the eXtensible Catalog.

LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries and the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project-- an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project currently underway at the University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries-- have announced a new partnership agreement to ensure future compatibility between the XC project and Koha, the first open-source integrated library system.

The XC/LibLime partnership will ensure that the open-source software being developed as part of the XC project and the Koha open-source integrated library system will be fully compatible with each other, enabling current and future users of Koha to take advantage of the added capabilities for managing and distributing metadata that XC will offer. These benefits include facilitating the ability to combine legacy metadata with emerging schemas, and delivering library content to web content management and learning management systems.

Changes to MARC Code List for Languages

As a result of a formal request from the National Libraries of Serbia and Croatia and those countries' national standards bodies to the ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee, the MARC language codes for Serbian and Croatian will be changed as below from the ISO 639-2 bibliographic codes (ISO 639-2/B) to the ISO 639-2 terminology codes (ISO 639-2/T). This change also supports established usage in bibliographic databases in Croatia. Because the codes are obsolete, rather than deleted, they may still appear in bibliographic records created before the implementation of this change.

New Code	Language Name	Previously Coded
srp	Serbian	scc
hrv	Croatian	scr

Subscribers can anticipate receiving MARC records reflecting these changes in all distribution services not earlier than September 1, 2008.

Martha Yee Articles

Some more articles by Martha Yee are now available.

Integration of Nonbook Materials in AACR2. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1983; 3:1-18.

Attempts to Deal With the Crisis in Cataloging at the Library of Congress in the 1940's. Library Quarterly 1987 Jan; 57:1-31.

What is a Work? In: The Principles and Future of AACR: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 23-25, 1997. Ed., Jean Weihs. Ottawa: Canadian Library Association; Chicago: American Library Association, 1998: 62-104.

Editions: Brainstorming for AACR2000. In: The Future of the Descriptive Cataloging Rules: Papers from the ALCTS Preconference, AACR2000, American Library Association Annual Conference, Chicago, June 22, 1995. Ed., Brian E.C. Schottlaender. (ALCTS Papers on Library Technical Services and Collections, no. 6) Chicago: American Library Association, 1998: 40-65.

Viewpoints: One Catalog or No Catalog? ALCTS Newsletter 1999; 10:4:13-17.

Lubetzky's Work Principle. In: The Future of Cataloging: Insights from the Lubetzky Symposium, April 18, 1998, University of California, Los Angeles. Ed., Tschera Harkness Connell, Robert L. Maxwell. Chicago: American Library Association, 2000.

RDA News

News from RDA.

The Co-Publishers of RDA Online (the American Library Association, the Canadian Library Association, and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) have reached the conclusion that further time is required to complete the development of the new software that will be used for distributing the full draft of RDA for constituency review.

The full draft was originally scheduled for release on August 4, 2008. Instead, it will now be issued in October 2008. The three month time period allocated for comments on the full draft is unchanged, and in this new schedule will extend from October into January 2009. More specific dates for RDA's final release will be forthcoming shortly.

Members of the Committee of Principals (CoP) and the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC) agree that the importance of distributing RDA content in a well-developed and tested version of the new software is such that a two-month delay is justified. They concluded that this extension is worthwhile given the ultimate value of the exceptional effort that is going into RDA and feel that the review by constituencies will be enhanced as a result.

OCLC Terminology Services

Terminology Services, an Experimental Services for Controlled Vocabularies, a project of OCLC Research is now available.

Highlights

• Search descriptions of controlled vocabularies
• Search for concepts/headings in a controlled vocabulary
• Retrieve a single concept/heading by its identifier
• View relationships for a concept/heading including equivalence, hierarchical, and associative
• Retrieve concepts/headings in multiple representations including HTML, MARC XML, SKOS, and Zthes.
• Search using SRU CQL syntax

Vocabulary Resources include:

• FAST subject headings
• GSAFD Form and genre terms
• Library of Congress AC Subject Headings
• Library of Congress Subject Headings
• Medical Subject Headings
• Thesaurus for graphic materials: TGM I
• Thesaurus for graphic materials: TGM II

New Union Catalog

The Avi Chai Foundation has announced a new tool for Judaica librarians — the Avi Chai Bookshelf Union Catalog. The union catalog, contains the MARC bibliographic holdings of 31 Jewish high school libraries in the United States and Canada that have been recipients of Avi Chai's Bookshelf grant. The Avi Chai Union Catalog runs on the OPALS (open source) library automation system.

Discovery at Safari Books

Jeff Patterson, CEO, Safari Books Online LLC spoke at the O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference on Valuing Content in a Web-enabled World

To effectively market their wares, publishers need to understand how their content is valued by the audience. With the web turning traditional distribution models on their head, easy searchability and access to a variety of free and paid resources must be considered. Jeff Patterson shares research on the information seeking habits of his client base of IT professionals. As users weigh the worth of information in exchange for their time, money and attention, publishers must grasp not just what is sold, but what is read, used and reused....

Money is one part of the equation, but time, and willingness to share personal details, are also important forms of currency. Patterson's studies posed a number of scenarios which revealed different behaviors depending on the urgency of the information seeking. Subscribers researching a long term question tended to start with paid resources such as online subscriptions or print books. Those with urgent business questions were more likely to use search engines as their first tool. These different behaviors bring home the point that products must be discoverable within a sea of available options. Information consumers will place a value on different resources depending on their context. The burden is now on the publishers to understand how their information is being used.

2008 Midwinter MARBI Meeting Minutes

The 2008 Midwinter MARBI Meeting minutes are now available online.

Cataloging Principles and RDA

Cataloging Principles and RDA by Barbara Tillett is the newly available webcast from LC.

The second in a series on RDA: Resource Description and Access, the next generation cataloging code designed for the digital environment. This presentation deals with the cataloging principles that have influenced the development of RDA; the challenges they present to the international sharing of bibliographic and authority data; and the challenges they present to the developers of RDA.

Metadata for Resource Discovery

Metadata to Support Next-Generation Library Resource Discovery: Lessons from the eXtensilble Catalog, Phase 1 by Jennifer Bowen has been published in the June 2008 issue of Information Technology and Libraries (p. 6-19).

The slides for her upcoming talk at ALA as part of the ALCTS Program, Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging (Sunday morning, June 29, 8 AM-12 PM, Anaheim Convention Center, Room 204B) are on the XC Shared Results Page.

The next time nominations roll around for Movers and Shakers someone should nominate Jennifer. Her work on RDA and the eXtensilble Catalog more than qualify her.

Delay in Publication of 31st Edition of Library of Congress Subject Headings

News from LC.

Delay in publication of 31st edition of Library of Congress Subject Headings

Due to production problems, the 31st edition of the five-volume printed edition of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, commonly referred to as the Red Books, will not be available until the spring of 2009. The data cutoff date for the 31st edition will now be December 31, 2008.

Open Source OPAC

Rapi is yet another open-source OPAC project. It uses Lucene and Ruby like most of the projects do.

Rapi is an open-source project of the WING group in the School of Computing, National University of Singapore licensed under the MIT license. Rapi provides an OPAC package that allows you to:

1. Build a Lucene index from your MARC files
2. Screen scrape live circulation data from your own iii OPAC
3. Wrap your OPAC with a customizable user interface

The user interface packaged with Rapi has been tested with Firefox 2 and 3 as well as Internet Explorer 7. The user interface supports a variety of features including tabs, an overview+details view, and a suggestion bar among many others. Note that although the user interface supports query suggestions, the package currently does not provide any suggestion modules. With that said, if you do have query suggestion modules, they can be easily integrated with the package. As an example, our live demo incorporates a spelling suggestion module.

Distributed Metadata Control Systems

Distributed Version Control and Library Metadata by Galen M. Charlton.

Distributed version control systems (DVCSs) are effective tools for managing source code and other artifacts produced by software projects with multiple contributors. This article describes DVCSs and compares them with traditional centralized version control systems, then describes extending the DVCS model to improve the exchange of library metadata.

Interesting suggestion. Network theory applied here. Only one node would be useless, two or three nodes interesting depending on the institutions, something like the old Linked System Project. More widespread adoption would make it much more useful.

Approved Books

The Open Library folks are considering adding information about banning to their bibliographic records. Other than MPAA ratings does anyone add approval by some body to their bibliographic records? I can remember seeing Nihil obstat and Imprimi potest on some books growing up. Is this still useful to some patrons for selecting an item?

Cross-concordances

Mayr, Philipp and Petras, Vivien (2008) Cross-concordances: terminology mapping and its effectiveness for information retrieval. World Library and Information Congress: 74th IFLA General Conference and Council, Québec, Canada.

The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research funded a major terminology mapping initiative, which found its conclusion in 2007. The task of this terminology mapping initiative was to organize, create and manage ‘cross-concordances’ between controlled vocabularies (thesauri, classification systems, subject heading lists) centred around the social sciences but quickly extending to other subject areas. 64 crosswalks with more than 500,000 relations were established. In the final phase of the project, a major evaluation effort to test and measure the effectiveness of the vocabulary mappings in an information system environment was conducted. The paper reports on the cross-concordance work and evaluation results.

Script Codes

One of the issues being considered by MARBI, Discussion Paper No. 2008-DP05, is how to indicate the script used in the bibliographic record. There is strong support for using the ISO 15924 Code List, Codes for the representation of names of scripts or Codes pour la représentation des noms d’écritures.

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.