Library APIs

Roy Tennant has posted a list of library APIs. If you know of any that deserves to be included, let him know.

From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America

The OCLC report on library funding, From Awareness to Funding: A study of library support in America has been released. One non-intuitive finding is that library use and library support are not correlated. Marketing to and mobilizing our users at election time is not the best use of our resources.

SCATNews

The latest issue of SCATNews, Newsletter of the Standing Committee of the IFLA Cataloguing Section (Number 29) is now available on the IFLA website.

Facebook

I've added this weblog to the Facebook Blog Network, now you can read it there is that is your preference.

Making your content available in more places makes metrics hard. Before Bloglines, Google Reader, Facebook Blog Network, Planet Catalog, and all the rest I could get a feel for the number of readers. Didn't matter too much to me, this is done for my own benefit as well as the community. However, if I was in a position and needed numbers to justify the work it would make it difficult.

Collocate and Disambiguate

Here's a new weblog of interest to catalogers, Collocate and Disambiguate. Not yet on Planet Cataloging, so grab the RSS feed for your reader.

Created by Lois Reibach, this blog will discuss news and trends in authority control, and new uses of authority data. Developments in controlled vocabularies will also be covered.

Moving Image Genre/Form Project Report

In early 2007 the Cataloging Policy and Support Office (CPSO) of the Library of Congress initiated a project to create authority records for genre/form headings (MARC tag 155), which indicate what a work is, as opposed to what it is about....

This past Tuesday members of CPSO presented a report on the moving image genre/form project to LC managers. The report

• explains the function of genre/form headings, including the impact that they have on both cataloging operations and end-user searching;
• reviews the history of genre/form headings in MARC format and at LC over the last decade;
• explains the logic of choosing moving image headings as the experimental group and the principles and policies that CPSO developed as the project progressed; and,
• recommends the expansion of genre/form headings beyond moving images and radio programs into such disciplines as law, music, literature, cartography, and religion.

From an email message.

The report says that the prefered method of entering genre/form information is 655 rather than subfield v. Is this the general consensus? Has any research been done? Any MLIS student even written a paper on the pros and cons of each approach?

Classify from OCLC

Classify is a service from OCLC. Search, the resulting FRBR set is checked and then the classification numbers used displayed. Quick, simple way to get a class number. No need to be an OCLC member. Does Dewey, NLM, and LCC at least. Not sure about other less used classification schemes, like the one at the US Geological Survey.

Seen on Lorcan Dempsey's weblog.

PRISM News

PRISM (Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata) has announced the availability of the new PRISM Cookbook.

The PRISM Cookbook builds on the PRISM Specification and assumes users have a basic understanding of metadata and PRISM. It does not answer questions such as “What is metadata?”, “What is PRISM?”, and “Why choose PRISM?”, but assists implementers by providing a set of practical implementation steps for a chosen set of use cases and provides insights into more sophisticated PRISM capabilities.

There is also an online video about the Cookbook.

A Best Buy

Special offer for NEW members: JOIN WAML FOR 1/2 OFF

The Western Association of Map Libraries (WAML) is looking for folks who want to expand their knowledge of maps and geospatial information through fun-filled networking opportunities and information-packed meetings and journals!

$15 (normally $30 a year) -- Good for NEW members only. Membership offer good from now till July 31, 2008.

The Western Association of Map Libraries (WAML) is an independent association of map librarians and other people with an interest in maps and map librarianship. Membership in WAML is open to any individual interested in furthering the purpose of the Association which is "to encourage high standards in every phase of the organization and administration of map libraries."

BENEFITS:
Subscription to the Information Bulletin (IB) Discounted registration fees to WAML's bi-annual meetings Practical workshops on topics such as aerial photos, scanning projects, and map cataloging Networking regarding geospatial and cartographic information Participation in WAML's electronic discussion board

INFORMATION BULLETIN
WAML's Information Bulletin is issued three times a year and enjoys worldwide readership. It includes feature articles, photo essays, Association business, book and electronic resources reviews, new map lists, and selected news and notes.

MEETINGS!!!
WAML meetings are THE most fun-filled library-related events you can attend!! They occur in the Spring and Fall. They are small (around 50 people), held in great locations such as Las Vegas, Denver, Flagstaff, and Pasadena, and have great field trips and delicious banquets. The presentations deal only with geospatial topics.
Roundtable discussions and workshops take place at every meeting. The registration fee runs from $35 to $60. The accommodations are reasonably priced, the camaraderie is great, and the tone is relaxed. Often, WAML has a 'map exchange' where attendees bring their withdrawn and extra copies of maps and make them available for others.

We are headed to the San Diego in October 2008!!

Field trips have taken WAML members to national parks, volcanoes, mountain tops, museums, and vineyards/wineries.

In the last 5 years, WAML has met in Las Vegas, Denver, Flagstaff, Pasadena, Vancouver, Fairbanks, Chico California, and Santa Cruz. Future meeting sites include San Diego, Salt Lake City, and Yosemite National Park.

If that weren't enough, you are invited to give presentations at the conferences OR write articles for the Information Bulletin. Presentations and papers run from the very formal to 'how I done good.' In the past WAML presenters and IB authors have been not just librarians but scholars, novelists, artists, map collectors, map dealers, scientists, and cartographers.

Come join us. The price is right. The offer is available for a limited time. Good times, good friends and good maps await you!

Copied from email on distribution list.

Viewzi

Viewzi is a new search tool, a search mash-up (smash?). They have made it possible to create different views and parameters for a search. On search brings up screens for photos, videos, 4 search engines combined, etc. Interesting approach, they will have an open API where custom views can be constructed.

This inspired a couple of thoughts, first, there is no book search. There is an Amazon view. How about one with Worldcat, LibraryThing, Open Content Alliance, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg. Or whatever sites/collections make sense.

Second, is there anything here that could make our OPACs, i.e. the front ends to our catalogs, better. What ideas, or presentation or results work. The views often break things up by facets, MP3s, Videos, Websites, etc. Is faceting the results useful? Other times they provide results from just one resource, Techcrunch for instance. Can this inform our metasearch tool development? Maybe not, but maybe there is something worth considering.

Open Shelves Classification

LibraryThing is building the Open Shelves Classification (OSC), a free, "humble," modern, open-source, crowd-sourced replacement for the Dewey Decimal System.

The vision. The Open Shelves Classification should be:

• Free. Free both to use and to change, with all schedules and assignments in the public domain and easily accessible in bulk format. Nothing other than common consent will keep the project at LibraryThing. Indeed, success may well entail it leaving the site entirely.
• Modern. The OSC should map to current mental models--knowing these will eventually change, but learning from the ways other systems have and haven't grown, and hoping to remain useful for some decades, at least.
• Humble. No system--and least of all a two-dimensional shelf order--can get at "reality." The goal should be to create a something limited and humble--a "pretty good" system, a "mostly obvious" system, even a "better than the rest" system--that allows library patrons to browse a collection physically and with enjoyment.
• Collaboratively written. The OSC itself should be written socially--slowly, with great care and testing--but socially. (I imagine doing this on the LibraryThing Wiki.)
• Collaboriately assigned. As each level of OSC is proposed and ratified, members will be invited to catalog LibraryThing's books according to it. (I imagine using LibraryThing's fielded bibliographic wiki, Common Knowledge.)

I also favor:

• Progressive development. I see members writing it "level-by-level" (DDC's classes, divisions, etc.), in a process of discussion, schedule proposals, adoption of a tenative schedule, collaborative assignemnt of a large number of books, statistical testing, more discussion, revision and "solidification."
• Public-library focus. LibraryThing members are not predominantly academics, and academic collections, being larger, are less likely to change to a new system. Also, academic collections mostly use the Library of Congress System, which is already in the public domain.
• Statistical testing. To my knowledge, no classification system has ever been tested statistically as it was built. Yet there are various interesting ways of doing just that. For example, it would be good to see how a proposed shelf-order matches up against other systems, like DDC, LCC, LCSH and tagging. If a statistical cluster in one of these systems ends up dispersed in OSC, why?

Universal Decimal Classification

Maintenance of the Universal Decimal Classification: overview of the past and preparations for the future by Aida Slavic and Maria Ines Cordeiro and Gerhard Riesthuis appears in International Cataloguing and Bibliographic Control 37(2):pp. 23-29.

The paper highlights some aspects of the UDC management policy for 2007 and onwards. Following an overview of the long history of modernization of the classification, which started in the 1960s and has influenced the scheme's revision and development since 1990, major changes and policies from the recent history of the UDC revision are summarized. The perspective of the new editorial team, established in 2007, is presented. The new policy focuses on the improved organization and efficiency of editorial work and the improvement of UDC products.

Better Targeted Ads

Computing Semantic Similarity Using Ontologies by Rajesh Thiagarajan, Geetha Manjunath, and Markus Stumptner is a new HP Lab Report.

Determining semantic similarity of two sets of words that describe two entities is an important problem in web mining (search and recommendation systems), targeted advertisement and domains that need semantic content matching. Traditional Information Retrieval approaches even when extended to include semantics by performing the similarity comparison on concepts instead of words/terms, may not always determine the right matches when there is no direct overlap in the exact concepts that represent the semantics. As the entity descriptions are treated as self-contained units, the relationships that are not explicit in the entity descriptions are usually ignored. We extend this notion of semantic similarity to consider inherent relationships between concepts using ontologies. We propose simple metrics for computing semantic similarity using spreading activation networks with multiple mechanisms for activation (set based spreading and graph based spreading) and concept matching (using bipartite graphs). We evaluate these metrics in the context of matching two user profiles to determine overlapping interests between users. Our similarity computation results show an improvement in accuracy over other approaches, when compared with human-computed similarity. Although the techniques presented here are used to compute similarity between two user profiles, these are applicable to any content matching scenario.

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.