Beloit College Mindset List

The Beloit College Mindset List has once again arrived. Always enlightening and fun.

RSS and Rights Metadata

RSS4Lib has simple instructions for including Creative Commons rights metadata in your RSS feeds.

Semantic Web Podcast

The Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science has a podcast by Rober Wolfe, The Semantic Library: RDF in Practice. Some of the topics he discusses are:

• SIMILE, Semantic Interoperability of Metadata in unLike Environments
• Babel, Format Converter developed by the SIMILE Project
• Longwell, A SIMILE demo by MIT Libraries
• W3C Semantic Web Activity, Simple Knowledge Organization System
• Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange

21 Aug. 2008 Listening to this on my commute. Fascinating. So much to consider.

‡biblios Released

LibLime announces the release of their open-source cataloging tool, ‡biblios.

At Code4lib 2007 you may have attended a presentation by yours truly about a new open-source cataloging editor initiative at LibLime called ‡biblios. In case you missed it, there's a video of the presentation available from: http://www.code4lib.org/conference/2008/catalfo

Over this past week we put the finishing touches on the project Web site and the .9 release of the ‡biblios editor.

Dangers in the Library

Who was prepared in library school for all the dangerous critters in the library?

Hebrew Script Tool

lc-hebrew-detransliteration allows you to convert from Library of Congress Romanized Hebrew to Hebrew script. Great for adding those 880 fields.

Work and Edition Fields

The Open Library has been doing some FRBR work on their records. They have been trying to decide which fields are work and which expression fields. Some end up as both. Not MARC BTW. They welcome comments.

A Techie Looks at Libraries

Digital Web Magazine has an article on libraries, Getting The Most Out Of Your Library by William Hicks. Some interesting statemnents:

• Think of the library system as something akin to the open-source movement before software.
• You will not be happy with many library websites.
• So you found the library catalog, fired off a search and found an item that sounds mildly intriguing. The result page probably didn’t have any real reviews of the book, it is doubtful there was a book cover, nor apparently any other related items. You’re most likely staring at a title, some notes on the author, a bunch of useless publication data, some subject headings, notes, and a string of letters and numbers. Amazon.com it is not. It’s not built for you the user. It’s built for the vendors, librarians, and their staff.
• While you may not get instant gratification from a library, and few if any are really cutting-edge when it comes to their use of web technologies, there is something to be said for the diversity and quality of information they provide you in your daily development tasks.

WorldCat and the LibX Firefox toolbar are both mentioned.

Telescope Library Exhibit

Apply by Sept. 19 to host "Visions of the Universe: Four Centuries of Discovery"

Public libraries are invited to apply to host “Visions of the Universe: Four Centuries of Discovery,” a traveling exhibition developed by the America Library Association (ALA) Public Programs Office in cooperation with the Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, to mark the International Year of Astronomy in 2009. The exhibit will travel to 40 selected public libraries from January 2009 through December 2010.

Free Covers from LibraryThing

LibraryThing is making nearly one million book covers available for free. It is pretty simple coding to grab them. Thanks Tim et al.

Update 12 Aug. 2008 I just added 37 links to covers from a page and none of the items had covers in LibraryThing. One million might be enough for a public library, not so much for a research library. Oh well.

WorldCat Search API

Nice for members of OCLC, WorldCat Search API (Web service).

The WorldCat Search API allows your application to search the WorldCat catalog—which indexes the collections of thousands of member libraries around the world—and retrieve:

• lists of bibliographic records, and individual records, for library-held items;
• information about WorldCat libraries that have cataloged a particular item; and
• direct links to those libraries' Web catalog records for the item, when available

Your application will allow users to discover books, videos, music, electronic content and more through WorldCat.

How the API works

• Send searches in OpenSearch or SRU CQL syntax
• Receive OpenSearch responses in RSS or Atom format
• Receive SRU responses in MARC XML or Dublin Core
• Receive MARC XML content for a single OCLC record
• Receive geographically-sorted library holdings information (each including the institution's name, location and a catalog link) within requests for single records
• Receive records in standard bibliographic citation formats (APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, and Turabian)

Who can use this tool.

Panama City Beach Library

Panama City Beach Library
Originally uploaded by dbigwood

While on vacation I stopped into the library to check my e-mail. I was greeted by a person at the front desk. Very friendly, not like the Wal-Mart greeters. I was able to use the machine to check my email, Facebook page, and OK some comments to this weblog. Nothing seemed to be blocked. There was a 30 minute a day time limit, it seems a silly rule, if the machines are empty, but....

While I was there other folks were using the computers browsing the fiction, reading a magazine. It was a very small library, but they did have a childrens' collection and provided story time.

They caught me taking this picture and asked about it, curious not snooping.

Koha 3.0

The Koha folks have announced that a packaged release of Koha 3.00.00 is now available. It can be download from the usual location:

http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00.tar.gz
http://download.koha.org/koha-3.00.00.tar.gz.sig

The 3.0 manual is available and will continually be updated.

LibraryThing API

News from LibraryThing.

LibraryThing just released a free, CC-attribution-licensed Web Services XML API to our "Common Knowledge" system, including series data, fictional characters, author dates and much else. I'm particularly stoked about the series data. I think it's of exceptional quality, suitable for use in OPACs (eg., Star+Wars). Anyway, in a catalog or not, there are a lot of cool things to do with it.

OCLC Crosswalk Web Service Demo

New demo tool from OCLC Research, Crosswalk Web Service.

The purpose of the Crosswalk Web Service (CWS) is to translate a group of metadata records from one format into another.

For this service, a metadata format is defined as a triple of:

• standard - The metadata standard of the record (e.g. MARC, DC, MODS, etc ...)
• structure - The structure of how the metadata is expressed in the record (e.g. XML, RDF, ISO 2709, etc ...)
• encoding - The character encoding of the metadata (e.g. MARC8, UTF-8, Windows 1251, etc ...)

To use the service you will have to write your own client software. With the aid of the WSDL file, this should be relatively easy. This documentation, however, does not cover how to write the client.

Facebook Blog Network

Still need a few more confirmations on the Blog Network on Facebook that I'm responsible for New and Noteworthy. Still need plenty for Recent Additions. Catalogablog is doing fine.

Vacation

I'll be on vacation next week. No WiFi in the beach house. I may or may not bring a laptop. So, most likely, no news for a week after today. Any good dancing, eating, hiking, gardens in the Panama City, Fla. area?

ORE Challenge at RepoCamp

There will be a cash prize of $2000, sponsored by Microsoft Research, for the the best prototype that uses and promotes OAI-ORE. This challenge is open to teams from anywhere, whether or not they attend RepoCamp. The competition deadline for prototype entries is August 8th (two weeks on from RepoCamp).

Training PDF Products Available for Free Download

Good news from LC.

On October 1, 2008, CDS will discontinue selling PDF training products. Instead, the following PDF training courses will be made available for free download:

• The workshop materials from the Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program (SCCTP): Basic Serials Cataloging; Advanced Serials Cataloging, Integrating Resources Cataloging, Electronic Serials Cataloging, and Serials Holdings.
• The workshop materials from Cooperative Cataloging Training (CCT): Basic Subject Cataloging using LCSH, Basic Creation of Name and Title Authorities, Fundamentals of Series Authorities, and Fundamentals of Library of Congress Classification.
• The workshop materials from Cataloging for the 21st Century (Cat21): Rules and Tools for Cataloging Internet Resources, Metadata Standards and Applications, Metadata and Digital Library Development, Digital Project Planning and Management Basics, Principles of Controlled Vocabulary and Thesaurus Design.

The maintenance of these PDF training products will be handled by the Instructional development and Training Division of the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Control Directorate at the Library of Congress. Additional information about these workshops is available online.

CDS will continue to sell printed training products such as Cataloging Concepts and MARC Content Designation for the present.

CDS will not be issuing refunds to customers who purchased PDF course materials prior to October 1, 2008.

Database of Databases

The Internet Search Environment Number (ISEN) intends to catalog catalogs and other databases.

You know how the ISBN is assigned to books. Over 1 million books are assigned ISBNs each year. What ISEN plans to do is emulate that system for databases. We would assign over 1 million databases ISEN or Internet Search Environment Numbers once the system is in place in its first year. There may be as many as 5 million in the backlog for cataloging by a social nework of librarians. Life Science databases would be cataloged by life science librarians, law resources by law librarians, etc...

Then we would create a database of databases or search engine only for databases. Your hit list would only be databases instead of PDF files, blog postings and random HTML files. We pull out the databases. The hits you get would be the interface to databases which provides access to upwards of 500 to 650 times the amount of information available on the "surface web" indexed by the major search engines. ISEN reveals the what is called the "deep web".

They have a weblog and mailing list.