Zotero News

Some bad Zotero news today. They are being sued.

Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters' EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base.

I like Endnote even less now. Just the threat of this could be enough to make a small school back off.

Information Delivery

I thought this was an interesting way to deliver information, in real time.

The dirty coal industry is planning to launch a major advertising blitz during the presidential debates. The Sierra Club will be keeping them accountable by monitoring the ads and coverage for ‘bogus coal moments’ where they attempt to spread misinformation.

Sign up for text updates via the form below or you can text the keyword DIRTY to 69866 from your mobile phone.

Sign up to receive a mobile alert when a ‘bogus coal moment’ occurs during the debates. The Sierra Club will text you updates throughout the debates and in the future on other major initiatives. You may opt out of these alerts by texting STOP to 69866 at any time.

An immediate response to broadcast media. As a profession how do we find, identify, select, obtain and navigate this information landscape? What about preservation?

SOPAC Now Available

The social OPAC, SOPAC is now available.

Thesocialopac.net is the official website of the Social OPAC application suite--an open source social discovery platform for bibliographic data. The purpose of this site is to build a cohesive community of users and developers around the SOPAC project suite.

Library Weblogs

Public Library Blogs: 252 Examples and Academic Library Blogs: 231 Examples by Walt Crawford are both soon to go out of print. Get your copies while you still can.

Introduction to Metadata

Now available, Version 3.0 of Introduction to Metadata by Tony Gill, Anne J. Gilliland, Maureen Whalen, and Mary S. Woodley ; edited by Murtha Baca.

Metadata Tools for Institutional Repositories

Nichols, David M. and Paynter, Gordon W. and Chan, Chu-Hsiang and Bainbridge, David and McKay, Dana and Twidale, Michael B. and Blandford, Ann (2008) Metadata tools for institutional repositories.

Current institutional repository software provides few tools to help metadata librarians understand and analyse their collections. In this paper we compare and contrast metadata analysis tools that were developed simultaneously, but independently, at two New Zealand institutions during a period of national investment in research repositories: the Metadata Analysis Tool (MAT) at The University of Waikato, and the Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS) at the National Library of New Zealand. The tools have many similarities: they are convenient, online, on-demand services that harvest metadata using OAI-PMH, they were developed in response to feedback from repository administrators, and they both help pinpoint specific metadata errors as well as generating summary statistics. They also have significant differences: one is a dedicated tool while the other is part of a wider access tool; one gives a holistic view of the metadata while the other looks for specific problems; one seeks patterns in the data values while the other checks that those values conform to metadata standards. Both tools work in a complementary manner to existing web-based administration tools. We have observed that discovery and correction of metadata errors can be quickly achieved by switching web browser views from the analysis tool to the repository interface, and back. We summarise the findings from both tools’ deployment into a checklist of requirements for metadata analysis tools.

WorldCat Tagging

Tagging is now available in WorldCat. It will be interesting to see how extensive, and so useful, tagging becomes here.

You and your users can now keep track of your favorite items in WorldCat through tags—keywords that help you classify or describe an item. Tags are displayed in search results lists and may help you find similar items or organize items in a way that makes sense to you. You can add as many tags as you would like to an unlimited set of items. You can view and maintain all of your personalized tags from your WorldCat profile page. Plus, you can also browse items using the tags other people have contributed.

Latest Code4Lib Journal

The fourth issue of Code4Lib Journal is now available. Articles include:

• Auto-Populating an ILL form with the Serial Solutions Link Resolver API by Daniel Talsky
• Mining Data from ISI Web of Science Reports by Alfred Kraemer
• Unveiling Jangle: Untangling Library Resources and Exposing them through the Atom Publishing Protocol by Ross Singer and James Farrugia
• LibraryH3lp: A New Flexible Chat Reference System by Pam Sessoms and Eric Sessoms
• OpenBook WordPress Plugin: Open Source Access to Bibliographic Data by John Miedema
• The Library Search Engine: A Smart Solution for Integrating Resources Beyond Library Holdings b y Karin Herm and Sibylle Volz
• BOOK REVIEW: Two Books about FRBR, Compared by Christine Schwartz

OAI Tool

Nichols, David M. and Chan, Chu-Hsiang and Bainbridge, David and McKay, Dana and Twidale, Michael B. (2008) A lightweight metadata quality tool. In Proceedings The 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 385-388, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (US).

We describe a Web-based metadata quality tool that provides statistical descriptions and visualisations of Dublin Core metadata harvested via the OAI protocol. The lightweight nature of development allows it to be used to gather contextualized requirements and some initial user feedback is discussed.

Video Metadata

Lostify is a free tool for Apple users wishing to add metadata to their videos.

Lostify is a metadata tagger for MP4 videos. It runs on Mac OS X, and the tags it produces aim to be compatible with iTunes, the iPod, iPhone, Front Row and Apple TV. This means that after you tag a video using Lostify, it will show up in iTunes, iPod etc. appropriately as a TV Show, Music Video, etc., with all the episode information, season information, etc. intact.

Movers & Shakers

Know an innovative librarian? The 2009 Movers & Shakers nominations are open. Let's get some catalogers in the mix.

MARCXML 2 MODS

The transformation from MARCXML to MODS 3.3 has been finalized.

The new MARC to MODS 3.3 stylesheet. Changes in the stylesheet reflect changes made in the MARC to MODS mapping for MODS 3.3

The MARC to MODS 3.3 mapping.

Report and Recommendations for Moving Image Works

OLAC has a draft of the Report and Recommendations for Moving Image Works

OLAC's Cataloging Policy Committee (CAPC) created a task force earlier this year to investigate and make recommendations on issues related to FRBR-based work-level records for moving image materials.

The task force has recently completed an initial draft report with recommendations that attempts to define a moving image work record, draw boundaries for such a record, identify attributes and relationships that are important to include in such records, and assess the relative importance of these attributes and relationships....

The task force is interested in feedback from the wider cataloging community and will take comments on the draft through Friday, October 17.

Hurricane Ike

The Texas Library Association is assembling reports on libraries affected by Hurricane Ike and has put them online. You can donate to the Disaster Relief Fund.

The Society of Southwest Archivists has set up an unofficial Wiki so that repositories can report news on Hurricane Ike and how they fared. Since it is an unofficial site, anyone can add content, and many libraries are posting there as well.

Adapted from an email distributed by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

Citation Software

Citations are tricky, so many different formats. FreeCite is a new open-source tool in this space.

Please help us beta test "FreeCite", a new citation parser for non-structured bibliographic data. FreeCite is the result of collaboration between the Brown University Library and Public Display, a Providence-based software company founded by and employing many Brown grads. Public Display's core business is information extraction. Partial funding for this project was provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

FreeCite is implemented in Ruby on Rails and uses the CRF++ library implementation of conditional random fields. The model is trained on the CORA dataset with lexical augmentation from the Directory of Research and Researchers at Brown (DRR-B).The API and code are available.

iPhone App

There is now a WorldCat app for your iPhone.

Find what you want in a library near you with WorldCat, a global catalog of library collections.

• Search many libraries at once for an item and then locate it in a library nearby
• Find books, music, and videos to check out
• Find research articles and digital items (like audiobooks) that can be directly viewed or downloaded

Additions to the MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions

The codes listed below have been recently approved for use in MARC 21 records. The codes will be added to MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions.

The codes should not be used in exchange records until after November 15, 2008. This 60-day waiting period is required to provide MARC 21 implementers time to include newly defined codes in any validation tables they may apply to the MARC fields where the codes are used.

Classification Code Sources

The following codes are for use in subfield $2 in field 084 in Bibliographic and Community Information records (Other Classification Number), in subfield $2 in field 084 in Classification records (Classification Scheme and Edition) and in subfield $2 in field 065 in Authority records (Other Classification Number).

Additions:

cslj

Elazar, David H. & Elazar, Daniel J. A classification system for libraries of Judaica (Lanham, MD: University Press of America) [use only after November 15, 2008]

nwbib

Nordrhein-Westfalische Bibliographie (Kaln: hbz - Hochschulbibliothekszentrum NRW) [use only after November 15, 2008]

rich

Richardson classification system (Yardley, Pa.: F. S. Cook & Son) [use only after November 15, 2008]

rpb

Rheinland-Pfalzische Bibliographie [use only after November 15, 2008]

skb

Sachbuch-Systematik fur Katholische offentliche Büchereien (Munchen: St. Michaelsbund) [use only after November 15, 2008]

sswd

Schlagwortnormdatei [use only after November 15, 2008]

Other Sources
Field 210 - Abbreviated Title
The following code is for use in subfield $2 in field 210 in Bibliographic records (Abbreviated Title).

Addition:

inisaljt

INIS: authority list for journal titles [use only after November 15, 2008]

IFLA RDA Satellite Meeting Materials

The PowerPoint presentations and speaker notes from the IFLA RDA Satellite Meeting held in conjunction with the 2008 IFLA Conference are now available on the JSC website. The talks include:

• Resource Description and Access Overview: History, Principles, Conceptual Models by Barbara Tillett. See also the Speaker notes
• Resource Description and Access: Structure, Content and the Development process by Deirdre Kiorgaard. See also the Speaker notes
• RDA vocabularies and concepts by Gordon Dunsire
• The International Community’s Reaction to RDA by Anders Cato
• Between Yesterday and Tomorrow – On Track for International Standards by Renate Gömpel (presented by Christel Hengel-Dittrich)
• Beyond RDA’s First Release by Pam Gatenby RDA demonstration

Hurricane Ike

Came through Ike just fine. We are all safe. The house only had minor damage. We have power and water. Yesterday I drove by my library and no windows were missing. That should mean no major damage to the collection. No power up there, mold is the only concern. Came through it pretty well.

Enriching the Catlog

Dynamic Catalogue Enrichment with SeeAlso Link Servers by Jakob Voss appears in Proceedings European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL), Aarhus, Denmark.

The poster presents architecture and usage of SeeAlso, a simple protocol for link servers that is used to dynamically enrich catalouges of libraries in the German Common library network GBV.

Currently the tool is at version 0.50, so it may take some tech savvy to get it up and running.