International Authority Data Number

"The IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR) is pleased to announce the availability on IFLANET of a paper titled "A Review of the Feasibility of an International Authority Data Number (ISADN)". Prepared for the Working Group by Dr. Barbara B. Tillett, the paper has now been approved by the IFLA Cataloguing Section Standing Committee and is thus being made available via IFLANET."

RDFa in XHTML

The technical specification RDFa in XHTML Syntax and Processing was formally accepted as a Web Consortium Technical Recommendation by W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee.

The current Web is primarily made up of an enormous number of documents that have been created using HTML. These documents contain significant amounts of structured data, which is largely unavailable to tools and applications. When publishers can express this data more completely, and when tools can read it, a new world of user functionality becomes available, letting users transfer structured data between applications and web sites, and allowing browsing applications to improve the user experience: an event on a web page can be directly imported into a user's desktop calendar; a license on a document can be detected so that users can be informed of their rights automatically; a photo's creator, camera setting information, resolution, location and topic can be published as easily as the original photo itself, enabling structured search and sharing.

RDFa is a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language. This document specifies how to use RDFa with XHTML.

eXtensible Catalog Project

The eXtensible Catalog Project has announced that they have launched their new website.

This new website will be the main vehicle for distributing our open-source software once it is released in 2009. In the mean time, the website contains a wealth of information regarding the project, including publications, an overview of the software we are developing and the technologies that software will use, and a blog that has already been in use.

American Libraries

Some news from American Libraries.

1. Our weekly e-newsletter, American Libraries Direct, is now available to anyone who wants to sign up for it, not just ALA members. There is a sign-up form, as well as the FAQ.
2. American Libraries has launched its own blog, AL Inside Scoop. Editor-in-chief Leonard Kniffel offers an insider’s view of goings-on at ALA headquarters and what hot topics ALA staffers are talking about in the hallways. Associate Editor Greg Landgraf offers his perspective from "the lower floors" of what many see as the ALA ivory tower.
3. Login is no longer required to view the current issue of the American Libraries print magazine online (in PDF format), or to view the archives, which date back to the January 2003 issue. First-time viewers will need to install the ebrary reader to view issues. Firefox 3 users installing the reader for the first time will need a workaround, to make the ebrary reader work with their browser.

Topic Maps

Steve Pepper has written an article on Topic Maps for the 3rd edition of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences. "This article provides a comprehensive treatment of the core concepts, in addition to the background and current status of the standard, its relationship to traditional knowledge organization techniques, and examples of the kinds of applications for which it is being used."

Open Office and BitTorrent

Open Office 3.0 is released today. It is also Open Access Day, nice fit there. But don't bother to try to download it now, the servers are overwelmed. You can grab it using BitTorrent. A nice P2P tool that is for more than stealing movies.

BitTorrent is a P2P method where a central 'tracker' keeps track of who is downloading and sharing specific files.

When using BitTorrent to download OpenOffice.org, your computer automatically uses spare bandwidth to help share the file with others, and this means that you don't have to put up with slower downloads during peak download times (such as just after a release), because the more people downloading, the more people sharing.

Also, your download is automatically checked for integrity to make sure that it is identical to the official version.

To use BitTorrent technology, you must have a BitTorrent "client" installed.

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records

Renear, Allen H. and Dubin, David (2007) Three of the Four FRBR Group 1 Entity Types are Roles, not Types. In Grove, Andrew, Eds. Proceedings 70th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) 44, Milwaukee, WI (US).

We examine the conceptual model of the "bibliographic universe" presented in IFLA's Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and argue, applying ontology design recommendations proposed by N. Guarino and C. Welty, that three of the four Group 1 entity types might be more accurately conceptualized as roles.

Off Topic: Timeline Tool

Does anyone know of a free/cheap tool to create a timeline for history? Must be able to handle BCE dates. Thanks

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

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

The code should not be used in exchange records until after December 10, 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.

Term, Name, Title Sources

The following code is for use in:

subfield $2 in fields 600-657 (Subject Added Entries/Index Terms) in Bibliographic and Community Information records;

subfield 662 (Subject Added Entry) in Bibliographic records;

subfield $2 in fields 700-754 (Index Terms) in Classification records;

subfield $2 in fields 700-788 (Heading Linking Entries) in Authority records;

subfield $f in field 040 (Cataloging Source) in Authority records.

Addition:

msh

Trimboli, T., and Martyn S. Marianist subject headings

DataRSS

The latest issue of Nodalities has an interesting article, Anatomy Of A SearchMonkey by Peter Mika. It is a run-down of Yahoo's new Semantic Web search platform. The part that interested me was a flavor of ATOM, DataRSS.

These considerations led to the development of DataRSS, an extension of Atom for carrying structure data as part of feeds. A standard based on Atom immediately opens up the option of submitting metadata as a feed. Atom is an XML-based format which can be both input and output of XML transformation. The extension provides the data itself as well as metadata such as which application generated the data and when was it last updated.

Cataloger’s Desktop Enhancement

LC has announced "The Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS) is pleased to announce that its flagship online cataloging documentation resource, Cataloger’s Desktop, has been enhanced to include OCLC’s Bibliographic Formats and Standards." About time.

MoinMoin Wiki Syntax for Description Set Profiles

The Dublin Core folks have a draft, A MoinMoin Wiki Syntax for Description Set Profiles

This document describes a MoinMoin wiki syntax for a Description Set Profile as defined in the DCMI Working Draft "Description Set Profiles: A constraint language for Dublin Core Application Profiles" of March 2008 [DC-DSP], which in turn is based on the DCMI Abstract Model [ABSTRACT-MODEL]. It is recommended to have some understanding of the concepts of Description Set Profile (abbreviated DSP in the rest of this document) before reading this document.

A DSP is a way of describing structural constraints on a description set and is not directly intended for human consumption. However, with the wiki syntax for DSPs described here, it is possible to mix normal wiki syntax with DSP-specific wiki syntax in order to document an Application Profile. This means that from the same source it is possible to create:

• A Dublin Core Application Profile that contains wiki syntax for a Description Set Profile, but is rendered as an HTML page for human consumption
• A formal serialization in XML for the same Description Set Profile, used for machine (computer) consumption.

Once again the DCMI Abstract Model is a basis for the document (like RDA), have to get to know it better.

Draft Version of Jangle Spec

Email from Ross Singer, widely distributed.

Jangle, an open specification to apply the Atom Publishing Protocol to library services and resources, has just released a draft version of a 1.0 release spec.

The goal of Jangle is to provide a very simple and easily understandable RESTful interface to library data that can be accessed with common commodity Atom clients.

The draft spec has been released to get feedback on the usefulness and clarity of the specification and to solicit ideas for how to improve Jangle for use in actual production environments. If you have any opinions, positive or negative; criticisms, constructive or otherwise, feel free to leave comments.

Grammar and sentence structure could definitely use attention.

For a more in-depth introduction to Jangle, there is an article in the latest issue of the Code4Lib Journal, Unveiling Jangle: Untangling Library Resources and Exposing them through the Atom Publishing Protocol (although the API responses have changed since this article was written, the basic architecture remains the same).

To join the Jangle development process, feel free to join our Google Group or contribute to the development.

OLAC Handouts

Handouts from the OLAC Conference are available. Handouts, not just cryptic PowerPoints.

MARC Records for the DOE Information Bridge

The DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) is now providing MARC records for the full-text reports available through the DOE Information Bridge. Like all OSTI products, the OSTI MARC records are available free of charge. The records are available through the MARC Records page of the OSTI website. Options for downloading include subject category, year, and OSTI ID number. The OSTI MARC Records are derived from existing Information Bridge records.

Information Bridge provides free public access to full-text documents and bibliographic citations of DOE research report literature. Documents are primarily from 1991 forward and were produced by DOE, the DOE contractor community, and/or DOE grantees. Legacy documents - including U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) documents dating back to the 1940s - and their MARC Records, are added as they become available. Visit OSTI's Library Tools & Special Services Web page.

LC Email Address Changed

With the administrative reorganization of the Library of Congress/Library Services/Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate on Oct. 1, 2008, the Cataloging Policy and Support Office has become the Policy and Standards Division and its email account has been changed to policy@loc.gov Anything addressed to cpso@loc.gov will be forwarded to the new address but only for the next 30 days, at which point any mail so addressed will be bounced back to the sender as address unknown. The email addresses of individuals remain unchanged.

St Jerome

Today is the feast day of St Jerome, patron saint of libraries and librarians.

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.

Work Records for Music

The Music Library Association's Bibliographic Control Committee (BCC) has announced the availability of the Final Report of The BCC Working Group on Work Records for Music.

The recommendations in the final report cannot be applied in a current, "real world" environment. Instead, the working group provided a conceptual document based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) conceptual models that addresses what a work record for music should encompass.

Cataloging Playaway Devices

The Playaways Cataloging Joint Task Force, comprised of members from OLAC and MLA, has announced that the final version of their Guide to Cataloging Playaway Devices Based on AACR2 Chapters 6 and 9 has been approved. The Guide is available in PDF, HTML, or MS Word formats.

NH Classification Schedule for Artistic Photography

Faculty want the artistic photography books with the rest of the art books? Class NH is an alternative to the way LC handles these materials.

The NH schedule is designed for the classification of photography books of an artistic nature. It was initially compiled for the 4th edition of N, which was issued in 1970. When the Library of Congress rejected the proposed subclass for art photography, it was published by ARLIS/NA in 1974. NH has been adopted by a number of libraries with strong collections of artistic photography as an alternative to TR, which emphasizes the technical aspects of photography.

Prototype a Cooperative "Identities Hub"

I've complained off-and-on about how much is lost because small special libraries can't contribute to OCLC. For instance, without OCLC membership we can't be NACO participants. Well, OCLC is taking a step in a better direction with the Identities Hub.

The current LC/NACO contributor model has severe limitations, both in who is enabled to add and edit authority records and the rules that constrain what information can be entered (even if the cataloger knows more information).The intellectual work that librarians who are not NACO contributors do in the course of creating bibliographic records is untapped. The expertise in archival and museum communities is not reflected. Scholars have expertise to contribute to more clearly differentiate creators of works and do so within the Web environment.

Only an announcement at this point, I look forward to seeing what develops.

Comics and Google

The Google Chrome comic is by Scott McCloud. Google was wise to choose him since he is a master of the nonfiction sequencial graphic format. His ground breaking work was using a comic to describe comics, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

Dublin Core Abstract Model

Karen Coyle provides an introduction to the Dublin Core Abstract Model (DCAM). It is something that deserves to be better uderstood and studied. I've heard that it, along with FRBR, is a basis for RDA. FRBR over the past 10 or so years has become somewhat known and taught in classes. I haven't seen the same dissemination of ideas from DCAM. I have considered giving a presentation on it, I believe it is important, but it is sooooo dry. Maybe Karen can begin to make it more widely known.

Microformats, Rel-Tag

I like microformats, just another metadata format really. Lately I've been looking at the rel-tag. It says what a page is about. Can it handle a phrase "Paul Spudis", for example? Doesn't seem to be able to do that. Pretty worthless otherwise. Examples? I've been using the hCal microformat and that seems to work pretty well. With my Firefox extension I can drop the info right into Outlook. I've got the rel-tag to work but can't seem to get a phrase to work. Saying a page is about the Lunar and Planetary Institute is a lot more useful than saying it is about institute. Any suggestions? Anyone else using microformats?

TechKNOW

The most recent issue of TechKNOW is now available. Issue 14, no. 2 includes:

• OCLC's Enhance Program: The Best-Kept Secret of Quality Control / by Sevim McCutcheon, Catalog Librarian, Kent State University
• What will we do when the 440 Field Becomes Obsolete?
• Book Review: Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front
• Innovation @ Our Library: Floating Collections at Columbus Metropolitan Library / by Marihelen Hatcher, Public Services Administrator, Columbus Metropolitan Library
• Ohio Library Council Technical Services Retreat: Mohican III-Looking Beyond the Horizon / by Fred Gaieck, Librarian, Ohio Reformatory for Women, Marysville, Ohio
• OLAC/MOUG Conference is Just Around the Corner / by Mary Huismann, Music/Media Cataloging Coordinator, University of Minnesota Libraries
• Coordinator's Corner / by Ian Fairclough, George Mason University
• A Summary of LC's Response to the Report of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control / by Amey L. Park, Database Maintenance Librarian, Kent State University
• Book Review: The Complete RFID Handbook: A Manual and DVD for Assessing, Implementing and Managing Radio Frequency Identification Technologies in Libraries

ORE in Atom Proposal

Comment quickly on this one, Revising the ORE Profile of Atom, the specs are due the end of September.

This document describes a possible revision of the serialization of Resource Maps in Atom. The core characteristics of the revision are:

1. Convey ORE semantics in Atom as add-ons/extensions to regular Atom Feeds by introducing explicit ORE relationships instead of by according ORE-specific meaning to pre-defined Atom relationship values as is the case in the current 0.9 serialization.
2. Express an ORE Aggregation at the level of an Atom Entry not an Atom Feed; there are no ORE-specific semantics at the Feed level.

Off Topic - Gaming

I've never played e-games. When Pac-Man came out tried it once or twice then stopped. Wasn't fun for me. Same with all the many games in the years since. I once or twice visited a MUD, found it dull. Rather watch re-runs of 3s Company. So it was for years, no excitement in the Xbox, PS2, and all the other things folks lined up for the night before to purchase.

The one exception to this was Dance Dance Revolution. I played this about 6 or 7 years ago and then priced the game and PS2. It seemed a bit too much for our budget then for just one game. I still had no interest in the ones where you sit and watch a screen.

Just about a year ago, we gave a home to some kids. For Christmas we got them a Wii and a couple of games. I was impressed by the imagination behind Super Mario Galaxy. Lego Star Wars was another that I found intriguing, so much so that about a week ago I started playing. Now I'm hooked. This is much better than TV, except it is much harder to turn off. It is engaging, it has problems and puzzles to solve, plenty of rewards, interesting and varied settings and an excellent soundtrack. There is more thinking going on in these games than I realized. In some ways it is more like reading a book than watching a movie. It is active rather than passive.

I always supported gaming in libraries. I don't read romance novels but think they have a place there. Same with the games. Now I think they have more reason to be there than the DVDs we all carry. The Shifted Librarian and all the other gaming librarians have another convert.

Guide to Cataloging DVDs

The DVD Guide Update Task Force of the Cataloging Policy Committee (CAPC) has completed the draft of the guide and is interested in your comments and suggestions. Many thanks to Sue Neumeister for placing the draft on the OLAC website in the following areas:

CAPC Publications & Training Materials
CAPC What's New
OLAC What's New

The charge to the Task Force was “to revise the Guide to Cataloging DVDs using AACR2r4 Chapters 7 and 9 and to include additional formats such as audio DVDs (AACR2r4 Chapter 6) and DualDiscs.”

Adapted from the email notice

Koha

There is now a VMWare appliance of Koha 3.0 on Debian. It's not configured, so it can be set up however you want it. This makes it very easy to play with and learn Koha.

Kete 1.1 Released

Kete version 1.1, from the same folks who brought you Koha, has been released.

Kete is software that combines aspects of Digital Libraries/Repositories, Knowledge and Content Management Systems, and collaboration tools such as Wikis to make it easy to add and relate content on a Kete site.

It is also an open source web application written on top of the Ruby on Rails framework.

Some improvements include:

• Privacy Control - ability to designate any item version within a basket as only viewable to its members
• Content Licensing - users can choose from Kete instance's available Licenses for a piece of content they create. Creative Commons licenses are available to be loaded as license options with one command on the server.
• OAI-PMH Repository - an Kete instance can optionally answer OAI-PMH harvester requests for its content.
• Force use of SSL Encryption on Private Items and User Account Information (optional) Kete now can be configured to use HTTPS for all sensitive areas (login, registration, private items, certain administrator functionality).

Open Library Environment (OLE) Project

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has announced that it is participating in the Open Library Environment Project.

With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Open Library Environment (OLE) Project will convene the academic library community in the design of an Open Library Management System built on Service Oriented Architecture. The project leaders are a multi-national group of libraries dedicated to thinking beyond the current model of an Integrated Library System and to designing a new system that is flexible, customizable and able to meet the changing and complex needs of modern, dynamic academic libraries. The end product will be a design document to inform open source library system development efforts, to guide future library system implementations, and to influence current Integrated Library System vendor products.

Dublin Core in XML

The Dublin Core folks are looking for comments.

"Expressing Dublin Core description sets using XML (DC-DS-XML)" by Pete Johnston and Andy Powell has been published as a DCMI Proposed Recommendation for public comment from 1 to 29 September 2008. A related document, "Notes on the DC-DS-XML XML Format", describes the development of the format and its relationship to the DCMI Recommendation "Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML" of April 2003. The Proposed Recommendation supports the W3C specification Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) in the form of an XSLT transform for extracting RDF triples from instances of metadata in the DC-DS-XML format. The specification includes 21 examples together with their equivalent representations in the DC-Text and RDF/XML syntaxes. A W3C XML Schema for the DC-DS-XML format is provided. Interested members of the public are invited to post comments to the DC-ARCHITECTURE mailing list, including [Public Comment] in the subject line.

Browse LCSH Database Links to lcsh.info

The Browse LCSH database (6.5m records) now includes the complete file of 266.857 terms that was made available by the lcsh.info project. That means you find links from our database to the record in lcsh.info to view their innovative display. The notes contained in the lcsh.info records have been included too. LC classes are indexed as well and can be browsed, to find LCSH terms.

LC has improved the findability of authority records recently. They have added a keyword search to the database.

Facebook Application

The Earl Gregg Swem Library has announced the release of it's Facebook application, Swem Tools to the open source community.

Released under the Apache 2.0 license, the project, Facebook Athenaeum, allows libraries to quickly develop and customize a Facebook application that provides a searching interface for a library's catalog, website, databases, or any other search target, pull RSS feeds, and provide users with the ability to show friends their location in the library.

Requirements for the application are relatively light. A set of floor plans in image form, a database compatible with the Pear DB package (MySQL, MSSQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc), and PHP 5.

WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry

OCLC is conducting a beta test of the WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry.

The WorldCat Copyright Evidence Registry (CER) is a community of people, libraries, and other organizations working together to discover and share information about the copyright status of books.

The Copyright Evidence Registry is based on WorldCat, which contains more than 100 million bibliographic records describing items held in thousands of libraries worldwide. In addition to the WorldCat metadata, the Copyright Evidence Registry uses data contributed by libraries and other organizations.

You can search the Copyright Evidence Registry to find information about a book, learn what others have said about its copyright status, and share what you know.

If your library or organization is a Copyright Evidence Registry subscriber, you can run automated copyright rules that you create in the Copyright Evidence Registry to conform to your standards for determining copyright status. The rules help you analyze the information available in the Copyright Evidence Registry and form your own conclusions about copyright status.

Also, you can receive an e-mail notification when information about a book changes within the Copyright Evidence Registry.

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 the online MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions.

The codes should not be used in exchange records until after October 22, 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.

Category Code Source

The following code is for use in subfield $2 in field 072 (Subject Category Code/Code Source) in Authority and Bibliographic records.

Addition:

kkaa

Kokoelmien kuvailun aihealueet (Kokoelmakartta) [PDF: 9 KB; requires a PDF reader to view] [use only after October 22, 2008]

Classification 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:

bar

Barnard, Cyril C. A classification for medical and veterinary libraries. (London: H.K. Lewis) [use only after October 22, 2008]

ekl

Eduskunnan kirjaston luokitus = Library of Parliament Classification [use only after October 22, 2008]

finagri

Finagri-luokitus (Helsinki: Maatalouskirjasto - Agricultural
Library) [use only after October 22, 2008]

kuvacs

Kuvataideakatemian kirjaston luokitusjarjestelma = Finnish Academy of Fine Arts Library Classification (Helsinki: Kuvataideakatemian
kirjasto) [use only after October 22, 2008]

mpkkl

Maanpuolustuskorkeakoulun kirjaston luokitusjarjestelma [use only after October 22, 2008]

siblcs

Sibelius-Akatemian kirjaston luokitusjarjestelma = Sibelius Academy Library classification system [use only after October 22, 2008]
Note: arranged in two sections:

1. Sibelius-Akatemian kirjaston luokitusjarjestelma - kirjojen luokitus = Sibelius Academy Library classification system - book classification scheme
2. Sibelius-Akatemian kirjaston luokitusjarjestelma - nuottien luokitus = Sibelius Academy Library classification system - sheet music classification scheme

suaslc

Seinajoen korkeakoulukirjaston luokitus (Seinajoki: Seinajoen korkeakoulukirjaston luokitus) [use only after October 22, 2008]

taikclas

Taideteollisen korkeakoulun kirjaston luokitus = University of Art and Design Helsinki Library Classification [use only after October 22, 2008]

taykl

Tampereen yliopiston kirjaston luokitus: Systemaattinen osa & Aakkosellinen osa (Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto) [use only after October 22, 2008]

teatkl

Teatterikorkeakoulun kirjaston luokitusopas [use only after October 22, 2008]

tykoma

Turun yliopiston kirjaston vanha luokitus [use only after October 22, 2008]

veera

VEERA-luokitus = VEERA-Klassifikatsiia [use only after October 22, 2008]

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.

Vacation

Next week I'll be on vacation in Panama Beach, Fla. Anyone have suggestions on things to do or see in the area? Thanks.

FRBR Tool for ISIS

Roberto Sturman has announced that the IFPA2 (ISIS FRBR Prototype Application - ver. 2) is now online.

(username/password for dataentry: ifpa2/demo2)

The new implementation of the prototype is based on WebLis.

Its main features are:

• new database design: relationships are managed in dedicated records, one relationship per record;
• unlimited no. of relationships for each Entity (within the database capability);
• creation of Entities/Relationships by hyperlinks; picklist assisted relationship management;
• WEB based interface for all functions, data entry included;
• pseudo-tree view of FRBR bibliographic "towers"

He asks us to "Please note as the user interface design is still in fluctuation and the application has still many bugs, inconsistencies, so it is not yet available for download. I hope to make it downloadable shortly."

The requirements are: Firefox, Opera, IE6 or IE7; cookies, javascript and pop-ups enabled. That last requirement might prove to be a problem.

IESR

A Registry of collections and their services : from metadata to implementation by Ann Apps appears in the Proceedings The International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications (DC2004), pp. 67-73, Shanghai (China).

The JISC Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) is a machine-to-machine middleware shared service providing a single central catalogue of quality descriptions of collections of resources available to researchers, learners and teachers in the UK, along with details of the services that provide access to those collections. The collections and services are described according to a set of metadata, which is defined by IESR, but is based on open standards wherever possible. The prototype registry is implemented as an XML repository indexed with the Cheshire II information retrieval software, with an associated meta-registry to support browsing and data capture. Several interfaces for server-to-server retrieval of IESR XML descriptions are available, as well as a Web interface.

Some other related papers by Ann Apps include:

• zetoc SOAP: a Web Services Interface for a Digital Library Resource
• The JISC information environment service registry: providing a catalogue of resources for portals

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 the online MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions.

The codes should not be used in exchange records until after September 25, 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.

Description Conventions

The following code is for use in subfield $e in field 040 in Bibliographic and Authority records (Description Conventions).

Addition:

dcrms

Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Serials) (Washington, DC: Library of Congress) [use only after September 25, 2008]

Term, Name, Title Sources

The following codes are for use in subfield $2 in fields 600-657 and 662 in Bibliographic and Community Information records (Subject Added Entries/Index Terms); subfield $f in field 040 (Cataloging Source) in Authority records; and subfield $2 in fields 700-788 (Heading Linking Entries) in Authority records.

Additions:

chirosh

Chiropractic Subject Headings (http://www.chiroindex.org/abouticl.php) [use only after September 25, 2008]

eet

European education thesaurus (http://redined.r020.com.ar/en/) [use only after September 25, 2008]

pkk

Predmetnik za katoliske knjiznice (Ljubljana: Maribor) [use only after September 25, 2008]

ssg

Splosni slovenski geslovnik (http://www.nuk.uni-lj.si/ssg/ssg.html) [use only after September 25, 2008]

The code listed below was previously defined for use in subfield $2 in Bibliographic and Community Information records in fields 600-651 and field 040, subfield $f in Authority records. Usage has been expanded and this code is now available for use in subfield $2 in fields 600-657 and 662 in Bibliographic and Community Information records (Subject Added Entries/Index Terms); subfield $f in field 040 (Cataloging Source) in Authority records; and subfield $2 in fields 700-788 (Heading Linking Entries) in Authority records.

Change:

gtt

GOO-trefwoorden thesaurus (Den Haag: Koninklijke Bibliotheek) [use in new fields after September 25, 2008]

Other codes

The following code is for use in subfield $2 in field 047 (Form of Musical Composition Code) in the Bibliographic format.

Addition:

iamlmf

International Association of Music Libraries Musical forms codes (http://www.iaml.info/en/activities/cataloguing/unimarc/forms) [use only after September 25, 2008]

The following code is for use in subfield $2 in field 048 (Number of Musical Instruments or Voices Codes) in the Bibliographic format.

Addition:

iamlmp

International Association of Music Libraries Medium of performance codes (http://www.iaml.info/en/activities/cataloguing/unimarc/medium) [use only after September 25, 2008]

European APIs

The JISC Information Environment Service Registry (IESR):

• is a machine readable registry of electronic resources;
• contains information about these electronic resources, and details of how to access them;
• aims to make it easier for other applications to discover and use materials which will help their users' learning, teaching and research.

Twitter

What is happening with Twitter? A week ago almost 400 people were following LPI_Library and I was following about 1/2 of that. Now both those numbers are less than 1/2 of what they were a week ago. It seems folk are leaving in droves. If it were just my followers going down I might reevaluate how I was posting but the people I follow has also been dropping so I can only assume either 1) Twitter has lost people's accounts or 2) people are leaving Twitter for other services.

I have created an account on FriendFeed. I'm capturing my Facebook, LPI_Library tweets, and postings here. Maybe this is where all the cool kids are hanging? Maybe Pownce or Jaiku or ?

This does raise a problem. Just what is our attention span with new tech tools? Twitter is not yet old enough to have been mentioned in any books and already it is passe. How can anyone keep up with this? How far ahead of the curve are we going to be? If all our users are a year or two behind us, are we serving them by continuing to move on?

OPAC 2.0

Chalon, Patrice X. and Di Pretoro, Emmanuel and Kohn, Laurence (2008) OPAC 2.0: Opportunities, development and analysis. In Proceedings 11th European Conference of Medical and Health Libraries, Helsinki (Finland).

Web 2.0 has raised new expectations from the library users : after reading a book, they wish to rate it, provide some comments or review about it and tag it for themselves or for others. They also expect to discover other interesting books thanks to the contribution of other people. Those functions, summarized under OPAC 2.0, are now provided by several Integrated Library Systems (ILS), at least partially. But, due to the slow development of some products, other paths were also explored: Content Management Systems (CMS) or specific software. CMS does provide the required functionalities like tagging and commenting. Some pioneers thus decided to develop a new Web OPAC based on CMS. Another approach was to build an OPAC that is independent from any ILS and which offers the required functionalities. In this paper, we propose to review the options available for the librarians wishing to offer Web 2.0 functionalities to their users. We also provide a synthesis of our own experience in implementing an OPAC 2.0 into our Library.

Breaking the Librarian Stereotype

This certainly breaks the stereotype, if she really is a librarian. My Spanish is not good enough to know if it is serious or meant to be ironic. Is there a Metal Librarian blog yet?

Small Libraries and OCLC

Are there any other libraries, other than here at the LPI, that would like to be an OCLC member but just don't have the funds?

How about OCLC services or products that you desire, but are out of reach? For instance, I want to access the authority files, then we could become NACO participants.

I'm asking because OCLC has a task force on small libraries and would like to hear from anyone in the same situation as we are. We would love to share our collection on WorldCat and Open WorldCat but find the set-up fees too large a hurdle. Too much of our cataloging is original, so the copy cataloging only option is not for us. There are no Groups we are able to join, anyone want to start a space science group or Houston group? In the end, our very rich unique collection is not visible via OCLC.

Now seems to be a good time to voice concerns to the Task Force or the folks at OCLC, since they are looking at small libraries.

Bibliographic Citation Tool in Facebook

OCLC has a Facebook app for those needing to create citations, CiteMe.

Get formatted citations in APA, Chicago, Harvard, MLA, or Turabian style. Start by searching for an item in WorldCat, the world's largest network of library content and services. Find your title in the results, select your favorite format, and you're done.

It also allows you to find other editions and find in a local library. I've added it to my Facebook account.

Famous Catalogers’ School

Friday came early this week. Famous Catalogers’ School.

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.