Bay Area Youth Singers Holiday Concert

Bay Area Youth Singers (BAYS) Holiday Concert
December 14 4:00 p.m.
University Baptist Church
Tickets $10 Adults $3 Students

Contact me for tickets.

IFLA GMD Paper

The IFLA Cataloguing Section, ISBD Review Group has the document Proposed Area 0 for ISBD up for review.

The Working Group on General Material Designations of the IFLA Meeting of Experts on an International Cataloguing Code (IME ICC) held in Frankfurt in 2003 suggested that the GMD seemed unsatisfactory because the presence of the content of the resource and of the presentation of the resource were mixed, confusing more than clarifying. Other comments were on its present location, interrupting the logical order of the title information. It was also thought that the GMD was important enough to be at the beginning of the record, and that it should not be optional as it currently is.

Comment by 30 January 2009.

GPO Separate Record Cataloging Policy

The Government Printing Office (GPO) has adopted a separate record cataloging policy.

At the request of the Federal Depository Library community, the Government Printing Office, Library Services & Content Services, Library Technical Information Services (LTIS) staff has formulated a policy for creating separate records for every manifestation of a document. This policy follows an internal review of the current approach of single record cataloging.

Preliminary Authority Records

Here is another preliminary authority record:

American Association of Petroleum Geologists. |b Committee on Structural Nomenclature

It was created in 1985 as shown by the ID n 85806886. It was updated in 2008 as shown by 005. But it is still PRELIMINARY. How long can these stay preliminary?

COinS in WordPress

The OpenBook Book Data plug-in for WordPress by John Miedema now supports COinS.

OpenBook is for book reviewers, book bloggers, library webmasters, anyone who wants to put book covers and data on their WordPress blog or website.

OpenBook gets its covers and book data from Open Library (http://openlibrary.org), the only source of bibliographic data that is both open source and open data, hence the OpenBook label.

About COinS

The goal is to embed citation metadata into html in such a way that processing agents can discover, process and make use of the metadata. Since an important use of this metadata will be to allow processing agents to make OpenURL hyperlinks for users in libraries (latent OpenURL), the method must allow the metadata to be placed any where in HTML that a link might appear. In the absence of some metadata-aware agent, the embedded metadata must be invisible to the user and innocuous with respect to HTML markup. To meet these requirements, the span element was selected. The NISO OpenURL ContextObject is selected as the specific metadata package. The resulting specification is named "ContextObject in SPAN" or COinS for short.

Problems with Microformats

This is old news, but new to me and maybe someone else. There are some basic problems with many of the microformats, including the hCalendar. The BBC has stopped using microformats.

Since /programmes first went live we've been working to ensure that programme data was accessible to people and machines alike. The API design was baked in at the application design stage. Similarly we've worked on adding microformats to HTML pages as a lightweight API. All broadcasts use the hCalendar microformat to add start times, end times, broadcast channels etc.

Unfortunately there have been a number of concerns over hCalendar's use of the abbreviation design pattern.

They were considering RDFa as an alternative.

So, does anyone know of any tools to easily create RDFa? Something to just plug in the info and have it pop out?

Name Authority Records

News form LC concerning Name Authority Records.

The Library of Congress is pleased to announce that OCLC has completed the pre-population of the NACO authority file with non-Latin references (authority 4XX fields) derived from non-Latin bibliographic heading fields in WorldCat, a use of data-mining techniques originally developed for the WorldCat Identities project. The pre-population project, which began in mid-July, added non-Latin script references to 497,576 name authority records for personal names and corporate bodies.

**For NACO catalogers, this means that the moratorium on updating 100/110 authority records that existed prior to July 2008 to add non-Latin script references is now lifted. All name authority records are now candidates for the addition of non-Latin script references. Thanks for your patience during this period.**

LC hopes to announce soon a process by which catalogers that have been examining the non-Latin script references added by this project can contribute to the development of policies and practices for the future, such as the issues raised in the white paper on non-Latin script references in name authority records.

Special thanks to Robert Bremer, and colleagues at OCLC, for all the efforts to make this pre-population a reality.

RDFa

Elias Torres, Ben Adida discuss RDFa on Technometria with Phil Windley

While the web is primarily for human consumption, more sites are including machine readable data. However, this information is usually included separately. As the RFDa Primer states, RFDa provides a set of XHTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints. RDFa helps bloggers and website authors make their web pages smarter by adding computer-readable information to a site. Elias Torres and Ben Adida talk about it, including its history and what problems RFDa is attempting to solve.

Torres and Adida also discuss the technical details of RDFa and give a detailed technical description of how RDFa works. They review the mechanics of RDFa and give examples of its usage.

Metadata Extraction

Effective Metadata Extraction from Irregularly Structured Web Content by Baoyao Zhou, Wei Liu, Yu Yang, Weichun Wang Ming Zhang, (HPL-2008-203)

Metadata extraction is one crucial module for domain specific Web content discovery and management, because the accuracy and completeness of the extracted metadata would directly affect the quality of subsequent domain information services. Our Online Course Organization project aims to build an online course portal to serve the course information obtained from the Web. Since most course pages are irregularly structured, most existing approaches are not effective for extracting course metadata. In this paper, we proposed a novel hierarchical clustering approach to generate a web page semantic structure model from the DOM tree, called Logical Structure Model, such that the hidden patterns and knowledge can be revealed and used to facilitate identifying course metadata. The experimental results have shown that our solution can achieve effective metadata extraction

Library Weblogs

Now available, The Liblog Landscape 2007-2008 by Walt Crawford.

Liblogs--blogs written by library people, as opposed to official library blogs--provide some of today's most interesting and useful library literature. This book offers a broad look at English-language liblogs as they are and as they've changed between 2007 and 2008. The book includes more than 600 blogs with detailed analysis of 27 metrics for 2007 and 2008 and changes from 2007 to 2008--and, for 143 of them, 2006 as well. Through tables, charts and text, we explore the liblog landscape.

MODS Tools

The MODS users are collecting examples of tools using MODS. One example is Tellico.

Tellico is a KDE application for organizing your collections. It provides default templates for books, bibliographies, videos, music, video games, coins, stamps, trading cards, comic books, and wines.

Tellico allows you to enter your collection in a catalogue database, saving many different properties like title, author, etc. Two different views of your collection are shown. On the left, your entries are grouped together by any field you like, allowing you to see how many are in each group. On the right, selected fields are shown in column format, allowing you to sort by any field. On the bottom is a customizable HTML view of the current entry. The entry editor is a dialog box where you enter the data.

Cataloging Tools

LibLime has announced the beta test of a suite of cataloging tools, ‡biblios.net.

‡biblios.net is a subscription-based, hosted version of the open-source ‡biblios metadata editor that we released earlier this year. In addition to the editor, ‡biblios.net includes some extended community features such as integrated real-time chat, forums, and private messaging.

‡biblios.net also provides access to the world's largest database of freely-licensed library records. The database will be freely available to ‡biblios.net subscribers and non-subscribers alike via Z39.50, OAI, and direct download.

Furthermore, the database itself will be maintained by ‡biblios.net users similar to the way that Wikipedia's database is maintained by users.

We're now looking for enthusiastic participants to help shape the final production release of ‡biblios.net.

Ways you can help:

• Become a beta tester for the ‡biblios.net platform by filling out the beta tester application form.
• Donate your records to ‡biblios.net. Upload records to http://archive.org, and drop us an email at 'info AT liblime DOT com'
• Get involved in the ‡biblios open-source community: get your copy of ‡biblios and join the development team at http://biblios.org

An aside, wouldn't it make more sense in that first paragraph to link "‡biblios metadata editor" rather than "released earlier this year?" Links are a form of mark-up and clean mark-up matters.

Metadata Matters

Diane Hillmann and Jon Phipps have started a new weblog, Metadata Matters. Based on the names, I'd call this a must read. Subscribed.

Better 404 Pages

Good idea from Dean Frickey writing in A List Apart (the other ALA), A More Useful 404.

Encountering 404 errors is not new. Often, developers provide custom 404 pages to make the experience a little less frustrating. However, for a custom 404 page to be truly useful, it should not only provide relevant information to the user, but should also provide immediate feedback to the developer so that, when possible, the problem can be fixed.

To accomplish this, I developed a custom 404 page that can be adapted to the look and feel of the website it’s used on and uses server-side includes (SSI) to execute a Perl script that determines the cause of the 404 error and takes appropriate action.

Authority Record Access

Why doesn't LC offer Z39.50 access to the authority files? How about their other thesauri, like the Thesaurus For Graphic Materials? Easy access to these files would be useful. Maybe Z39.50 is "so yesterday" and SRU/SRW or an API is the answer. These are rich resources and access would be useful in ways we can't yet imagine. How about other institutions? AAT or the NASA Thesaurus, or... would be useful. This is not only about bibliographic access, but has wider issues in a Semantic Web environment.

[Later] OCLC does provide access via their Terminologies Project, see the comment for full details.

[21 Nov. 2008] Someone sent me a note saying that the Voyager software used does not support Z39.50 access to the authority records. That they are not a separate database and have very little indexing. Do check out the comments for some useful information.

RSS for TOCs

RSS and Scholarly Journal Tables of Contents: the ticTOCs Project, and Good Practice Guidelines for Publishers by Lisa Rogers provides some advise based on experience.

Publishers are using various versions of feeds such as RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, RSS 0.91 and Atom. RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0 are very simple XML formats, and typically only contain the fields for title, description and link. However, RSS 1.0 can easily be extended by the use of modules so as to not only deliver the content, but also provide structured metadata. One such module for extended RSS 1.0 is the Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) module. A variety of publishers such as Nature Publishing Group (6), Inderscience (7) and SAGE (8) are already using PRISM along with Dublin Core Metadata to provide rich metadata in their RSS feeds.

Comment on RDA

Form for comments from the US about RDA.

Koha User Group Meeting

On April 16-17th there will be a Koha innovations and sharing group in Plano Texas (suburb of Dallas/Fort Worth). The 2 day workshop would have lab access and presentation space. There would be a charge to cover lunch both days and other expenses. Any leftover money would be given to the KUDOS users group as seed money. Anticipated cost $100.

Algorithms for Clustering Tags

Clustering Tags in Enterprise and Web Folksonomies by Simpson, Edwin will be published and presented at the International Conference on Weblogs & Social Media, Seattle, March 31st, 2008 (HPL-2008-18 )

Tags lack organizational structure limiting their utility for navigation. We present two clustering algorithms that improve this by organizing tags automatically. We apply the algorithms to two very different datasets, visualize the results and propose future improvements.

RDA Draft

The full draft of RDA is now available for comment. Comments needed.