More MARBI News

The draft agenda for the 2009 ALA Midwinter MARBI meeting is now available.

Also, the minutes for the 2008 Annual MARBI meeting are now available.

News from MARBI

The following papers are available for review by the MARC community:

• Proposal No. 2009-02: Definition of new codes for legal deposits in 008/07 (Method of Acquisition) in the MARC 21 Holdings Format
• Proposal No. 2009-03: Definition of field 080 in the MARC 21 Authority Format
• Proposal No. 2009-04: Addition of Codes for Map Projections in 008/22-23 (Maps) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
• Proposal No. 2009-05: Adding subfield $u for Uniform Resource Identifier to field 510 (Citation/References note) of the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
• Discussion Paper No. 2009-DP02: Definition of field 588 for metadata control note in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

A few additional proposals and a discussion paper will be posted shortly. MARBI proposals and discussion papers related to RDA will be posted in early January.

The draft agenda for the 2008 ALA Annual MARBI meetings and the Annual 2008 MARBI minutes will be made available soon.

2009 Electronic Resources & Libraries

I'll be going to the 2009 Electronic Resources & Libraries. Hope to see some people there I've only "met" online. This is made possible by the scholarship I received from the conference. My sincere thanks to the conference organizers and the scholarship committee.

lcsh.info Gone

Some sad news. "On December 18th I was asked to shut off lcsh.info by the Library of Congress. As an LC employee I really did not have much choice other than to comply." This has been posted everywhere else, but deserves the widest exposure, so I'm posting here as well.

uClassify Contest

The folks at LibraryThing are interested in what could be done with the uClassify tool. They are offering a $100.00 prize for the best tool.

Our dream is to share hardcore classifier technology with everyone. We recognized that classifiers are mostly present at universities research departments and expensive commercial companies. We want to change that. We want everyone to have the possibility to use a top notch classifier - completely free. We find it enormously exciting to see what happens when a tool for creativity is given to the community. We hope to see all kinds of beyond-our-imagination classifiers and incredible web applications being built around the API.

PURLs

PURLZ Server version 1.2 has been released.

Purlz are Web addresses or Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) that act as permanent identifiers in the face of a dynamic and changing Web infrastructure. Instead of resolving directly to Web resources, PURLs provide a level of indirection that allows the underlying Web addresses of resources to change over time without negatively affecting systems that depend on them. This capability provides continuity of references to network resources that may migrate from machine to machine for business, social or technical reasons.

Cataloging Video Discs

Image via Wikipedia

Another from the draft folder. The DVD Guide Update Task Force of the Cataloging Policy Committee (CAPC) of OLAC has completed the document, Guide to Cataloging DVD and Blu-ray Discs Using AACR2r and MARC 21 (2008 update).

Thanks to all involved.

Cataloging Video Discs

The DVD Guide Update Task Force of the Cataloging Policy Committee (CAPC) of OLAC has completed the document, Guide to Cataloging DVD and Blu-ray Discs Using AACR2r and MARC 21 (2008 update).

Thanks to all involved.

Additions to the MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Descriptions

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

The code should not be used in exchange records until after February 16, 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 Sources

The following code is for use in subfield $2 in field 072 in Authority and Bibliographic records (Subject Category Code) and in subfield $z in field 073 (Subdivision Usage) in Authority records.

Addition:

eflch

E4Libraries Category Headings

[use only after February 16, 2008]

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

Addition:

eflch

E4Libraries Category Headings

[use only after February 16, 2008]

Nature Now has XMP

Nature now includes XMP semantic data in the PDF version of their articles.

We now have a complete bibliographic record (including DOI) embedded in the PDF using structured markup. And, moreover, we also have a solid bedrock for adding in any additional metadata should the need arise. This semantic labelling is available on all new issues of Nature and will be added to other NPG titles over the coming months.

XMP as a labelling technology could well go a long way towards addressing concerns raised by Olivia Judson in an op-ed piece earlier this week in the New York Times: Defeating Bedlam. The author decries that "downloading papers from journal Web sites" means that "access to information is easier and faster than ever before ... but there’s been no obvious way to manage it once you’ve got it." Those days may soon be over.

Now with XMP all manner of scholarly content - documents, images and other media types - can be properly labelled and many programs (not just Zotero and Papers which she reviews) can directly profit from the richness of semantic web descriptions.

Indexing 2.0

Unshelved is going to use use the crowd to index their strips. Ohnorobot.com is the tool they selected to do the indexing. It is also a tool for searching across over 91,000 Web comics.

Timeline and Plan for the Next Five Library of Congress Genre/Form Projects

News from LC.

In July, 2008, the Library of Congress Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access (ABA) management team approved five new genre/form projects to be undertaken by the Cataloging Policy and Support Office (now the Policy and Standards Division): cartography, law, literature, music, and religion. On October 31st, 2008, the Division presented its timeline and plan for those projects to the ABA management team, and it was approved on November 17th.

The plan follows the principles and recommendations for the management of the genre/form projects, as outlined in the moving image project report; provides opportunities for involvement by other libraries and organizations with an interest in genre/form headings; requests input from the broader library community at various points in each project; and, furnishes a timeline that will allow for the orderly roll-out of genre/form headings in each of the five disciplines under development during the next four years.

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.