Genre and Form Term Usage

Roy Tennant has posted a list of $a and $2 combinations for the 655 field. It is interesting to see some terms with high counts that are tagged local. Seems like those should be considered for being incorporated into an existing vocabulary. Electronic books with 37,605 uses seems a good candidate. Dissertations with 16,733 hits is another one to consider.

10th Anniversary

The other day Catalogablog turned 10. The first post dealt with RSS, which I guess was new back then. One of the two links is still valid.

NISO Newsletter

In other NISO news, the latest NISO Newsline has been published. Topics include:

• ISO 25964-2:2013, Information and documentation – Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies – Part 2: Interoperability with other vocabularies
• EDItEUR, Updated FAQ on eBooks and ONIX
• ISO/IEC 11179-3:2013 , Information technology – Metadata Registries (MDR) – Part 3: Registry metamodel and basic attribute
• ISO/IEC 17963:2013, Web Services for Management (WS-Management) Specification
• OASIS, searchRetrieve version 1.0

There is also a survey request.

NISO is a membership organization that must be responsive to community needs and interests. As an organization with limited resources, it must also prioritize the many strands of activity that are taking place, to ensure we are working toward goals which will have the greatest impact.

To help prioritize our work, the NISO Architecture Committee is identifying the important technologies and trends that face our community. As part of this process, we would like the NISO membership to complete an online survey related to potential NISO directions and activities.

And a reminder that comments on the ResourceSync Framework Specification for the web "detailing various capabilities that a server can implement to allow third-party systems to remain synchronized with its evolving resources" are due by March 15.

NISO Publishes Maintenance Revisions of Dublin Core and SUSHI Standards

The latest news from NISO.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) announces the publication of maintenance revisions of two widely used standards: The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (ANSI/NISO Z39.85-2012) and The Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) Protocol (ANSI/NISO Z39.93-2013). Both standards were revised to make very minor updates. The Dublin Core standard defines fifteen metadata elements for resource description in a cross-disciplinary information environment and is used as the basis for most metadata standards in use today. The SUSHI Protocol defines an automated request and response model for the harvesting of electronic resource usage data and is required for conformance with the COUNTER Code of Practice.

"The DCMI Usage Board approved a change to the usage comment for the 'subject' element to eliminate some ambiguity with the 'coverage' element," explains Thomas Baker, Chief Information Officer for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, the maintenance agency for the Dublin Core standard. "The new version of the ANSI/NISO standard corresponds to version 1.1 of the specification on the DCMI website."

"The SUSHI Standing Committee initiated this revision of the standard to make two minor updates," states Oliver Pesch, Chief Strategist for EBSCO Information Services and Co-chair of the SUSHI Standing Committee. "An additional error code was added and the appendix about security considerations was updated to reflect technology changes and experience gained since the initial implementation of the SUSHI protocol."

"Standards do not drop into a black hole once they are published," states Todd Carpenter, NISO Executive Director. "They must be supported and regularly reviewed to ensure they are kept up-to-date. Both the Dublin Core and the SUSHI standard receive ongoing oversight from their respective Maintenance Agency and Standing Committee. The maintenance revisions just published are examples of how the standards are revised to address even minor issues found during implementation."

Both standards are available for free download from the NISO website; Dublin Core at www.niso.org/standards/z39-85-2012 and SUSHI at www.niso.org/standards/z39-93-2013/. Additional information on the use of the Dublin Core standard is available from the DCMI website at www.dublincore.org. SUSHI FAQs, schemas, and implementation information are available at www.niso.org/workrooms/sushi.

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Additions to Source Codes for Vocabularies, Rules, and Schemes

The source codes listed below have been recently approved. The codes will be added to the applicable Source Codes for Vocabularies, Rules, and Schemes lists. See the specific source code lists for current usage in MARC fields and MODS/MADS elements.

The codes should not be used in exchange records until 60 days after the date of this notice to provide implementers time to include newly-defined codes in any validation tables.

Classification Scheme Source Codes
The following source code has been added to the Classification Scheme Source Codes list for usage in appropriate fields and elements.

Addition:

misklass

Klassifikasjonsskjema (Stavenger: Misjonshogskolen)

Genre/Form Code and Term Source Codes
The following source codes have been added to the Genre/Form Code and Term Source Codes list for usage in appropriate fields and elements.

Additions:

isbdcontent

ISBD Area 0 (Content Form and Media Area) isbdmedia - ISBD Area 0 (Content Form and Media Area)

National Bibliography Number Source Codes The following source code has been added to the National Bibliography Number Source Codes list for usage in appropriate fields and elements.

Addition:

ldb

Letapis Druku Belarusi = Chronicle of the Press Belarus (Minsk: Natsyianal'naia kniznaia palata Belarusi)

Free Your Metadata

Free Your Metadata is a site that describes using Google Refine and some extensions to clean and reconcile metadata, and automate the creation of personal, corporate and geographic names.

Clean up
Clean up your metadata and discover how to handle those embarrassing errors.

Reconcile
Match your metadata with controlled vocabularies connected to the Linked Data cloud.

Entity extraction
Even unstructured fields can provide meaning thanks to named entity extraction.

Sustainable access
Once your metadata is in shape, it is ready to be published in a sustainable way.

eXtensible Catalog Drupal Toolkit

News from the eXtensible Catalog project.

I happily announce, that after several months of development the eXtensible Catalog Drupal Toolkit 1.3 is just released.

The eXtensible Catalog Drupal Toolkit is the front end of eXtensible Catalog (XC) built on Drupal content management system. It contains a set of 25 Drupal modules, a custom theme, and installation profile, and a customized Apache Solr search engine. XC is a discovery interface built on FRBR and RDA-like metadata structure.

The release has a primary focus on data integrity, namely being able to successfully process record updates on a schedule basis. This includes new additions, updates and deletions of records. This release includes some Solr integrity fixes submitted by Kyushu University. The installation process for release 1.3 has also been reworked to include an implementation option using Drush that makes the installation substantially easier. If you have drush, the whole installation is only 4 steps.

We also created a custom Solr package which is pre-configured to the needs of the Drupal Toolkit.

You can find the installation instructions and release notes here:
http://drupal.org/project/xc_installation.

I hope you will find it useful. Now we are working hard on creating the first stable release of the Drupal 7 version. Any comments, suggestion and feedback are more than useful. You can find all the project's issue tracker here:
http://extensiblecatalog.lib.rochester.edu:8080/browse/DRUPAL.

The eXtensible Catalog project's website is available at http://eXtensibleCatalog.org

Problems with Library Catalogs

Catalog Matters Podcast no. 18: Problems with Library Catalogs by James Weinheimer is available.

In the last episode, I provided some examples of how people want to manipulate data instead of plowing their way through masses of printed text but I went on to express my doubts that the information in catalog records is actually the type of information that most people want to manipulate. I would like to continue that discussion.

SRU Approved as OASIS Standard

News from OASIS via OCLC, that SRU has been approved as OASIS Standard.

SRU (Search and Retrieve via URL) 2.0 has been approved as a standard by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). SRU is the web-based successor to Z39.50.

Functionality supported by SRU includes defining a standard query grammar for complex interoperable searching, the ability to specify the format of the documents returned and the mime-type of the response. SRU includes a capability to allow client software to query the server for functionality, include a complex description of the databases being searched.

Does SRW (Search and Retrieve via the Web) still have any life left? Once they were most often written together as SRU/SRW.

Proposal for Revision of the Urdu, Pushto, and Sindhi (in Arabic script) Romanization Tables

News from LC.

The Policy and Standards Division of the Library of Congress has received a revision proposal for the Urdu (in Arabic Script), Pushto, and Sindhi (in Arabic script) ALA-LC romanization tables. The proposal recommends a change in the romanization of the letters Svad, Zvad, Toe, and Zoe, as well as several minor corrections to the Urdu table.

The revision proposal http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman_urdu_proposal.pdf[PDF, 251 KB] highlights all additions and changes. A separate document < http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman_urdu_proposal_explanation.doc[DOC, 33 KB] enumerates changes in the revision proposal.

MODS in RDF

News from LC about MODS in RDF.

As a result of requests from the MODS community and for its own explorations into Linked Data, the Library of Congress has developed MODS/RDF, an ontology for MODS. This work has been informed by the previous work of developing a MADS/RDF ontology, which is in use now in id.loc.gov, LC's Linked Data Service, and by discussions in the MODS Editorial Committee. MODS/RDF may be used to create born-RDF MODS, or it may be used to create an RDF description corresponding to an existing MODS XML record. (An XSLT is available to help create MODS/RDF from MODS XML.)

Although it is still a draft and work in progress, LC would like to share its work on the ontology to encourage experimentation with MODS modeled as RDF. As the Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative and its BIBFRAME data model is emerging, it is clear that much work is going into expressing bibliographic data as RDF. We will be working on a mapping of MODS to BIBFRAME as the BIBFRAME model stabilizes, and this initial work on MODS/RDF may inform that task.

The ontology may be found at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/modsrdf/

Open-source Automated Library System Article

OPALS, the Open-source Automated Library System, is another option when considering Koha and Evergreen. A newspaper wrote OPALS expands research possibilities for John Abbott College students.

It’s quick, efficient and cheap. The system, which received tops honours from Perceptions 2012: An International Survey of Library Automation, was developed by the Pointe-Claire-based company Bibliofiche 11 years ago and has been reinvented three times since then in response to changing technology and client requests.

Music Cataloging using RDA

Comments are invited on Best Practices for Music Cataloging using RDA and MARC21

The MLA-BCC RDA Music Implementation Task Force is happy to announce the release of the first complete draft of "Best Practices for Music Cataloging using RDA and MARC21." This document represents over sixteen months of effort by the task force to determine and articulate best practices for the description of music resources (chiefly scores and audio recordings). In the increasingly decentralized environment of library metadata standards, this document addresses the need for specific guidance for catalogers describing music resources that is authoritative, yet flexible to the needs of individual institutions. It is intended to supplement the text of RDA itself, and accounts for (though does not presume full adherence to) the Library of Congress-Program for Cooperative Cataloging Policy Statements (LC-PCC PS).

MARC Tag Usage

OCLC will examine MARC tag usage in the WorldCat database.The goal of this new MARC Usage in WorldCat activity is to provide an evidence base for testing assertions about the value of capturing various attributes by demonstrating whether the cataloging community has made the effort to populate specific tags, not just to define them in anticipation of use.

OCLC Research seeks to use evidence of usage, as depicted in WorldCat, the largest aggregation of library data in the world, to inform decisions about where we go from here with the data that has been encoded using the MARC standard.

Security Issue

Ruby and Ruby on Rails have been widely used by the library coding community. In the past few weeks major security flaws have exposed in the tools. A List Apart (the other ALA) has an informative article on the topic, De-Railing Security Bugs.

I'm not sure what the Code4Lib folks have done about this issue.

VIAFbot Video

A video showing OCLC Research Wikipedian in Residence Max Klein and Senior Program Officer Merrilee Proffitt discussing the results of having Max's "VIAFbot" link Virtual International Authority File records to Wikipedia references.

OPAC Design

Catalog by Design | The User Experience by Aaron Schmidt appeared in the latest Library Journal. It has created quite a heated exchange on AUTOCAT.

Aside from paying very little attention to visual design and not caring about the impact of horrible typography, the big problem with library catalogs is that they are not designed to help people accomplish library tasks. Instead, they’re designed to expose catalog records. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is totally backward—prioritizing the collection, not people, results in a user-hostile interaction design and a poor user experience. Imagine the reverse: a tool that prioritizes helping people accomplish their tasks, whereby bibliographic data exists quietly in the background and is exposed only when useful.

NISO Newsletter

The latest issue of the NISO Newsline is available. Some of the topics include:

• NISO and NFAIS Publish Recommended Practices for Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials
• NISO Launches New Initiative to Develop Standard for Open Access Metadata and Indicators
• NISO and OAI Release Draft for Comments of ResourceSync Framework Specification
• ISO 22274:2013, Systems to manage terminology, knowledge and content Concept-related aspects for developing and internationalizing classification systems
• ISO/IEC 20944:2013, Information technology Metadata Registries Interoperability and Bindings (MDR-IB)
• W3C Working Draft, RDF 1.1 Concepts and Abstract Syntax
• W3C Proposed Recommendation, SPARQL 1.1 Protocol
• W3C Working Draft, Linked Data Platform Use Cases and Requirements

Additions to MARC Code List for Relators

News from LC.

The following relator codes have been recently approved and will be added to the MARC Code List for Relators for usage in appropriate fields and elements.

The codes should not be used in exchange records until 60 days after the date of this notice to provide implementers time to include newly-defined codes in any validation tables.

Additions:

prv

provider Use for a person or organization who produces, publishes, manufactures, or distributes a resource if specific codes are not desired (e.g. [mfr], [pbl]).

rcd

recordist Use for a person or organization who uses a recording device to capture sounds and/or video during a recording session, including field recordings of natural sounds, folkloric events, music, etc.

stg

setting Use for an entity in which the activity or plot of a work takes place, e.g. a geographic place, a time period, a building, an event.

Synchronizing Metadata and Resources Standards

NISO and Open Archives Initiative (OAI) project are working together on standards for synchronizing both metadata and Resources, ResourceSync.

ResourceSync will research, develop, prototype, test, and deploy mechanisms for the large-scale synchronization of web resources. ResourceSync is a joint cooperation between NISO and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) team, with work funded by the Sloan Foundation2. Building on the OAI-PMH strategies for synchronizing metadata, this project will enhance that specification using modern web technologies, but will allow for the synchronization of the objects themselves, not just their metadata.

Much of the discussion is taking place on Google+.