Thanks Ian for being the host the past few days. I thought it was fun having someone else be the host. It brought a different personality to the 'blog, which I found refreshing.
Tuesday, December 31, 2002
MARC in XML
Dublin Core
Controlled Vocabulary
A controlled vocabulary is a way to insert an interpretive layer of semantics between the term entered by the user and the underlying database to better represent the original intention of the terms of the user.
Thursday, December 26, 2002
Greetings all!
The January 2003 edition of Cites & Insights, by Walt Crawford, is now available at:
http://cites.boisestate.edu/civ3i1.pdf It has some interesting, if disturbing, news on copyright.
A tip: when reading a .pdf document, select Full Screen. (Pressing F11 may achieve this, otherwise use View-Full Screen from the drop-down menu). Then use your page-up page-down buttons to manipulate the column format.
Friday, December 20, 2002
Happy Holidays
Hello! This is your guest host, Ian Fairclough, greeting you. If you have anything to post, or wish to correspond with me, during David's absence, do write to me at ifairclough AT marion.lib.oh.us. Sincerely - Ian P.S. this is my first experience at actually writing the blog, so if anything is strange please bear with me!
Encoded Archival Description
It incorporates a small number of newly-defined elements, deprecates eight previously used elements, and modifies the structure (content model) for a few elements to allow the inclusion of other valid EAD elements at different levels within a finding aid. The changes and additions were suggested as a result of experience with the first (1998) production release of the test version of the EAD DTD. During the four years that Version 1.0 was in use, hundreds of archives experimented with use of the EAD DTD for a range of finding aid encoding projects. Their input was important for deciding upon which changes and additions were essencial in the 2002 release.
MARC and Metadata
This is a call for articles for a special issue of Library Hi Tech devoted to the topic of MARC and metadata standards/initiatives that are attempting to enhance, exploit, emulate, and/or replace the MARC standard. This special issue is especially interested in examining current developments with MODS, METS, XML MARC, and OAI in these areas, and the issue editor is looking for experts, developers, and users of these standards to write articles for the issue.
The deadline for receipt of final articles would be June 31, 2003, and the issue would probably be published in late 2003/early 2004. If you are interested in writing an article, please send a proposal with a title and short abstract of the content of the article, as well as some information regarding your expertise and experience with the standard(s) that you plan to discuss. Co-authored articles are also encouraged. If you have any questions, please contact the special issue editor at:
Brad Eden, Ph.D.
Head, Bibliographic and Metadata Services
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
beden at ccmail.nevada.edu
Deadline for receipt of proposals is January 31, 2003.
Posted with permission. The @ symbol in the e-mail address has been replaced with " at " to prevent spam.--D.B.
Thursday, December 19, 2002
Guest Host
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
Professional Reading
Presents a brief overview of what is meant by a digital library and a digital archive, and how archival collections can be described. It expresses briefly the different approaches to collections and their descriptions and suggests that a consistent approach to descriptions at collection and item level is an important factor in initiatives which seek to provide integrated access to distributed resources, whether those resources are traditional or digital.
Digital Libraries
Tim Jewell
University of Washington
Steering Group Chair
DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative
1. DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative. The steering group that helped organize a May NISO/DLF Workshop on Standards for Electronic Resource Management has continued working via conference call since then. The group developed and submitted a successful proposal to the Digital Library Federation to create an Electronic Resource Management Initiative, which aims to:
- Describe the architectures needed to manage large collections of licensed electronic resources
- Establish lists of appropriate supporting data elements and common definitions
- Write and publish XML Schemas/DTDs.
- Identify and promote appropriate best practices and standards to support data interchange of licensing information
The initiative was recently announce in CLIR Issues (No. 30, November/December). A fuller description and list of deliverables" can be seen.
The members of the steering group are all excited to have this opportunity to extend and formalize the work done so far, and look forward to communicating actively with members of the library and vendor/publisher communities in the months ahead.
2. Meetings at the DLF Fall Forum. The initiative's steering group held a couple of working sessions at the DLF Fall Forum that resulted in important refinements to a shared understanding of the problems to be addressed and to the most useful approach to doing so, as well as a Birds of A Feather session during the conference. (A summary should be available soon on the DLF web site
3. Data Elements and Volunteers. At the open meeting on E-resource management held by the group at the American Library Association conference (ALA) last June, it was decided to enlist the help of volunteers to help review and refine the lists of data elements within the 3 areas of prime interest: Description, Licensing, and Access and Administration, and a number of people came forward to help with that work. Members of the steering group expect to be following up and contacting those volunteers again soon -- once the data element lists have undergone some more review.
4. Meeting/discussion opportunities. If you are interested in the initiative and plan to attend ALA midwinter, you will have two opportunities to hear more about it and the steering group's progress toward the initiative's goals:
- ALCTS Symposium on Managing Electronic Resources. Tim Jewell (chair of the steering group) will be one of several speakers for the preconference planned for Friday, January 24th at ALA Midwinter. His presentation will focus on some of the best and most interesting features of the local systems described on the Web Hub, and provide an overview of the DLF initiative and the prospects for establishing relevant standards.
- Open Discussion on E-resource management. The evening of the 24th (7:30-9:30 p.m. in the Wyndham Franklin Plaza, Philadelphia Ballroom) the steering group will also hold an open information sharing meeting for librarians, vendors and publishers interested in these developments. An agenda will be set closer to the conference, but we will probably begin with a status report on the initiative from members of the steering committee and provide time for discussion of it and local developments. (This meeting will once again be sponsored by the ALCTS Technical Services Directors of Large Research Libraries -- whose support is again gratefully acknowledged!)
Formats
Tuesday, December 17, 2002
MARC21
- Proposal 2003-01: Defining subfield $2 in Field 022 for ISSN Center code
- Proposal 2003-02: Definition of subfield $u (URI) in Field 538 (Systems Details Note) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
- Discussion Paper 2003-DP01: Data Elements for Article Level Description
- Discussion paper 2003-DP02: Coding graphic images in Leader/06 in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
- Discussion paper 2003-DP03Z: Adding field 024 (Other Standard Identifier) into the MARC 21 Authority Format
These papers will be discussed in a meeting of the MARC Advisory Committee on Saturday, January 25, 2003 and Sunday, January 26, 2003 in Philadelphia.
A draft agenda for the meeting is available
Another proposal will be posted at a later date.
Disaster Relief
I am sending this plea on behalf of the children who attend Brazos Elementary School in Orchard, TX.
Sunday night a fire consumed the principal's office, six classrooms, a computer lab and the school's library. At this time, we don't know if it was arson or an electrical fire.
The building was constructed in 1940. What I'm requesting would be elementary level books in fairly good shape, supplies like pockets and books cards, date stamps, ink pads, anything useful for old-fashioned checking out. If some of you are automated and have any of these things lying around, it would be wonderful if you would share with us.
My name and address are:
Becky Knesek
Brazos High School
14413 Hwy 36
Wallis, TX 77485.
That address is for UPS. Our other address is:
Brazos High School
P.O. Box 458
Wallis, TX 77485.
If you are willing and able to help us, I thank you so much from all of us at Brazos I.S.D.
Sincerely,
Becky Knesek, district librarian
bknesek at esc6.net
The @ symbol in the e-mail address is replaced by " at " to prevent spam.--D.B.
Dublin Core
This research describes an empirical study of how the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) is used by 100 Data Providers (DPs) registered with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The research was conducted to determine whether or not the DCMES is used to its full capabilities.
Monday, December 16, 2002
IASA Cataloguing Rules
NISO
LibraryLookup
Over at Library Planet it was reported it is working with Polaris systems.
Saturday, December 14, 2002
'Blog Metadata
Next came Blogchalk Simple and easy to apply. There was a tool to search 'blogs that had been chalked, but that seems to be no longer working.
This was followed by the Weblog MetaData Initiative (WMDI). This was standards based, an extension of Dublin Core. A tool to read and compile WMDI is available. It will read qualified DC, no need for the WMDI additions. Nice.
The latest is Janes' Blogosphere. It uses non-standard markup but has a suite of tools to create, read and interpret the metadata and 'blog entries.
All this work going in different directions. What is needed is a metadata standard for 'blogs, like WMDI that supports a suite of tools like Janes' to add the medadata to the template and interpret it. Talk to each other people and work together. A widely adopted standard metadata for Web logs could be used in RSS, OPML, OAI-MHP and other Web services. It could improve access in so many ways.
Worth Reading
Friday, December 13, 2002
NSDL METADATA HARVESTING PROGRAM
From ShelfLife, No. 84 (12 December 2002) ISSN 1538-4284
LibraryLookup
Let's say you're on a book-related site (Amazon, BN, isbn.nu, All Consuming, possibly others), and a book's info page is your current page. (Specifically: its URL contains an ISBN.) You can click your bookmarklet to check if the book is available in your local library. The bookmarklet will invoke your library's instance of the Innovative service, feed it the ISBN, and pop up a new window with the result.Thank you Jon Udell for a useful tool.
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
Digitizing Audio
Tuesday, December 10, 2002
Digital Library
"The National Science Foundation (NSF), through its Division of Undergraduate Education, is funding the development of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) over the next 5 years. A limited public release of the NSDL was launched on December 3, 2002. NSF expects the NSDL to become, over-time, the world's largest digital library of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) information resources and services as well as an online network of learning environments and resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education at all levels.
Many of the resources that populate the NSDL collection will come from projects funded under the NSDL program and related NSF digital library initiatives. However, the goal is to include access to as many relevant STEM resources as possible, including both open access and proprietary materials.
The Core Integration (CI) team of the NSDL is distributed among a group of collaborating institutions (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), Cornell University, Columbia University, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) and is aimed at the development, deployment, and support of both the technical and organizational infrastructure of the NSDL. The Cornell team is lead by a group of computer scientists and librarians.
A core component of CI responsibility is the development and maintenance of a metadata repository comprised of collection and item level metadata which serves as the basis for search and discovery services. The metadata repository will be built using a combination of methods including metadata ingest by the Open Archives Metadata Harvesting Protocol OAI-MHP. The NSDL metadata repository is built on open source, open access principles and standards and thus will also be available for harvesting by other services. While the principle of open access and free search and discovery services is a fundamental principle of the NSDL, the NSDL is concurrently looking at integrating proprietary content into it's distributed collections. Authentication and authorization services are being developed to allow for user access to fee-based content once it has been discovered within the open (i.e.free) search/browse services built on the OAI compliant NSDL metadata repository.
To read more about the NSDL see:
- Zia, Lee L., "Growing a National Learning Environments and Resources Network for Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education: Current Issues and Opportunities for the NSDL Program". D-Lib Magazine, 7 (3), March 2001.].
- C. Lagoze, W. Arms, S. Gan, D. Hillmann, C. Ingram, D. Krafft, R. Marisa, J. Phipps, J. Saylor, C. Terrizzi, W. Hoehn, D. Millman, J. Allan, S. Guzman-Lara, and T. Kalt, "Core Services in the Architecture of the National Digital Library for Science Education (NSDL),", arXiv Report cs.DL/0201025, January 29 2002.
Other Library Architecture and Design Documents
John M. Saylor
DirectorCollection Development
National Science Digital Library
Director (on leave 10/02-9/04)
Engineering & Computer Science Library
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-220
email: JMS1 at cornell.edu
phone: 607-255-4134
fax: 607-255-0278
Posted with permission. The @ symbol in the e-mail address has been replaced by " at " to foil spammers.
Taxonomy
Taxonomies have recently emerged from the quiet backwaters of biology, book indexing, and library science into the corporate limelight. They are supposed to be the silver bullets that will help users find the needle in the intranet haystack, reduce "friction" in electronic commerce, facilitate scientific research, and promote global collaboration. But before this can happen, practitioners need to dispel the myths and confusion, created in part by the multi-disciplinary nature of the task and the hype surrounding content management technologies.
Dublin Core
This 'Blog
Would anyone want to be a guest host for Catalogablog? I'll be out of town over Christmas as well. It would be nice if someone else took over that week. Just let me know.
Writing
"You've spent 2 years and GBP 2 million to create the ultimate content management system. Your staff have reached the nirvana of 'total relevance' where they have precisely the right amount of information they need. But because it's so boring and badly written, they don't read it. The board wants to see a return on their massive investment reflected in usage statistics. You have but a tiny bit of budget remaining. What should you spend it on?"The answer is better writing and editing. I started this 'blog to practice writing clearly and concisely. This newsletter is a valuable for anyone wishing to communicate.
Monday, December 09, 2002
FRBR
The Format Variation Working Group is now beginning to develop criteria for evaluating online systems that organize bibliographic data according to the FRBR model. We are especially interested in issues related to creating systems that users will find intelligible and easy to use, rather than simply implementing the FRBR theoretical model for the sake of doing so. We welcome the opportunity to discuss this issue with those who are in the process of developing these systems.
The JSC Format Variation Working Group was charged in 2001 with investigating the feasibility of incorporating the FRBR entity "expression" into AACR utilizing a proof of concept model. In June 2002 our discussion paper, "Dealing With FRBR Expressions in MARC 21" (MARBI DP-08) was discussed by MARBI at the ALA Annual Meeting. This paper, along with the other reports from the Group to date, are posted on the website of the Joint Steering Committee.
System vendors who would like to establish a formal liaison relationship with the JSC's Format Variation Working Group may contact the group's Chair, Jennifer Bowen, at jbowen at library.rochester.edu or (585) 274-1370.
Jennifer Bowen
Head of Cataloging, University of Rochester Libraries
Head of Technical Services, Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music
jbowen at library.rochester.edu
(585) 274-1370
Rush Rhees Library, Box 270055
University of Rochester,
Rochester, NY 14627-0055
or
Sibley Music Library, Eastman School of Music
27 Gibbs St., Rochester, NY 14604
Posted with premission. N.B. I have replaced the @ symbol in e-mail addresses with " at " to prevent harvesting of addresses for spam mailings. D.B.
Recycle
That is why AAA Environmental, Inc./EnviroSmart can design the Recycling Programs to be beneficial to you and the environment both today and well into the future. And our programs are - - FREE. We pay for the collection materials and shipping. Best of all, you are rewarded with CASH for each acceptable empty inkjet cartridge that we receive from your organization and we recycle at the same time. Although your contributions might seem minimal, please remember…Every Effort Counts!
This 'Blog
Dublin Core
This document proposes a mapping between
- the Dublin Core Element Set, Version 1.1, and
- the JPX file format extended metadata definition, in Annex N of JPEG 2000 Part 2 (ISO/IEC 15444-2:2002), which is itself based on the DIG35 Specification of the Digital Imaging Group.
New 'Blog
library-usability.org is dedicated to the idea that libraries are critical to our communities. But to help people meet their needs, libraries must be usable in every facet of their service. Usability is about more than just software. It's about helping people accomplish their goals, and library usability asks: what can we do to help people in the way we operate, in the way we publish, in the way we deliver service, and in the way we use technology?Seen at several 'blogs.
Friday, December 06, 2002
Award
Note Fields
MARC Field 024
I have been adding this information to our records for several years now. I find it very useful. We often receive boxes of materials as donations. It is much faster to scan the UPC or EAN to see if the item is in our collection than do an author/title search.
NISO
The Protocol Subcommittee of NISO Standards Committee AZ on Networked Reference Services is developing a Question/Answer Transaction Protocol (QATP) to support exchange between digital reference systems collaborating in the processing of a question. A preliminary step in the development of a protocol is to describe use cases (also known informally as "functional scenarios") that the protocol is required to support. Use cases help develop protocol requirements.
Thursday, December 05, 2002
MARC
- Latin (Basic/Extended + Greek Symbols, Subscripts and Superscripts)
- Hebrew
- Cyrillic (Basic + Extended)
- Arabic (Basic + Extended)
- Greek
- East Asian Characters Includes 13,478 'han' characters, Japanese Hiragana and Katakana (172 characters), Korean Hangul (2,028 characters), East Asian Punctuation Marks (25 characters), 'Component Input Method' Characters (35 characters)
IFLA
Metadata Crosswalks
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
Spanish Cataloging Portal
OCLC
Z39.50/ISN Robot
ZI-Bot (Z39.50/ISN Robot) is our project (initiated May 2001) to populate our prototype global server with ISBN and ISSN data from public Z39.50 servers around the world. Whenever a bibp/ISBN link is created and tested, ZI-Bot initiates a parallel query of approximately 75 Z39.50 servers to generate the first response. Over time, ZI-Bot will enrich the database using known item ISN queries on all Z39.50 servers.An interesting side effect is the Merged MARC data allows field by field comparison of the cataloging of the same item by different institutions. Could be useful in teaching cataloging or cataloging research. Thanks to Matthew Eberle at Library Techlog for pointing this out.
Professional Reading
- "Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe As A Cooperative Archiving Solution for E-Journals" by Victoria A. Reich.
The LOCKSS model, based on analysis of the history of cultural continuity epitomized by "Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe," creates low-cost, persistent digital "caches" of e-journal content housed locally at institutions that have authorized access to that content and actively choose to preserve it.
- "Building Digital Archives for Scientific Information" by Leah Solla
PRISM is a four-year project funded by Phase 2 of the Digital Libraries Initiative from the National Science Foundation to develop risk assessment strategies for web resources. It is a collaborative project between the Cornell Computer Science Department, the Human-Computer Interaction Group of the Cornell Communication Department, and Cornell University Library. Specific focus areas of the project include: digital object architecture, digital preservation, human-centered research, interoperability, policy enforcement, and web preservation.
RDF
Monday, December 02, 2002
RSS
Archives
Professionsal Reading
- "The design of metadata for the Digital Museum Initiative in Taiwan" by Chao-chen Chen; Hsueh-hua Chen; Kuang-hua Chen; Jieh Hsiang.
This paper discusses issues related to the development of metadata in Taiwan. It describes the development process of a Chinese metadata system, Metadata Interchange for Chinese Information (MICI), and an XML/metadata management system, Metalogy. Both were developed under the Digital Museum Initiative sponsored by the National Science Council of Taiwan.
- "Aiming at quality and coverage combined: blending physical and virtual union catalogues" by Janifer Gatenby
This article discusses the deficiencies of search engines and the importance of metadata before examining three models of metadata retrieval: distributed; distributed data with a centralised index; and centralised union catalogue. In listing the advantages and disadvantages of the distributed model, the Z39.50 protocol is used as an example. The OAI harvest protocol is the example of the second model. Virtual union catalogues are compared with a real one. A pan-European model is discussed as a way to combine the best of all three models, with EUCAT as its base.
Genre
UKMARC
Markup Languages
STMML is an XML-based markup language covering many generic aspects of scientific information. It has been developed as a re-usable core for more specific markup languages. It supports data structures, data types, metadata, scientific units and some basic components of scientific narrative. The central means of adding semantic information is through dictionaries. The specification is through an XML Schema which can be used to validate STMML documents or fragments. Many examples of the language are given.From FOS News
Friday, November 29, 2002
This 'Blog
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
Friend-of-a-Friend
Explores an XML and RDF application known as Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF). FOAF allows the expression of personal information and relationships, and is a useful building block for creating information systems that support online communities. Code samples demonstrate the basics.A tool for creating a FOAF file is the FOAF-a-matic
The FOAF-a-matic is being provided as a quick and easy way for you to create your own FOAF description. Simply work through the forms on this page and complete whichever entries you'd like to add to your description. At a minimum you'll need to supply your name and email address, and similarly for any friends you might add.A technical description is FOAF: the 'friend of a friend' vocabulary
This is the FOAF namespace document. It describes the FOAF vocabulary, and the terms (RDF classes and properties) that constitute it. As such, it is a Semantic Web vocabulary or 'ontology'.
Interesting. Anyone using it?
ALA
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
21st Century Librarian Award
Poll
If you know of a decent voting/polling application please let me know.
Privacy
Blog owners will be able to view the list of their subscribers. On the flip side, if subscribers want their email address hidden from view, they can set their account to "private" in their Profile section. In fact, this option is in place now, if you want to use it.You can rest assured I'll not pass your addresses on to any third party or send you spam. I'm curious as to who is a subscriber, so I will take a peek some time. This applies to any 'blog you have subscribed to using Bloglet.
Personal Names
The study sought to investigate how Spanish names are handled by national and international databases and to identify mistakes that can undermine the usefulness of these databases for locating and retrieving works by Spanish authors.
Open Archives Initative
Z39.50
SRW ("Search/Retrieve for the Web") is a web-service-based protocol which aims to integrate access across networked resources, and to promote interoperability between distributed databases by providing a common platform. The underpinnings of the protocol are formed by bringing together more than 20 years experience from the collective implementers of the Z39.50 protocol with recent developments in the web-technologies arena. SRW features both SOAP and URL-based access mechanisms (SRW and SRU respectively) to provide for a wide range of possible clients. It uses CQL, the Common Query Language, which provides a powerful yet intuitive means of formulating searches. The protocol mandates the use of open and industry-supported standards XML and XML Schema, and where appropriate, Xpath and SOAP.
The SRW Initiative recognizes the importance of Z39.50 (as currently defined and deployed) for business communication, and focuses on getting information to the user. SRW provides semantics for searching databases containing metadata and objects, both text and non-text. Building on Z39.50 semantics enables the creation of gateways to existing Z39.50 systems while reducing the barriers to new information providers, allowing them to make their resources available via a standard search and retrieve service.
SRW, SRU, and CQL have been developed by an international team, minimizing cross-language pitfalls and other potential internationalization problems. Participants include:
Theo van Veen, Koninlijke Bibliotheek
Mike Taylor, independent consultant
Pat Stevens, OCLC
Rob Sanderson, Liverpool University
Ralph LeVan, OCLC
Allan Kent, RMIT University
Ian Ibbotson, Knowledge Integration
Poul Henrik Jorgensen, Portia
Sebastian Hammer, IndexData
Janifer Gatenby, PICA
Matthew J. Dovey, Oxford University
Larry Dixson, Library of Congress
Adam Dickmeiss, Index Data
Ray Denenberg, Library of Congress
The ZING, SRW, and CQL home pages
The Z39.50 Maintenance Agency home page.
The SRW and CQL version 1.0 specifications will remain stable for a six- to nine-month implementation-experience period. During this period developers are encouraged to implement the specification (see the implementors page), join the list of implementors, participate in interoperability testing, and help develop the next version, 1.1. Please direct questions, comments, and suggestions to z3950@loc.gov. Please feel free to forward this announcement to other lists as appropriate.
Lawyers for Libraries
The first two training institutes were held in 1997 and 1998 and proved very successful. Beginning in 2003, we will be sponsoring regional training institutes to ensure that libraries throughout the United States will have access to effective representation when dealing with First Amendment issues.
Pass this on to the attorney in your life.
EFF Pioneer Awards
In every field of human endeavor, there are those dedicated to expanding knowledge, freedom, efficiency, and utility. Many of today's brightest innovators are working along the electronic frontier. To recognize these leaders, the Electronic Frontier Foundation established the Pioneer Awards for deserving individuals and organizations. The Pioneer Awards are international and nominations are open to all. The deadline for nominations this year is Feb. 1, 2003 (see nomination criteria and instructions below).
How to Nominate Someone
You may send as many nominations as you wish, but please use one e-mail per nomination. You may submit your entries to us via e-mail to: "pioneer at eff.org" Just tell us:
- The name of the nominee
- The phone number or e-mail address at which the nominee can be reached; and, most importantly
- Why you feel the nominee deserves the award.
Nominee Criteria
There are no specific categories for the EFF Pioneer Awards, but the following guidelines apply:
- The nominees must have made a substantial contribution to the health, growth, accessibility, or freedom of computer-based communications.
- The contribution may be technical, social, economic, or cultural.
- Nominations may be of individuals, systems, or organizations in the private or public sectors.
- Nominations are open to all (other than EFF staff & board and this year's award judges), and you may nominate more than one recipient. You may nominate yourself or your organization.
- All nominations, to be valid, must contain your reasons, however brief, for nominating the individual or organization, along with a means of contacting the nominee (or heirs, if posthumous), and your own contact number. Anonymous nominations will be allowed, but we prefer to be able to contact the nominating parties in the event that we need further information.
The 2003 Awards
The 12th annual EFF Pioneer Awards will be presented in New York, NY, in conjunction with the 13th Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP2003). All nominations will be reviewed by a panel of judges chosen for their knowledge of the technical, legal, and social issues associated with information technology.
Links:
Pioneer Awards webpage
Lets have plenty of libraries and librarians get nominated.
Thursday, November 21, 2002
Scout Portal Toolkit
This open source software package, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, allows groups or organizations to develop a portal online without making a big investment in technical resources or expertise. This release marks the first post-beta release of SPT.
Interested users and current beta testing organizations are strongly encouraged to offer feedback by taking a brief (12 questions) survey. This survey will help us gather information to refine SPT in future releases and evaluate our work to date.
The SPT 1.0.0 package features include:
- Shipped with a MySQL database with Dublin Core compliant metadata default fields
- Cross-Field Searching (Advanced Search)
- Metadata field editor, which allows portal administrators the ability to add, delete, or disable a variety of metadata fields
- Resource comments by Users
- Intelligent User Agents
- Resource Quality Ratings by Users
- Suggested Resource Referrals (Recommender System)
- Accessible to users with disabilities
- Support for RSS channel export and the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting 2.0
- Discussion forum options
More information on SPT and its features, to explore a demo installation, or to download the software is available on-line.
Specific comments, question and bug reports can be sent to SPTSupport@scout.wisc.edu.
Also, the November issue of D-LIB Magazine has an article on the SPT software. Discussed are the key features and functionality. The article may be found on-line.
The development team looks forward to hearing your feedback!
Thanks,
David J. Sleasman
Metadata and Cataloging Services Coordinator
Internet Scout Project
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Phone: 608-263-2674
http://scout.cs.wisc.edu--Posted with permission
Koha
Vacation
Wednesday, November 20, 2002
Reading
MARC
Cataloging Portals
FacetMap
Tuesday, November 19, 2002
IFLA
Swarming
The question then becomes how can libraries use this behavior to their advantage? How to initiate the swarm? How to handle the swarm when it arrives? How to make sure some of them return? This is new territory. In the Web, it is easy. Some visitors here over the past few days signed up to receive posts over e-mail. Others may have added Catalogablog to their newsreader or favorites. In a physical setting, it becomes less obvious.
K-12 Schools
From now through December 31, 2002, qualifying K-12 teachers can order their free “X for Teachers Kit,” which provides everything a teacher needs to learn and become comfortable with Mac OS X including:
- Getting Started with Mac OS X Training CD filled with practice exercises, tips, and over 80 QuickTime movies
- Mac OS X v10.2 (Jaguar) Install CD Set
- Telephone support for 90 days
- Manual and License Agreement
Monday, November 18, 2002
MarcEdit
A patch is available to address a bug with the replace command in the MarcEditor. The error generally occurs when attempting to replace a string with nothing or a set of spaces--but could manifest itself using different criteria. This fix addresses all these issues.
ISBD(ER) Revisions
Metadata
This article provides an overview of work completed at Tsinghua University Library in which a metadata framework was developed to aid in the preservation of digital resources. The metadata framework is used for the creation of metadata to describe resources, and includes an encoding standard used to store metadata and resource structures in information systems. The author points out that the Tsinghua University Library metadata framework provides a successful digital preservation solution that may be an appropriate solution for other organizations as well.
Sharing Scripts
Friday, November 15, 2002
Distractions
MARC
Thursday, November 14, 2002
Marketing
We should also be marketing for the larger institution. The library does not stand much chance of survival, if the larger organization should fail. Hard times do follow the trickle down economic model; if the parent organization is hurting, you can be sure the library will feel the pain. So the university, city, corporation, or school district should be supported.
Each of us moves in several spheres in our professional duties. Different situations call for marketing of a different level. However, marketing is a normal part of every day.
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
MBA
Student take the core courses of the MBA program and graduate with that degree. In addition, they take a set of core courses in Information Management introducing them to key management concepts involving the design, construction, and control of information processing activities within an organization; the strategic role of information technology in rapidly changing business environments; and the new business models and competitive strategies emerging from the electronic marketplace.Does anyone have any experience with this degree?
Dissertations
Research
- Finding the Flow in Web Site Search, Hearst, Elliott, English, Sinha, Swearingen, and Yee, Communications of the ACM, 45 (9), September 2002. (Deals with user interfaces)
- The Descent of Hierarchy, and Selection in Relational Semantics, Rosario, Hearst, and Fillmore, ACL 2002. (Machine indexing and classification)
- FLAMENCO: Dynamic Use of Metadata in Search Interfaces (A project on user interfaces)
- LINDI: Text Data Mining
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
Digital Object Identifier
The Digital Object Identifier (DOI®) is a system for identifying and exchanging intellectual property in the digital environment. It provides a framework for managing intellectual content, for linking customers with content suppliers, for facilitating electronic commerce, and enabling automated copyright management for all types of media. Using DOIs makes managing intellectual property in a networked environment much easier and more convenient, and allows the construction of automated services and transactions for e-commerce.
Dublin Core
Facet Analysis
This research will focus on application of such this method in the field of humanities and will try to answer on the following questions:
- Is FAT useful for developing the kind of complex knowledge structures we need in order to access digital materials
- How might classification structure based on FAT provide innovative access to digital materials?
- How might FAT facilitiate cross-disciplinary access?
RSS
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web content syndication format based on XML 1.0. In the current implementation it's a very capable format used to aggregate content from multiple news sources. The problem with this format is that the architecture on which it is deployed hasn't changed in a while and places too much load onto the infrastructure. In this article I try to point out different approaches to solve these problems and make RSS more suited to be used on mobile devices which are not always-on.
Friday, November 08, 2002
Library On-Line Forum
I spent some time checking it out and made a few postings. It is interesting to see how each of these different forms of communication each have their own rules and etiquette. IM and chat allow the worst spelling and grammar and have a whole world of abbreviations, none of which would be acceptable anywhere else. Even though forums have been around quite some time, I first looked at them on Fidonet, I'm not used to the ethos. Just how it will fit into my overall effort to communicate and keep current remains to be seen. Another issue is the technology, I've not played with it yet. Can there be RSS feeds from topics? Would be nice. How about receiving postings via e-mail? Could I post using e-mail? If not on this software, how about another? Or would these techniques ruin the purpose of a common meeting place?
Thursday, November 07, 2002
Dewey
Dewey Cutter Software. Software program that automatically provides cutter numbers from the OCLC Four-Figure Cutter Tables (Cutter Four-Figure Table and Cutter-Sanborn Four-Figure Table) upon input of text. Works with Windows 95, 98, NT, XP, and 2000.
Dewey Screen Saver A screen saver to load on your PC to view the ten main classes of the DDC. Works with Windows NT, 95, 98, and 2000.
MARC21
- Addition of field 748 (Index term -- Chronological)
- Updated examples
- Improved descriptions of content designators
Keeping Up with Changes
WatchThatPage is a service that enables you to automatically collect new information from your favorite pages on the Internet. You select which pages to monitor, and WatchThatPage will find which pages have changed, and collect all the new content for you. The new information is presented to you in an email and/or a personal web page. You can specify when the changes will be collected, so they are fresh when you want to read them. The service is free!
Wednesday, November 06, 2002
Marc21
- Addition of field 026 (Fingerprint identifier)
- Addition of subfield $u (Uniform resource identifier) in fields 506 and 540
- Addition of the second indicator values in field 655
- Updated examples
- Improved descriptions of content designators
MARC21
- Addition of field 065 (Other classification number)
- Addition of subfield $u (Uniform Resource Identifier) in field 670
- Updated examples
- Improved descriptions of content designators
MARC21
- Addition of field 563 (Binding information)
- Addition of subfields $n (Pattern note) and $p (Number of pieces per issuance) in fields 853-855
- Updated examples
- Improved descriptions of content designators
MARC21
- Addition of field 648 (Subject added entry -- Chronological term)
- Improved descriptions of content designators
- Updated examples
Dewey
- Plain Planes
- Standing Room
- Amazing Grace
- Swimming Upstream
- Good Grief
- Time Periods
- Significant Expansion
- Medical Research
Tuesday, November 05, 2002
Faceted Classification
Serials
Type of Material
Monday, November 04, 2002
CONSER
Information
Libraries and our catalogs tend to be "just the facts" places. There is no place in a MARC record for an opinion. Amazon has a place for reviews and comments. Maybe, we should consider this for our catalogs. It would be messy, but maybe richer and more interesting.
Serials
A NISO White Paper released in September 2002 reported that libraries, content aggregators, publishers, and third party service providers are increasingly exchanging information about serials subscription. The White Paper indicated that a standard exchange format would be beneficial to all parties in the supply chain and identified ONIX for Serials as a good foundation for such an exchange format.
The NISO/EDItEUR group will begin work in November 2002 and will be tasked to:
- Recommend specific enhancements to the ONIX for Serials schema and documentation to support exchange of serials subscription information
- Recommend how the query/response scenarios can be accommodated within the emerging EDItEUR framework for transaction-based exchange
- Plan, organize and coordinate a pilot project involving publishers, intermediaries, and libraries to demonstrate the feasibility of using ONIX for Serials as an exchange format for serials subscription information
The Joint Working Party will be co-chaired by Priscilla Caplan, a member of the NISO Standards Development Committee and Assistant Director of the Florida Center for Library Automation, Gainesville FL and Richard Gedye, Journals Sales and Marketing Director, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK.
Thanks Ian for passing this on.
OCLC
Writing
National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.
OPML
The purpose of this format is to provide a way to exchange information between outliners and Internet services that can be browsed or controlled through an outliner.The design goal is to have a transparently simple, self-documenting, extensible and human readable format that's capable of representing a wide variety of data that's easily browsed and edited. As the format evolves this goal will be preserved. It should be possible for a reasonably technical person to fully understand the format with a quick read of a single Web page.
Friday, November 01, 2002
Career
- The Joy Of Being Solo
- I'm Still a Librarian
- So, You Want to Be a Systems Librarian?
- To Be a Music Librarian
- One Day I Walk: How I Changed Specializations -- and Survived!
- Choosing To Change: From Public To Law Librarianship
- What's Online? Recommended Resources
- But I Want To Hold It In My Hand! Print Resources
AACR
- JSC Format Variation Working Group
- Incorporating FRBR Terminology in AACR
- Chapter 21 and “Rule of three”
- Revised Introduction
- GMDs and Class of Materials
Open Source
Thanks to Matthew Eberle at Library Techlog for bringing this to my attention.
Thursday, October 31, 2002
Foreign Languages
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
NACO
I have found a work around. I'm e-mailing submissions to someone at another institution who then searches and inputs the record. This does create double work, more selectivity on my part (I don't want to place too heavy a burden on my colleague) and time delay.
This could be alleviated if one of the utilities offered access to their authority files and the ability to contribute as a separate service. They could bring in a few more dollars and the library community would benefit from the contributions of small, specialized libraries.
Tuesday, October 29, 2002
Guidelines
Open URL
It does the fulltext linking for a host of different databases and supports OpenURL linking. It uses a special version of jake (GODOTjake) for the fulltext lookup (we are currently in the process of updating this version of jake) and it will also make use of the 856 field if available in the ILS. The result is a very robust and accurate linking system. As an example of additional functionality, it may be used to send ILL requests to other libraries as per a matrix of borrowing rules that can be setup and controlled. In cases where the ILL requesting is unmediated, the request can go direct to the lending institution.
Open Archives Initative
An important role of the Open Archive Forum is sharing information about technical issues relating to open archives, and especially about implementations of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Please help us by filling at least part of our questionnaire.
PHPMyLibrary
Open Source
In this article, we'll try to answer the question "how" we implemented our WebPAC, what were our goals and how they were changing as we were progressing and adjusting them to fluctuating conditions. We will describe our environment, consisting of 19 different libraries with an undefined organisational structure, problems with space, insufficient communications between library staff and the management board, and many other problems. Another important question we want to answer is why we decided to solve our problem going step by step and using the existing Open Source solutions, no matter how complete or inadequate they were, instead of waiting for a single "perfect" solution that would solve all our problems in one integrated package. Finally, we will share with you what we have learned in this process and how our new knowledge affected creation of new requirements, as well as our future plans.They were using ISIS not MARC, so the details may not apply to everybody, still the process is valid. Found at oss4lib.
Almost a Virus
Greetings!If you click the link, it asks to download a program to your machine and gives you an End User License Agreement to agree with. By agreeing, you give them permission to send a greeting to every person in your contact list. It is nothing more than a sneaky way to spam and collect valid e-mail addresses. Symantic is not calling it a virus, since you agree to have it do just what it says it is going to do. Beware. More details at Symantec.has sent you an E-Card -- a virtual postcard from FriendGreetings.com. You can pickup your E-Card at FriendGreetings.com by clicking on the link below.
Monday, October 28, 2002
LCSH
OLAC Newsletter
Z39.50
Metadata
ANSEL Designated/Invoked by Two Bytes, Not One
This is a clarification of information on the newly assigned escape sequence for designating and invoking ANSEL, the Extended Latin character set used in MARC 21.
The email notification of the escape sequence assigned to the extended Latin set (ANSI/NISO Z39.47) provided information about the final character of the escape sequence only, which was identified as hexadecimal 45 (the uppercase letter "E"). The text of the registration itself, however, indicates that final part of the escape sequence for ANSEL is actually two bytes, hexadecimal 21 ("!") followed by hexadecimal 45 ("E"). Although "E" is the final character, it appears that the pair hex 21 45 ("!E") would need to be used in MARC 21 records to designate and/or invoke ANSEL. This is important with regard to the application of ISO 2022 which specifies the technique for using escape sequences to change character sets. ISO 2022 does not indicate that the final portion of the escape sequence is restricted to a single character. Please make note of this clarification when implementing any escape sequences to designate and/or invoke ANSEL (ANSI/NISO Z39.47)
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Library of Congress
Network Development and MARC Standards Office
101 Independence Avenue, S.E.
Washington, DC 20540-4402 U.S.A.
TEL: +1-202-707-6237
FAX: +1-202-707-0115
NET: rbar@loc.gov
Friday, October 25, 2002
Value of Cataloging
Spelling
Thursday, October 24, 2002
Privacy
Blog owners will be able to view the list of their subscribers. On the flip side, if subscribers want their email address hidden from view, they can set their account to "private" in their Profile section. In fact, this option is in place now, if you want to use it.You can rest assured I'll not pass your addresses on to any third party or send you spam. I'm curious as to who is a subscriber, so I will take a look some time. This applies to any 'blog you have subscribed to using Bloglet.
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
RSS
Portals
Open source. Found at oss4lib.
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
Serials Subscription Information
NISO commissioned this White Paper to help the organization think through the current needs and prospects for successfully developing a standard format for exchanging serials subscription information.They are seeking comments on the paper.Increasingly libraries, content aggregators, publishers, and third party service providers are exchanging serials subscription data. Indeed, in the last five years, several new businesses have been started to provide libraries with accurate information about the serials to which they subscribe via aggregations.
ILL
School Librarians
Monday, October 21, 2002
AACR
Metadata
I've developed a specification which shows how to encode our general schema's metadata using only HTML [meta] tags. Along the way, I've also "Dublin Core-ized" our data schema, and tried to use DC tags wherever possible and appropriate.What we'd like to do is get several (as many as possible) volunteers to apply this specification to their own weblogs, thereby beginning to actually 'publish' real metadata. At the same time, we call on everyone who is codingly-inclined to begin examining approaches for grabbing, parsing, slicing, dicing and presenting back this very same metadata.
MARC
On August 16, 2002, in Glasgow, the members of the MARC Harmonization Coordinating Committee (MHCC) completed the signing of an agreement confirming the commitment of the National Library of Canada, the Library of Congress and the British Library to work together on the maintenance and development of the MARC21 format.
The Future
Friday, October 18, 2002
Call for trainers
SCCTP is a program of the CONSER (Cooperative Online Serials) Program and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. SCCTP provides training materials and trains experienced catalogers to present the materials but does not sponsor the actual workshops. SCCTP trainers work with workshop sponsors to set dates and all expenses are paid by the sponsor. Honoraria are given at the discretion of the sponsor. Complete information on SCCTP is available.
Two train-the-trainer sessions are being scheduled for winter 2003. The first will be held in Philadelphia on Friday January 24 in conjunction with ALA Midwinter. PALINET will be assisting with the logistics of the course. The second session will be held in Seattle in February, dates to be announced. There is no cost for the training or the materials but trainees are responsible for paying their own expenses.
Requirements:
- A minimum of 1-2 years of experience cataloging integrating resources.
- Experience in training, such as SCCTP workshops, NACO or BIBCO training, other cataloging-related workshops, or significant in-house training.
- Support of your institution in providing your expenses to attend the training session and in providing paid leave of absence for you to give two SCCTP workshops a year. The number actually given may vary, depending on demand and the availability of a trainer.
To apply:
- Current SCCTP, BIBCO or NACO trainers: Send an email to Ana Cristan (acri at loc.gov) indicating your specific experience with integrating resources and the session you would like to attend. No references are needed.
- All others: Send an email to Ana Cristan (acri at loc.gov) with the following information:
- Your name, title, mailing and email addresses and telephone and fax numbers.
- Which session you would like to attend (Philadelphia or Seattle)
- A brief description of your cataloging experience involving integrating resources, and your experience with providing cataloging training.
- Names of three references who can attest to your cataloging experience and training ability
Please send in applications or expressions of interest by: November 15. Confirmation will be sent out beginning after Nov. 1. A maximum of 30 people in each session may limit acceptance.
Jean Hirons
CONSER Coordinator
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave. SE
Washington, DC 20540-4160
voice: 202-707-5947
fax: 202-707-1778
email: jhir at loc.gov
I have replaced the @ symbol with "at" to prevent spam. If one of the SCCTP courses is offered in your area, take advantage of it. These folks know their stuff.