NACO Training

Later today, I'm off to Dallas for a refresher in NACO. I'm looking forward to this. It is always great to get together with other catalogers and this is a very competent group. The training is Friday and Saturday, so there will not be any more postings until Monday. I'm not bringing a laptop with me for just the one workday. We have weekend guests, so I'll not try to catch on the weekend. The guests are in connection with a GCOA workshop. The Gulf Coast Orff-Schulwerk Association is a local chapter of The American Orff-Schulwerk Association See you Monday.

Resource Description Framework

What is RDF? by Tim Bray is a good introduction to this important standard. It is also available as Que es RDF? in Spanish.

E-Prints

Eprintblog is a new 'blog devoted to e-prints "E-print archives in universities and colleges, particularly those hosted by academic libraries, and the e-print phenomenon in general."

Cookies

Why does Library Journal place a doubleclick cookie on my machine when I visit? I expect that from hungry dot.coms and crass commercial establishments but not established publishers.

Open Archives Initiative

On behalf of the Institute of Physics, I'm pleased to announce our recent implementation of the Open Archives Initiative technical framework for our Electronic Journals service.

As you may know, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) 'develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content'. The key standard promoted by the initiative focuses on content providers making metadata records available in a common format - the Dublin Core Element Set. We are pleased to confirm that we have adopted this standard here at the Institute and metadata records for our article abstracts are now available in this format. They can be 'harvested' from our server on request.

This news will be of interest to a range of individuals and organizations including the E-Print community, fellow publishers and A & I service providers. It is also relevant to you if your institution subscribes to our journals and you wish to harvest our abstract data with a view to loading it locally and/or adding elements of it to your OPAC.

If are interested, please contact custserv@iop.org in the first instance.

Further information on the Open Archives Initiative can be found online.

Kind regards,

Lucy Pearce
Senior Product Manager
Institute of Physics Publishing

Inspiration

A golden oldie, Ten Graces for New Librarians by GraceAnne DeCandido. This has been around since 1996, but even older librarians should reread it every so often. It reminds us to be the kind of professional librarian we meant to be. Pause and reflect.

Multilingual Cataloging

I've just read an article "Perceptions of Catalogers and End-Users Towards Bilingual Authority Files" by Kaba Abdoulaye. The Electronic Library v. 20, no. 2 (2002) pp. 202-210. A shame it is so poor, since it treats such an important topic. Abdoulaye interviewed three catalogers then makes statements like "A majority (66.6 per cent) of the cataloguers believed...." or "A majority of the cataloguing staff believe ...." With a group of three we are dealing with case study, not statistics. Abdoulaye does interview a small group (23) of students as well.

Abdoulaye also is not always sure of the facts. "Authority files appeared to be organized according to AACR2 principle, which is applied today in many academic libraries. However, some of the records were found attached with birth and/or death dates within the name authority file." Anyone who has their first cataloging class in AACR could have told why some names had dates. And it wasn't because they were famous Muslim scholars as Abdoulaye guesses. There is a bibliography that may lead to some better studies, mostly concerned with Arabic language cataloging. The literature review may also be useful as a lead to better research.

Z39.50

YAZ-1.8.8 Sebastian writes: "The most notable changes are full support for character set negotiation and the use of UNICODE in Z39.50 sessions. Also new is support for Unix domain sockets ("file system sockets") as a high-speed, high-security alternative to TCP/IP connections for local client/server pairs." Posted on oss4lib

If you are wondering what YAZ is, here is the description from the YAZ page: "YAZ is a C/C++ programmer's toolkit supporting the development of Z39.50v3 clients and servers. ... The current version of YAZ includes experimental support for the industry standard ZOOM API for Z39.50."

Moving Images

An interesting article in Information Outlook v. 6, no. 8 (2002). "Organizing Moving Image Collections in the Digital Era" by James M. Turner, Michele Hudon and Yves Devin. This is not a how-to-do-it article, rather a research project showing decisions at various institutions. Lots of diversity, was their conclusion.

Information Policy at IMLS

Solicitation of Public Comments on Guidelines for Ensuring and Maximizing the Quality, Objectivity, Utility, and Integrity of Information Disseminated by the Institute of Museum and Library Services

The Institute of Museum and Library services (IMLS) announces that its draft Guidelines for Ensuring and Maximizing the Quality, Objectivity, Utility, and Integrity of Information Disseminated by the Institute of Museum and Library Services have been posted on its website, www.imls.gov. IMLS invites public comments on its draft Guidelines and will consider the comments received in developing its final Guidelines.

E-Records Policy

Request For Information For Electronic Records Archives The NARA is looking for suggestions on e-record policy. This is a preliminary step to issuing an RFP for a product.

NARA intends to make an investment in Electronic Records Archives capabilities to capture, preserve, and provide access to electronic records indefinitely into the future. NARA is currently developing formal system requirements that will be used as the basis for implementation of the ERA. NARA has entered into research partnerships aimed at developing standards for preserving and delivering authentic digital records over indefinite periods of time, including the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model. NARA is participating in a number of research activities and prototypes aimed at improving the knowledge base for developing and evaluating potential technical solutions. These include the Persistent Archives project being performed by the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, and the Presidential Electronic Records Processing Operational System (PERPOS) project, a collaborative effort by the Army Research Laboratory and Georgia Tech Research Institute. The existence of these demonstration programs and prototypes does not imply a commitment by NARA to require incorporation of the associated technologies and architectures into ERA.