Career

The latest issue of Info Career Trends is now available. Contents include:

• 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

MARC

LC has made some additions and changes to "MARC Code List for Languages additions" and "MARC Code List for Relators and Sources additions" recently.

AACR

The Outcomes of the Meeting of the Joint Steering Committee Held in York, England, 9-11 September 2002 are now available. Topics included:

• 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

The Open Source Software and Libraries Bibliography compiled by Brenda Chawner "includes announcements, journal articles, and web documents that are about open source software development in libraries. It also includes articles that describe specific open source applications used in libraries, in particular Koha, Greenstone, and MyLibrary." The bibliography is also available as an EndNote library. That's a nice touch.

Thanks to Matthew Eberle at Library Techlog for bringing this to my attention.

Foreign Languages

Recently, I've been cataloging some foreign language dissertations. German, French, Italian and Spanish are the languages. I'm poor in all of these. However, I've been using the Google translation tool and getting some good results. Good enough to be able to assign subject headings in most cases.

Presentations

Saw this posted somewhere recently: Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

NACO

This is a plea to OCLC and RLN to consider providing access to the authority files as a separate product. We are a small library and cannot afford full cataloging status on either of these utilities. However, with our specialized collection and close ties with the community of users, we are in a very good position to contribute to NACO. We see the authors as they come through for meetings and workshops. I'm sure there are other special libraries in a similar position. Yet, a requirement for NACO participation is access to OCLC or RLG. This prevents our participation.

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.

Guidelines

The 4th ed. of the Government Printing Office Cataloging Guidelines is available in PDF. At about 200 pages is it a large file.

Open URL

An open source open URL linking program is available, GODOT (Generalized Online Documents Ordering Texts).

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

The Open Archives Forum is seeking input from European institutions.

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

The PhpMyLibrary-2.0.1 has been released. Its major enhancement, Multi-admin support. Library user picture upload. Database structure changed. polGenSQL revised. Content Management added. Found via oss4lib.

Open Source

Building WebPAC for Faculty of Philosophy Libraries - experiences and lessons learned by Marijana Glavica and Dobrica Pavlinusic details the decisions to use an open source for their Web presence.

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

This message is being passed around:

Greetings!

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.

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.

LCSH

Glancing at the Revised LC Subject Headings in the latest Cataloging Service Bulletin it seem as if all battles are having geographic information added. The format looks like: XXX, Battle of, Place, Date. For example, Cool Springs, Battle of, Va., 1864. Libraries with history sections will have some major updating to do. Luckily, here at the Lunar and Planetary Institute we have no such headings.

OLAC Newsletter

The March/June 2002 issue of the OLAC Newsletter is now available. I've received mine in the mail over the weekend. If you are not yet a member of OLAC, see what $12.00 can buy.

Z39.50

If your catalog is available via Z39.50, and you want others to know, WebClarity has a database of sites to which you can contribute. This will make it available to all the Bookwhere 2000 users in about a week.

Metadata

CIMI Releases SPECTRUM Schema. The CIMI Consortium is pleased to announce the public release of Version 1.5 of the CIMI XML Schema for SPECTRUM, and the launch of an Open Implementers call to participate an Alpha Test Period. The CIMI Schema will enable museums to encode rich descriptive information relating to museum objects, including associated information about people, places and events surrounding the history of museum objects, as well as information about their management and use within museums. The CIMI Schema will be useful for migrating data, the sharing of information between applications, and as an interchange format for OAI metadata harvesting.

From The Open Archives Initiative

Metadata

Faceted Metadata Search and Browse is a short introduction with a few links.

ANSEL Designated/Invoked by Two Bytes, Not One

Received via e-mail this morning.

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
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