Happy Holidays

Seasons Greetings to all. I'm off to the North country. I'm leaving you in the capable hands of Ian for the next week. See you l8er.

Dear Catalogabloggers,

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

A new version of the EAD DTD has been released.

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

Call for articles: Special issue of Library Hi Tech titled: MARC and Metadata: Future Developments and Relationships

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.

Guest Host

Anyone willing to step in as guest host next week? I'll be visiting family in Mass. and x-country skiing in VT. I'm also going to visit the library/opera house that stradles the US/Canadian border. So no posts from me next week.

Professional Reading

"Metadata-based access to multimedia architectural and historical archive collections: a review" in Aslib Proceedings (2002) v. 54, no. 6, pp. 362-371.

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

On behalf of the steering group mentioned below, I would like to make readers of this list aware of the good news that the Digital Library Federation (DLF) has established an Electronic Resource Management Initiative. (Some related upcoming discussion opportunities at ALA Midwinter are mentioned at the end of the summary.)

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!)

Posted with premission.

Off Topic

Just noticed that the Jimi Hendrix tune "Little Wing" turns up in lots of my recordings. My favorite version would be the one with Clapton and Sheryl Crow. The strangest the one by the Corrs, it works but the tin whistle is a shocker.

Formats

ERIC has a paper, Format Proliferation in Public Libraries by Norm Parry. It does not discuss the problems concerned with cataloging all these new and emerging formats. We know that all too well. It does cover some of the problems this causes in budgeting.

MARC21

The following documents are available for review by the MARC 21 commmunity:

• 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

Dear everybody,

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

The master's paper, A Quantitative Analysis of Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) Usage in Data Providers Registered with the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) by Jewel Ward is available.

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.

IASA Cataloguing Rules

The IASA Cataloguing Rules are available on-line. The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives has developed these rules to complement the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 2nd edition and International Standard Bibliographic Description for Non-Print Materials (ISBD (NBM).

NISO

The RFP Writer's Guide to Standards for Library Systems will help library systems staff understand the standards that can be referenced in RFP's for integrated library systems.

LibraryLookup

Jon Udell has added other library systems to the LibraryLookup bookmarklet. Now users of the epixtech IPAC and Endeavor systems can offer this to their patrons. If your library uses one of these systems make this available on your Web page for your patrons to download. Thank you Jon for this nifty tool and thanks Jenny at the Shifted Librarian for bringing it to my attention.

Over at Library Planet it was reported it is working with Polaris systems.