Text Encoding Initiative

The Text Encoding Initiative Consortium will hold its third annual Members' Meeting at ATILF, the nationally-funded laboratory for analysis and data processing of the French language, based at the University of Nancy, France, on the 7th and the 8th November 2003.

Margaret Mann Citation

The Margaret Mann Citation Committee is now accepting nominations for the award to be presented at the ALA Annual Conference in June 2004. Deadline for nominations is November 7.

The Margaret Mann Citation is awarded by the ALA ALCTS Cataloging and Classification Section for outstanding professional achievement in cataloging or classification either through publication of significant professional literature, participation in professional cataloging associations, or valuable contributions to practice in individual libraries.

Personally I feel Douglas Winship deserves the honor. AUTOCAT has made a huge difference in the profession. He has provided direction for this very important resource for quite some time.

Metadata

OLDaily provides a summary of the Canadian Metadata Forum.

Map Cataloging

Two presentations from the 2003 ALA conference are available on the MAGERT Web site.

• Cataloging of Early Maps by Velma Parker
• Cataloging Electronic-Resource Cartographic Materials - The Basics by Mary Lynette Larsgaard

PowerPoint presentations are available for many of the other talks.

Faceted Classification

A great resource for faceted classification is the Faceted Classification Discussion List. Aside from the list, there are links to useful Web sites.

Metadata

The Interim report on metadata development in The European Library (TEL) is now available.

The main objective of the metadata workpackage of TEL is to find out which metadata are needed for providing the desired TEL functionality and how this should be implemented or encoded to obtain an integrated, consistent presentation of data obtained from inhomogeneous sources. A second objective is to keep the barrier low for participants to enter collections into TEL. This report outlines the whole metadata development process that should lead to these objectives step by step.

LPI Web

I can't take any credit for this, but a section of our Web site has won the Star Award.

Congratulations!

Your Digital Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon web site has been selected to receive the Griffith Observatory Star Award for the week of Sept. 28 - Oct. 4 for excellence in promoting astronomy to the public through the World Wide Web.

The Star Award is presented only once a week to a deserving site and is quite exclusive. One award is made each week, and it is permanent. Recipients are acknowledged at the Griffith Observatory's Star Award page. You can view other recipients at that location.

Papers

Some articles in the latest Online Information Review v. 27, no. 4.

• Meta-tag: a means to control the process of Web indexing by Dariush Alimohammadi
  Search engines are used to locate information on the Web, but they cannot always adequately meet the information needs of users. Some schemes have been developed to solve this problem and meta-tags are one of them. This article provides a comprehensive definition of meta-tags and explains their function. Then, the possible attributes of meta-tags and the most important meta-tags are introduced in detail. It concludes that, although the meta-tag has shortcomings, as do other schemes of information organizing, it can help improve the retrievability of information on the Web, and should be utilized by Web masters and search engine designers.
• Automatic query taxonomy generation for information retrieval applications by Shui-Lung Chuang; Lee-Feng Chien
  It is crucial for information retrieval systems to learn more about what users search for in order to fulfill the intent of searches. This paper introduces query taxonomy generation, which attempts to organize users' queries into a hierarchical structure of topic classes. Such a query taxonomy provides a basis for the in-depth analysis of users' queries on a larger scale and can benefit many information retrieval systems. The proposed approach to this problem consists of two computational processes: hierarchical query clustering to generate a query taxonomy from scratch, and query categorization to place newly-arrived queries into the taxonomy. The results of the preliminary experiment have shown the potential of the proposed approach in generating taxonomies for queries, which may be useful in various Web information retrieval applications.

OCLC

OCLC has redesigned their Web site. I like most the improved placement of the OCLC Research materials. It even comes with an RSS feed. The other areas still lack this tool.

Will we all need to change our bookmarks and links to the documentation? If we have been using PURLs we would be fine, but I doubt many, if any, of us were that prepared. Just an idea, maybe if a PURL exists for a page it should be displayed on the page or through some sort of autodiscovery method? That might encourage more use of PURLs.

Taxonomy, Classification & Search

Putting it Together: Taxonomy, Classification & Search by Jeff Morris appears in the Sept. issue of Transform Magazine. His conclusion, a combination of free text searching, classification and vocabulary control is better for searching, than just free text searching. We could have told them that decades ago. Still, it is nice to see someone gets the idea.