Scout Portal Toolkit

The Scout Portal Toolkit has a new version, 1.2.1.

The Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) allows groups or organizations that have a collection of knowledge or resources they want to share via the World Wide Web to put that collection online without making a big investment in technical resources or expertise.

This is primarily a bug fix release, but it does include one major internal set of changes, that should increase performance. The result should be significantly decreased server loads when displaying the front page and for browsing, search, and recommender system results.

Holiday

Here in the states Thursday is a holiday, Thanksgiving. After today, there may not be any posts until Monday.

Writing

The new issue of the Plain Text Gazette is now available. The articles are:

• Editorial
• why oh Why Oh why can't we get Capitalisation Right?
• Words We Hate: the list that could just go on for ever

I find it helpful to be reminded of the basics of good writing, this newsletter does that. As catalogers, we have to write summaries and other notes in bib records. Writing well is a service to all catalog users.

Amazon

The UK's Amazon has added records from the British Library to their catalog. Seems like Amazon appreciates the value of cataloging metadata.

The British Library has added details of over 2.55 million unique bibliographic records to the Amazon.co.uk books catalogue, with 1.7 million of these dated before the 1970 introduction of ISBN.

Australia

This looks interesting, but a bit far from Texas.

Revolution or Evolution? The impact of FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records).

Registrations are now open for the "Revolution or Evolution" seminar to be held from 1.00 to 5.00 pm on 2 February 2004 at the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre. This seminar is being organised by the Australian Committee on Cataloguing as a professional development event for Australian cataloguers, metadata creators and system developers.

This seminar will provide an introduction to FRBR concepts and a description of Australian FRBR implementation and research projects. It will feature a keynote address by Barbara Tillett, Chief, Cataloging Policy and Support Office, Library of Congress. Marie-Louise Ayres from the National Library of Australia will discuss the implementation of FRBR concepts in the Austlit service and other projects. Bemal Rajapatirana from Kinetica will describe the National Library of Australia's research into the application of FRBR concepts within the National Bibliographic Database.

MARC Tools

MARC::Record 1.33 is now out. The big news, besides the bug fixes, is that it now runs cleanly on Perls back to 5.00503.

Thanks to all involved in this work.

TEI

XML Matters: TEI -- the Text Encoding Initiative : An XML dialect for archival and complex documents by David Mertz.

Nowadays, XML is usually thought of as a markup technique utilized by programmers to encode computer-oriented data. Even DocBook and similar document-oriented DTDs focus on preparation of technical documentation. However, the real roots of XML are in the SGML community, which is largely composed of publishers, archivists, librarians, and scholars. In this installment, David looks at Text Encoding Initiative, an XML schema devoted to the markup of literary and linguistic texts. TEI allows useful abstractions of typographic features of source documents, but in a manner that enables effective searching, indexing, comparison, and print publication -- something not possible with publications archived as mere photographic images.

Z39.50

Version 3.0 of the Z Texas Profile is now available.

Ontologies

The papers from the 2nd International Workshop on Evaluation of Ontology-based Tools are now available. Papers include:

• Towards a benchmark for Semantic Web reasoners - an analysis of the DAML ontology library by Christoph Tempich and Raphael Volz
• Using XSLT for Interoperability: DOE and The Travelling Domain Experiment bby Raphael Troncy, Antoine Isaac, and Veronique Malaise
• Case Study: Using Protege to Convert the Travel Ontology to UML and OWL by Holger Knublauch

Metadata Portal

The Wiki page MetadataTaxonomiesAndVocabularies is a good portal to the topic. Not much content but plenty of links. Since it is a Wiki, if you notice an article that should be there, just add it.