Uniform Titles

Draft 2 of a proposed revision to LCRI 25.5B on Uniform Titles for Motion Pictures, Television Programs, and Radio Programs is now available for review and comment on the CPSO Web site. Send comments by January 15, 2004.

Houston Area

On Jan. 6, 2004 a special cataloging class will be offered in Houston through the Department of Library Services

Class: Cataloging Spanish materials
Teacher: Joanna Fountain
Time: 9:00-4:00

Location: Department of Library Services, Houston ISD, 5216 Feagan, Houston, Texas 77007

Scope: Learn to recognize and locate good cataloging records for Spanish materials; learn what tools are useful as aids to cataloging and what standards to apply when evaluating commercial cataloging for Spanish materials.

The class is limited to 23 students sue to the size of the lab. Participants should be familiar with Marc Magician.
A box lunch will be provided.
Cost: $50 for materials and lunch

If you have questions contact Debbie Hall, Library Technology Supervisor,
To reserve a seat, call (713-861-1204) or email Yolanda Sauceda (ysauceda@houstonisd.org)

Posted with permission. A couple comments.... This should be an excellent workshop, Dr. Fountain knows both cataloging and Spanish very well. Also, what an excellent idea for a workshop. Giving the rest of us some tools and knowledge to better deal with Spanish language materials is a need in many parts of our country. I hope they have a full session and offer the workshop again and again.

Digitization

While at the AOSA Conference I attended the session "Writing for the Orff Echo." They distributed the photo permission form that had to be used for any photographs accompanying articles. One statement caught my eye, it said the photograph of your child will never appear in the Internet. Never is a very long time. That means the full contents of the Orff Echo will never be available on-line. Never. Not a 5 year moving wall, like JSTOR. Never.

Just wondering, how many other publications have similar restrictions that will prevent them from ever being completely available on-line. Is this the rule in publications that might have pictures with children, or rather the exception.

Audio Standards

Memory institutions often have collections of non-commercial sound recordings. Oral history projects, meetings and presentations, and local music are some examples. Transferring these from tape to digital will provide better access, they may even be placed on the Web in digital format. However, MP3 and WMA are both proprietary lossey formats; some other codecs should be considered.

For lossless open-source compression FLAC should be considered.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec. Grossly oversimplified, FLAC is similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see links to the right for supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file.

A lossey open-source codec is Ogg Vorbis.

Ogg Vorbis is a new audio compression format. It is roughly comparable to other formats used to store and play digital music, such as MP3, VQF, AAC, and other digital audio formats. It is different from these other formats because it is completely free, open, and unpatented.

SANAD Support Technologies

This might belong more in Library Technology Guides, but since I got the scoop.... SANAD Support Technologies sold most of its contracts, but not the company name, to Library Associates.

NASIG

The NASIG Newsletter is now available to all, previously access was restricted to members. The Dec. issue contains information on:

• NASIG 19th ANNUAL CONFERENCE (2004)
• NASIG 18th Annual Conference (2003)
• NASIG PROFILES
• NASIG AWARDS
• OTHER SERIALS NEWS

The North American Serials Interest Group is a bargain, only $25.00 for membership and only $5.00 for students. Read the newsletter to see what they are up to and then join.

ISBD(G)

The revised version of ISBD(G) is now ready for reviewing.

The General International Standard Bibliographic Description - referred to hereinafter as the ISBD(G) - lists all the elements that are required to describe and identify all types of material that are likely to appear in library collections, assigns an order to the elements of the description, and specifies a system of punctuation for the description.

This document often influences AACR, so it is fundamental to cataloging. Now is the time to make comments.

OPAC Access

Jenny, the Shifted Librarian, points to a IE Explorer add-on that allows searching library catalogs. The Searchy tool

"with this Search Addon you can upgrade your Internet Explorer to search quickly and directly over the address bar of your Browser in:

• different Search-Engines
• various Online Shops
• and Encyclopedias etc.

However, it is not limited to a particular group of databases, it has a tool to add custom databases. Jenny created one for her local library catalog. You can create one for the users of your institution and make it available for download.

I've not compared this to LibraryLookup. Searchy is not limited to ISBN's it will search any keywords. Exciting news. Thanks for the pointer Jenny.

ccValidator

ccValidator is a parser/validator for Creative Commons Licence metadata in RDF.

This service parses Creative Commons licenses, validates the RDF and displays their contents in human readable form. It is useful for ensuring that your license accurately reflects the rights you wish to reserve (or not).

What's New at the Lunar and Planetary Institute Library

The What's New at the Lunar and Planetary Institute Library page has been on administrative leave for a while now. I'm glad to say it has returned and should be back on a weekly update schedule for the future.

Dublin Core

A new working group has been established by DCMI, the Working Group on
Preservation Metadata.

OCLC

The minutes of the Cataloging & Metadata Interest Group of the OCLC Members Council are available. Topics discussed include:

• OCLC Cataloging Partners Program (CPP)
• Batchloading
• Z39.50 Update
• Subscription Pricing

Librarian's Book Club

The Dec. selections for the Librarian's Book Club are, The Truth About Reference Librarians by Will Manley and Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason by Nancy Pearl.

The fiction selection is Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMullen.

Digital Libraries

Dynix is hosting Digital Library Research and Development Within Libraries on Dec. 4, 2003, 8 AM to 9 AM Pacific.

Sayeed Choudhury of Johns Hopkins will discuss the rationale for conducting onsite digital library research and development within libraries, discussing the benefits for library users and for libraries themselves. He will discuss specific digital library projects at Johns Hopkins, including a robotic retrieval and scanning system and name disambiguation tools for automated metadata generation.

The have a form to suggest a speaker or topic, so if there is someone you would like to hear this is your opportunity.

Career

Rachel Singer Gordon and Sarah Johnson of Lisjobs.com fame have begun to 'blog. The purpose of Beyond the Job is to:

post ideas and opportunities to help you develop your career as an information professional... things to take you beyond the job, in other words. While we won't be including specific job ads here (check either of our sites via the Links section for those), we will be posting information on other career development opportunities. These include calls for papers or presenters, tips on job-hunting and resume building, articles on librarianship as a profession, and anything else that happens to be relevant.

Thanks to both for this very useful resource, Lisjobs.com and the newsletter, Info Career Trends. Seen on Library Stuff.

EAD

The LEADERS Project has developed a toolkit that delivers transcripts and images of archive documents over the Internet together with appropriate contextual material. The toolkit is built on standard methods for encoding texts (TEI), digital images (NISO Mix), finding aids (EAD) and authority records (EAC). There is currently only a demonstrator application available.

Preservation Metadata

OCLC is conducting a survey of those using preservation metadata.

Preservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS), a working group sponsored by OCLC and RLG, seeks information about digital preservation repositories. The focus of PREMIS is on the practical aspects of implementing preservation metadata in digital preservation systems. The group is examining alternative strategies for implementing preservation metadata, and developing a core set of preservation metadata with wide applicability within the digital preservation community.