Frankfurt Principles

The Lithuanian translation of the "Frankfurt Principles" has been posted on the IFLA Web site.

Furthermore, the Korean translation has been replaced by an updated version.

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is Your Friend by Libby Miller and Simon Price provides a brief introduction and a few links to further info.

MARC Tools

Roy Zimmer has created and made available some Perl tools for working with MARC records. Thanks Roy.

• getmarc.pl Extracts BLOB data from Voyager. Pick one of the three data types, and specify the range of records to be retrieved. Output is human-formatted, unless you specify raw, and it goes to STDOUT (screen).
• marccount.pl Count the MARC records in file filename. Output is to STDOUT (screen).
• marcedit.pl Add, remove, and/or edit fields in MARC records. Process inputfile to create outputfile. marcedit requires a marcedit.ini file (see below) in the local directory so that it knows what to do. You do not need to be a programmer to use marcedit, if the currently available functions fill your needs. Merely set up the directives in the .ini file, and run marcedit.
• marcedit.ini This is the initialization file for marcedit.pl (see above). You can create individualized copies of this file in different directories to meet your needs.
• marcread.pl Read the MARC file indicated by filename. Output is human-formatted and goes to STDOUT (screen)
• splitmarc.pl Splits file specified by infilename into chunks containing the number of lines specified by chunksize. An incrementing counter is appended to outfilename for each chunk so created. Example: splitmarc.pl abcin.this abcthis.out 100 This would create N files abcthis.out.1, abcthis.out.2, etc., each 100 lines in size, as many as necessary to divide abcin.this as specified

Tattoos for Catalogers

This Metafilter thread is interesting.

NISO/EDItEUR Joint Working Party on the Exchange of Serials

The NISO/EDItEUR Joint Working Party on the Exchange of Serials
Subscription Information (JWP) is a group of librarians, publishers, vendors, subscription agents and other parties involved in using or communicating information about serial products and holdings. Additional information is available from our informal website.

For the last year we've been working to develop and pilot XML transaction formats based on ONIX for Serials for communicating lists of serial products, subscriptions, and holdings for use in publishers management systems, link resolvers, and library systems.

The JWP is now beginning a new project: an ONIX for Serials transaction format called the "Serial Release Notification" (SRN) to communicate notification that one or more serial issues and/or articles has been published. We envision uses for this in various applications from library check-in systems to current awareness services. The SRN is based on the draft ONIX for Serials format called "Serial Item Record" on the EDItEUR website.

MARC

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

• Proposal 2004-07: Applying Field 752 (Added Entry - Hierarchical Place Name) for Different Purposes in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
• Proposal 2004-08: Changing the MARC-8 to UCS Mapping for the Halves of Doublewide Diacritics from the Unicode/UCS Half Diacritic Characters to the Unicode/UCS Doublewide Diacritic Characters

These papers will be discussed in a meeting of the MARC Advisory Committee on Saturday, June 26, 2004 and Sunday, June 27, 2004 in Orlando.

Spelling

Spelling errors prevent access to materials and our catalogs do contain typos. I've not recently mentioned the work by Terry Ballard and others, so it is worth listing these again.

• Typographical Errors in Library Databases by Terry Ballard. Revised March, 2004 by Tina Gunther and Terry Ballard. This list started as a by-product of a keyword inspection of the online catalog of Adelphi University in 1991. Early in the process I found that words appearing more than once in the Adelphi catalog were almost always found in other OPACs of similar size or larger. Since then, I have added some words as I found them. This particular version of the list integrates material from a confirming study performed at the University of North Florida by Bob Jones.
• More Typographical Errors in Library Databases The words in this list are correctly spelled for some uses, but not others. Some of the words are personal names, some are archaic and some are not English. Some are filing indicator errors.
• Libtypos-L A discussion list for librarians interested in this problem.

MARC21

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

• Proposal 2004-05: Changes Needed to Accommodate RISM Data--Music Incipits
• Proposal 2004-06: Defining the First indicator and New Subfields in Field 017 to Suppress Display Labels in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
• Discussion Paper 2004-DP04: Use of ISBNs and LCCNs in MARC 21 Bibliographic Records

These papers will be discussed in a meeting of the MARC Advisory Committee on Saturday, June 26, 2004 and Sunday, June 27, 2004 in Orlando.

A draft agenda for the meeting is available.

Other papers will be posted soon.

LISA V Preliminary Announcement

The planning for the next LISA (Library and Information Services in Astronomy) conference has started. LISA V will be hosted by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' (CfA) John G. Wolbach Library & Information Resource Center in Cambridge, MA, in June 2006. Mark your calendar now.

Rights Expression Languages

Rights Expression Languages : A Report for the Library of Congress by Karen Coyle.

Rights expression languages (RELs) are emerging in the information community that support different aspects of the digital access environment -- licensing, payments, web material, use control, access, etc. They go to different depths in the data they specify and they take different approaches vis-à-vis machine manipulation. These variations make it difficult to select the appropriate one for a particular situation or a cooperative venture. This report was commissioned to clarify the similarities and differences of various emerging RELs in order to assist users in making choices and to encourage cooperation among the developers of the languages where feasible. Karen Coyle has shown several important ways to analyze a language, such as its purpose or its machine-actionability or its data element content, that will assist the community in making decisions. She based the discussion on four leading REL initiatives (as of February 2004), following them through an analysis process.

This is an excellent introduction, a must-read for anyone concerned with rights management and access.