Holiday

Thursday, here in the U. S. of A., we will be celebrating Thanksgiving. My library is also closed Friday, a four day weekend. Happy Thanksgiving to all in the states. I'll be back Monday.

Color Access

Recently the bookstore that allowed some artists to arrange the stock by color received a good bit of press. Ian pointed me to an older effort by the New England School of Law to provide color as a limit on searching. I've posted this before, but it is an interesting concept. Using the binding company's colors provides a limited palette and removes ambiguity such as purple, plum, wine, ox-blood, and all the other terms that are available to describe color.

Searching

Moving Beyond Metasearching: Are Wrappers the Next Big Thing? by Brian Kenney appears in the latest Library Journal.

Bieber who also is codirector of NJIT's Collaborative Hypermedia Research Libratory told LJ that project participants are using a "wrapper" specific to each system that analyzes the display screens such as where the author and title are located. Most vendors today produce pages in XML which makes the process easy--the information is embedded. All results from the same vendor are returned in the same layout wherever you search.

FRBR

The WEB search interface of the ISIS FRBR Prototype Application is now on-line.

A brief WEB page about the software, with some links, is available.

They say that the server performance is very poor, but I found it just fine.

Metadata Authority Description Schema

In preparation for a new MADS draft, there is a "preview" draft".

For reference see Rebecca's message of August 27 (subject: MADS review) accessible from the archive.

There are three changes from the previous version:

1. Descriptors now allow empty elements, so you can use an xlink attribute (URI) in lieu of a value.
2. < ref > is replaced with two elements:
   • < related type="earlier | later |parentorg | broader | narrower |other" > and
   • < variant type="acronym |abbreviation | translation | expansion | other" >.
   The high level structure now is:
   • One < authority >
   • Zero or more < related >
   • Zero or more < variant >
   • Zero or one < otherElements > which is a wrapper for one or more "other elements".
3. All of the MODS elements in the previous MADS draft (e.g. modsNamePart -- namePart from MODS was copied verbatim into MADS and renamed modsNamePart) have been removed, and instead there are references to MODS (e.g. mods:namePart). This requires some changes to MODS, and a draft is available. This is not a proposal for a new MODS version, just an illustration of what needs to be done to MODS to support these MADS references, and this MODS draft is fully compatible with the current version, it simply restructures some of the definitions.

An outline according to the new version is available.

AACR

The Outcomes of the Meeting of the Joint Steering Committee Held in Cambridge, England 18-21 October 2004 are now available.

Librarian's Book Club

So Many Books, So Little Time by Sara Nelson is the December selection for the Librarian's Book Club.