TMEA

Next Wednesday (9 Feb.) I'm off to San Antonio for the rest of the week to attend the Texas Music Educators Association (TMEA) annual conference. I'm just along for the ride and to support Cora in her run for elementary music vice-president. (I suggested the campaign slogan "Cora's for vice" but that did not get an OK) There may not be any postings after Wednesday morning. San Antonio and musicians are a great combination and I'll be having too much fun to think about MARC or AACR or ISBD. If you know any Texas elementary music teachers mention to them that Cora would make a wonderful VP. If you are going to be in San Antonio too, maybe we could get together for lunch or something.

MARC Tag of the Month

This month the MARC Tag of the Month at Follett is a MARC Record Sample for an e-book. It is missing the 006 and 007 fields. They do use the option to give the extent of the remote item. I'd have included an 655.

MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions

The codes listed below have been recently approved for use in MARC 21 records. The new codes will be added to the online MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions. The new codes should not be used in exchange records until after April 2, 2005. This 60-day waiting period is required to provide MARC 21 implementers with time to include the newly defined code in any validation tables they may apply to the MARC fields where the code is used.

Additions:

• ogst - Oregon GILS Subject Tree (Oregon: Oregon State Library and Oregon Information Resource Management Division (IRMD)) (subfield $2 in Bibliographic and Community Information records in fields 600-651 and field 040, subfield $f (Cataloging Source / Subject heading/thesaurus conventions) in Authority records) [use after April 2, 2005]
• wgst - Washington GILS Subject Tree (Tumwater, WA: Washington State Library) (subfield $2 in Bibliographic and Community Information records in fields 600-651 and field 040, subfield $f (Cataloging Source / Subject heading/thesaurus conventions) in Authority records)[use after April 2, 2005]
• anuc - Code anuc signifies that the descriptive elements have been edited and all headings verified against the relevant authority file to prepare the record for inclusion in the Australian National Bibliographic Database. The Australian National Bibliographic Database authenticates records for Australian imprints, and bibliographic and authority records of Australian interest; field 042 (Authentication Code). [use after April 2, 2005]

MARC Tool

The Emilda Project has released a sub-package, named PHP-MARC, for MARC handling natively in PHP. It can be found in the files list on the Emilda Project page on SourceForge. This package is very similar to the Perl package MARC::Record, and most MARC parsing rules have been looked up in MARC::Record.

Rare Books

Rare Book School announces its schedule of courses for 2005, including sessions at the University of Virginia, the Walters Art Museum/Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and the Freer/Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC. Visit the web site for a complete brochure, expanded course descriptions, and application forms.

Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books), forthcoming 2006, a revision of Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Books (1991).

Cites & Insights

Walt Crawford's latest issue of Cites & Insights is now available. It includes:

• Ethical Perspectives: Republishing and Blogging (no, it's not about the Webcred conference)
• The Library Stuff: two articles and a cluster of five blog entries worth reading and thinking about
• Trends & Quick Takes: 11 items in all, including a different look at Pew's blogging numbers, patent holding companies, an OPAC wiki, and lots more.
• Perspective: Wikipedia and Worth [Revisited]--how one little op-ed draws a book's worth of flames and comments!
• The Good Stuff--seven articles worth reading
• Session Reports from ALA Midwinter 2005: ACRL Current Topics Discussion Group and ALCTS Electronic Resources Interest Group

Institutional Repositories

Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture) 2.0 has just been released.

Fedora is an open source digital repository service that gives organizations the tools for managing these existing and emerging content management requirements. At its core is a powerful digital object model that supports multiple representations or views of each digital object. These representations may originate from data stored locally, from data referenced at other networked locations, or from data produced dynamically by local or remote web services. Relationships among digital objects can be stored and queried, providing the foundation for expressing rich information networks. These objects exist within a repository architecture that supports a variety of management functions such as fine granularity access control, version control, and ingest and export of information in standard XML formats. Finally, all functionality of Fedora, both at the object and repository level, is exposed as web services with well-documented REST and SOAP interfaces.

Fedora 2.0 is a major release that culminates Phase I of the initial Fedora project that began in October 2001 and ended in October 2004. Fedora 2.0 includes significant new features and improvements including the introduction of the Fedora Object XML (FOXML) schema as the new internal storage format for objects, introduction of the Resource Index that provides enhanced search capability, introduction of a Batch Modify utility, upgrades of all third party libraries, performance enhancements, and a number of bug fixes.

Taxonomies

Constructing a concise medical taxonomy by Bruce McGreg appears in the latest Journal of the Medical Library Association.

How do you construct a taxonomy of medicine concise enough to mount on a single Web page and comprehensive enough to describe the contents of a set of leading journals whose coverage ranges from public health to molecular biology? This seemingly impossible task was recently presented to the publishing division of the American Medical Association (AMA) to improve subject access to its journals' Websites.

Open WorldCat

A new feature of Open WorldCat is described on Lorcan Dempsey's weblog

We recently added a button on the Open WorldCat rendezvous page to find other 'editions' of the found item. This is an interim approach to implementing the FRBR model which clusters versions of a work. It helps find, for example, translations of a particular item.

See Reading in the dark and click on 'other editions of item'. (Click through from a search engine to see the subject headings and author fields hot linked. Here is the Google result - click through.)

This is an example of turning a service inside out. What we are doing is exposing on the open web functionality that was previously only available within a catalog or retrieval system. Over time we will enhance the functionality available at this page. It is one way of releasing the value of the accumulated library investment in structured data.

TLA Talk

I'll be on a panel at the Texas Library Association annual conference (see the calendar on the lower right). The panel will be discussing

"Who's Going to Catalog This Stuff" (Event #387) which will focus on the priorities we must consider for continuing to recruit qualified catalogers for the 21st century, ask how can cataloger education and training change to meet new needs and demands and how can we ensure that the cataloging profession continues to grow and adapt to the evolving information environment?

I'd be happy to hear any suggestions for issues to cover in that event.

Folksonomies

Folks are gaining an understanding of the usefulness of consistant terms when tagging information. A tool to aid that consistancy, in a limited manner, is the del.icio.us tag stemmer. Seen on LibraryStuff.

MARC Language Codes

The announcement issued on January 19, 2005 about additions to MARC
language codes had an error. Please note that the correct code for the
language Kashubian is csb, NOT csh.