TMEA

Cora, my spouse, has been elected vice president of the Elementary Division of the Texas Music Educators Association. Congratulation Cora.

Dublin Core

The DCMI Directorate has announced that the DCMI Abstract Model is now available for public comment as a Proposed Recommendation. They are inviting comments on this important document until 5 March 2005. Comments should be sent to the DC-General mailing list with subject "Public Comment DCMI Abstract Model".

MARC Tool

This tool was mentioned in a comment a few days ago, but since the RSS and e-mail folks missed it and some of those reading the Web page may have skipped the comments, here it is again.

The pymarc module provides an API for reading, writing and modifying MARC records from python. MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) is a metadata format for bibliographic data.

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While it's not rocket science to read MARC, it's also not something you want to code very often, so pymarc does the lifting for you. pymarc allows you to reading records and extracting arbitrary fields from each record. In addition pymarc provides a mechanism for updating records, and writing records back out in transmission format.

The latest version was released Feb. 2.

Serials Management

How are folks at smaller libraries managing their serials? We are still using Cardex for check-in. Not the best solution but the last time I looked, several years ago, there was no stand alone serials management product for smaller libraries.

I'd like something that would alert us to missing issues and binding. Something that our users could see the issues received would be nice. If it could read the barcodes from the issues and perform the check-in from that, that would be great. Any suggestions?