Houston, Texas Area

Explore Saturn and Titan with the Chief Scientist of NASA's Cassini Mission! Join the Lunar and Planetary Institute at Space Center Houston on March 17 at 7:30 p.m. to hear Dr. Dennis Matson share exciting news about "Cassini and Huygens: New Discoveries from Titan and the Saturnian System." Space Center Houston is located at 1601 NASA Parkway (also known as NASA Road 1). For event information, contact Mr. Michael Madera, LPI Education Department, at 281-244-2040. This public presentation is free.

LPSC
Saturn
Astronomy
Houston

Subject Headings

Over on AUTOCAT there is discussion on the inadequacies of subject headings. Well worth reading the thread. One suggestion was to add more cross-references to authority records. I strongly agree, but I'd not only add them to my records but use SACO to add them to all catalogs. You don't have to go through special training nor be a part of a special group to use SACO. It is not like NACO, BIBCO and CONSER in having entrance requirements. Anyone can submit new subject headings, cross references, and classification numbers as long as they follow the submission guidelines.

Also mentioned was the OCLC project FAST: Faceted Application of Subject Terminology. Interesting project and worth a look.

Subjects
SACO
FAST
LCSH

Metadata Authority Description Schema

A new draft of MADS is available. Please review and comment by next Friday, March 18.

The major changes (since the December draft) are:

1. The constraint that an item (authority, variant, or related) must have exactly one high-level descriptor has been removed. An item may have an arbitrary combination of descriptors.
2. Descriptor metadata has been eliminated -- identifier and url have been moved to "additional elements".
3. The nameTitle descriptor has been removed.
4. Authority attributes have been re-worked.
5. The structured definition is removed and replaced by unstructured text.

MADS

ISBN

The Canadian ISBN Publishers' Directory provides search by city, ISBN prefix, postal code, publisher or keyword. It returns the name, address, other names ISBN prefix, and other names. Could be a very useful resource when tracking down a Canadian publisher or doing authority work on a small press (if you are tracing small presses).

ISBN
Canada
Publishers
Directories

AACR3

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging has commented on the draft of AACR3. The PCC Review and Comments on the drafting of AACR3 is compiled by Paul Weiss, Kristin Lindlan and Carolyn Sturtevant. The very detailed critique covers everything from the authority of the JSC to begin this change to typographical errors.

AACR3
Program for Cooperative Cataloging

Dewey

On the Dewey web site there is a brief supplement to "Draft schedule 741.5 Cartoons, caricatures, comics, graphic novels, fotonovelas available for testing." It includes a modification to the original proposal in response to user feedback received to date. Please see "Supplement to Draft schedule 741.5" They are still hoping to receive comments and suggestions by March 31, 2005.

Dewey
Classification
Graphic Novels

FRBR

OCLC to host workshop for the IFLA FRBR Review Group

"FRBR in 21st Century Catalogues: An Invitational Workshop" will take place May 2-4, 2005 on the OCLC campus. The purpose of the international workshop is to provide implementors, vendors, cataloguers, scholars, teachers, end-users and others with an opportunity to share views and expectations, exchange ideas and propose solutions. It is intended for people involved in or considering a FRBR-related project, who use FRBR in one way or another, who have written or are about to write papers or dissertations on some aspects of FRBR, who have to make decisions in a field related to FRBR, or more generally who work in the field of conceptual modeling for cultural heritage information.

If you are interested and you would like to obtain an invitation, please contact OCLC. Please include a brief statement explaining your interest and how you would like to contribute to the workshop. Attendance is limited to 75 persons.

Seen in OCLC Abstracts.

FRBR
OCLC

Peeps

As Easter approaches thoughts turn to Peeps. I've mentioned this before but Peep Research: A study of small fluffy creatures and library usage is worth revisiting.

Peeps
Humor

Technorati

Technorati is providing a search service for tags from Flickr, Delicious and Furl as well as weblogs that include the Technorati tag. I'm tagging this post as an experiment. If it works I may continue the experiment for a bit. Please let me know if this creates any problems for you.

Technorati
Tags
Metadata

Dublin Core

The Dublin Core tool DC-assist has been updated. It now:

• provides examples using XHTML rather than HTML
• uses the recommended XHTML syntax
• includes details and examples for all the metadata terms currently in DCMI maintained namespaces

DC-assist is a small, flexible help utility for metadata applications and is intended to complement the help pages embedded within existing software. It can be configured for any 'application profile' that conforms with the notions of elements, element refinements and encoding schemes as defined within the DC Abstract Model.