Connotea Code

The source code for Connotea is available for use and to modify under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Connotea is a type of social bookmarking service. It is aimed at more scholarly communities.

Connotea is a place to keep links to the articles you read and the websites you use, and a place to find them again. It is also a place where you can discover new articles and websites through sharing your links with other users. By saving your links and references to Connotea they are instantly on the web, which means that they are available to you from any computer and that you can point your friends and colleagues to them. In Connotea, every user's links are visible both to visitors and to every other user, and different users' libraries are linked together through the use of common tags or common bookmarks.

Connotea

Open-Source

A commercial venture, Liblime, has been established to provided support to libraries using open-source tools.

LibLime's mission is to make open-source software accessible to libraries. Our initial product offerings focus on three areas of technology in libraries: the ILS, the library website/Intranet, and filtering. The open-source solutions we've selected are: Koha ILS, Mambo, and DiscrimiNet (a project LibLime has developed in-house). Full demos of Koha and Mambo are available on our site if you're interested.

Koha

Folksonomies Review

A good review posting about social bookmarking and free tagging with plenty of links to more information is at Library Clips.

Folksonomies

Top 33

The 33 most frequently used fields in LC USMARC data. They mapped them to Dublin Core elements. How would they map to FRBR? In German.

MARC

Multilingual Thesauri

An Invitation to participate in the World-Wide Review of IFLA Guidelines for Multilingual Thesauri has been issued. Comments deadline: July 31, 2005

Guidelines for Multilingual Thesauri

The IFLA Working Group on Guidelines for Multilingual Thesauri started to prepare this document in 2002. The objective of this document is to add to the existing Guidelines for Multilingual Thesauri as worded in the ISO-standard for multi-lingual thesauri (ISO-5964-1985) or in handbooks on thesaurus building, such as Aitchison (2000). The general principles for the building of monolingual thesauri are assumed.

Thesauri

MARC Tag of the Month

The MARC Tag of the Month from Follett is a Sample MARC Record with a Corporate Name Main Entry. Field 008 gives only the year, yet there is a 500 showing the month as well. Why not include that info in the 008? The contract number is in field 500, wouldn't that be better in 536?

MARC

Free Tagging Sites

The number of resources using free tagging keeps growing. All Consuming now uses it.

Georgia Tech has a project to export their catalog in marcxml and then use those records for public searching. Free tagging would be part of this new OPAC.

Folksonomies

MARC Records Under the Microscope

The University of North Texas (UNT)-Texas Center for Digital Knowledge (TxCDK) announces a project investigating the coding of information in MARC records from the OCLC WorldCat database. The Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent Federal grant-making agency dedicated to creating and sustaining a nation of learners by helping libraries and museums serve their communities, is funding the project with a National Leadership Grant of $233,115. TxCDK Fellows Dr. William E. Moen and Dr. Shawne D. Miksa, both from the UNT School of Library and Information Sciences (SLIS), are the Principal Investigators of this project entitled MARC Content Designation Utilization: Inquiry and Analysis (MCDU Project). SLIS Ph.D student Serhiy Polyakov and Masters students Amy Eklund and Gregory Snyder serve as Research Assistants.

During the course of the 2-year project, Drs Moen and Miksa will investigate the extent of catalogers' use of MARC 21 from an empirical perspective and will provide the first publicly available data on its usage. In the Z-Interoperability project, funded in 2003 by another IMLS National Leadership Grant, Dr. Moen discovered strong indications that only 36 of the approximately 2000 MARC fields/subfields accounted for 80% of all utilization, and that less than 50% of the available fields/subfields occurred even once in the records. These preliminary findings have important implications for library catalogers, standards developers, and people involved in the machine generation of metadata.

The Online Computer Library Center (OCLC, www.oclc.org) initially agreed to supply 1 million records for this project. After recent discussions, however, OCLC has agreed to provide the project with all of its approximately 55 million bibliographic records. This new development will significantly increase the accuracy of the research results. The OCLC WorldCat database contains unique bibliographic records shared by more than 50,000 libraries in 84 countries and territories around the world. For this project, only those records which are created by OCLC member libraries and contain original cataloging will be examined. The MARC records will be placed into study samples based on format of the material and record date-of-creation. The format-specific samples will allow determination of content designation use among similar types of records. The date-of creation samples will intersect with project activities to document how MARC content designation use by catalogers has changed over time.

The project has three goals:

1. to provide empirical evidence to document MARC21 content designation use;
2. explore the evolution of MARC content designation for patterns of availability and adoption/use level; and
3. investigate a methodological approach to understand the factors contributing to current levels of MARC content designation use and relationships with the cataloging enterprise.

The results of the research will be disseminated to the LIS community through periodical publication of findings, including a methodology that could be applied to similar studies of utilization of MARC or other metadata schemas. The MCDU Project group will also work on designating a set of "core elements" based on occurrence in the samples and comparison with PCC and FRBR initiatives core record recommendations. A database application containing MARC 21 content designation specifications is currently under construction that will allow for the analysis of trends and patterns. This tool will be made available to the LIS community after the project's completion.

Dr. Miksa describes how the project's research strategies will examine MARC records as artifacts of the cataloging process. Data resulting from the project will greatly inform cataloging education and curricula which is critical to the continued development and improvement of information retrieval systems in libraries worldwide.

Details of the MCDU Project can be found at a website created and maintained by SLIS Masters student Bryce Benton. Any additional inquiries regarding project activities can be directed to Bill Moen (wemoen@unt.edu) or Shawne Miksa (smiksa@unt.edu).

MARC
UNT

Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies

NISO Z39.19-200x Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies

Abstract: This standard presents guidelines and conventions for the contents, display, construction, testing, maintenance, and management of monolingual controlled vocabularies. This standard focuses on controlled vocabularies that are used for the representation of content objects in knowledge organization systems including lists, synonym rings, taxonomies, and thesauri. This standard should be regarded as a set of recommendations based on preferred techniques and procedures. Optional procedures are, however, sometimes described, e.g., for the display of terms in a controlled vocabulary. The primary purpose of vocabulary control is to achieve consistency in the description of content objects and to facilitate retrieval. Vocabulary control is accomplished by three principal methods: defining the scope, or meaning, of terms; using the equivalence relationship to link synonymous and narly synonymous terms; and distinguishing among homographs. ISBN: 1-880124-65-3
Status: Currently Balloting
Balloting Period: April 11, 2005 to May 25, 2005

Only members can vote but any interested party can comment.

NISO
Vocabularies
Standards

Source of Title Note

The OLAC CAPC Subcommittee on the Source of Title Note for Internet Resources has completed a second draft of the revised document that is ready for review and comment. They would very much appreciate feedback on the current draft by May 2.

We want to remind folks that this document is intended to serve as a best practice guide developed by a community of electronic and audiovisual catalogers. Like most best practice guides, it has been developed because existing resources have not fully addressed the needs of working catalogers. It therefore goes beyond the examples given AACR2, LCRIs, etc., which are not consistent with one another, to recommend a form of the note that we think better serves the intent of the note and its value for catalogers of remote access electronic resources. Like any best practice guide, catalogers and institutions will be free to follow this or not, as they choose.

Titles
OLAC

International Cataloguing Principles

The Chinese translation of the Frankfurt Draft Statement of International Cataloguing Principles as well as the Chinese and Bulgarian translations of the "Glossary" for IME-ICC have been posted on the IFLA website.

Cataloging
IFLA

Koha

The new version of Koha (2.2.2) is available.

Koha is the 1st Open-Source Integrated Library System. Released first in New Zealand, in January 2000, it is maintained by a team of volunteers from around the globe. The Koha system is a full catalogue, OPAC, circulation and acquisitions system.

Koha 2.2 is more than 247,000 lines of code, developed by more than 30 different developers (excluding translators).

With the 2.2 version, Koha is now a mature product, with many nice features. It's used in more than 50 libraries, of all kinds (public, schools, religious, etc.), of all sizes (from 1 to 8 branches, from 1000 to 300,000 items).

Koha
ILS

Hits

Page hits here jumped about 150 times normal yesterday. Just curious, what caused this?