Copyright

The monthly Copynight meeting is approaching. Check to see if your city has a meeting.

CopyNight is a monthly social gathering of people interested in restoring balance in copyright law. We meet over drinks once a month in many cities to discuss new developments and build social ties between artists, engineers, filmmakers, academics, lawyers, and many others.

Copyright

FRAR: Extending FRBR Concepts to Authority Data

FRAR: Extending FRBR Concepts to Authority Data by Glenn E. Patton is now available.

The IFLA FRANAR Working Group is charged with extending the concepts of the IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records to authority data. The paper reports on the current state of the Working Group's activities.

Seen on the FRBR weblog. Note, the acronym has changed from FRANAR to FRAR.

FRANAR
Authorities

Metadata Posting in the LISWiki

I've just posted an item to the LISWiki on metadata in weblogs. It was begun as a chapter for a book a couple years back. Then I started to rework it as a journal article. However, I've just not had the time to whip it into shape. Here it is, warts and all. Maybe others will correct and update the posting and make it more useful to the community. It was doing no good sitting on my C: drive.

Metadata
Weblogs
LISWiki

NASA Ames Library in Trouble

It seems the NASA Ames library is in jeopardy.

Despite multiple good faith attempts within the system to mitigate the damage of proposed Library cuts by numerous interested parties over the past few months, you implemented a policy of dumping large numbers of books behind building 202 without proper notice to employees or lower-level management and without adequate safeguards to protect this incredibly valuable asset for the Center, the Agency, and its employees. Many dumpsters filled with books have already been lost (see attached photo taken this Wednesday evening) and these books/journals were not all duplicates or available on line. Had the Union, the Chief Scientist, and other dedicated employees not intervened to halt this process, the plan was to eliminate most of the book collection.

Libraries

Collaborative Tagging Paper

The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems by Scott A. Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman looks interesting. As soon as I heard about social tagging I thought it would be a great place to research how folks would apply subject headings. Given that solid research we could then make some adjustments in our application of Sears and LCSH to better fit the thinking of our users. This paper looks like a start in that kind of research.

Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.

Bold supplied my me. Thanks Library Stuff.

Folksonomies

Continuing Resources

The minutes of the Continuing Resources Cataloging Committee meetings during the recent ALA Annual Conference 2005 in Chicago are now available on ALA's website.

These minutes include the Saturday (6/25) business meeting and the Monday (6/27) update session. They also have PowerPoint images for the presentations "Defining an Access Level Record for Remote Access Electronic Resources" and "The Serial Super Record 2.0."

Serials

OAI-PMH & Tagging Experiment

ColLib is an interesting experiment involving tagging, a Wiki and the OAI-PMH.

colLib harvests metadata-records from OAI-PMH-compliant repositories and enables manual 'tagging' of these records to cluster them by subject or other meaningful categories. Tags are represented by pages in a wiki, that can be annotated with links to related tags, external links and any other text deemed relevant.

Seen on the FRBR weblog.

ColLib
OAI
Folksonomies
Wiki

Yet another Example of Why to Avoid Microsoft and Go Open-Source

About a year or so ago I bought MS Plus! Digital Media Edition. I registered it when I bought it. Worked fine until today. Now it is asking for a registration key. I can't be expected to keep track of cases forever. Calling MS help line is a long-standing joke. The software I own has just stopped working and I'm stuck. Downloading some free open-source tool that works when needed seems so much easier.

I tried to submit a help request via their on-line form. After I submitted the request it took quite a time to send and then came back with a message saying it was not sent and to hit their back button. Hitting the back button did nothing but bring up the same page. I tried the whole process again with the same result.

Microsoft