MARC Tag of the Month

September's MARC Tag of the Month at Follett is MARC Record Sample -- Main Entry - Pseudonym.

MARC

Bibliographical References

Over on AUTOCAT a series of posts brought to my attention that the correct form of the note is "Includes bibliographical references." not bibliographic. No big deal. But something I'd not been conscious of before. I had 84 with the wrong term in my catalog and while doing other things I did a global change to fix them. Not that any patron would ever notice. Just in case the cataloging police look at my records.

LPIB

The new issue of the Lunar and PLanetary Information Bulletin is now available. The RSS feed works just fine. So glad, since that is something I was behind.

RSS
LPIB

Trackbacks

So arXive now has trackbacks. I'm wondering what it would take to provide trackbacks in our catalogs. Would links like that to individual bibliographic records be useful? There is Freetag, an open-source tool, that allows tagging in a MySQL database. That should work with Koha. Anyone tried that yet? Even in a test?

I'm becoming more convinced that the future of the net is not tools like topic maps and RDF, although they may have important niche parts to play. But rather, the easy one click building of links and the simple automatic ping and RSS distribution of changes and new material. Trackbacks, free tagging, PingGoat, RSS are just so simple and easy. They may not be quality but they have quantity. Long ago I hears someone say that there will be levels of cataloging, I think it was Stuart Wiebel. The most important materials will receive professional treatment, MARC, EAD, FGDC or something like that. Less important or less permanent materials will receive a less complete treatment. Dublin Core qualified or MARC with a minimal level of encoding. Still less important or more ephemeral materials would receive Dublin Core unqualified or HTML meta tags. The vast bulk of the Web would be covered by the search engines. That makes sense from an institutional point of view. However, an individual might find his or her idea of important very different than the memory institutions. The public needs simple easy tools where they can create their own personal information space. Collectively these spaces can reveal what society considers important at the moment. Improved access to the now is very important benefit, one we can leverage without much effort on our part. Just some random thoughts.

Trackbacks

arXiv Supports Trackbacks

A tool common to weblogs has moved into the e-print arena, arXiv the physics preprint server now supports trackbacks.

arXiv.org supports the Trackback standard. By sending a trackback, you can notify arXiv.org that you've created a web page that references a particular paper.

You can send a trackback to our system by giving your blogging software the following trackback URL:

http://arxiv.org/trackback/{paper_id}

You will find this URL at the bottom of every abstract page. Our abstract pages support trackback autodiscovery: software such as Movable Type or WordPress can send trackbacks automatically when you link to our abstract pages.

Trackbacks
arXiv

Beloit College Mindset List

The the Beloit College Mindset List for the Class of 2009 has been released. Always interesting and informative reading.

Encoded Archival Descriptions Tool

RLG has released the EAD Report Card, download it for free and check your EADs.

This Web application is the first automated program for checking the quality of your EAD encoding. Created by popular demand, the tool supplements RLG's award-winning RLG Best Practice Guidelines for Encoded Archival Description. Simply upload one of your finding aids for a quick checkup. The program will flag any discrepancies and cite the relevant guideline, so you can fix what you have wrong on the spot.

It can be configured to work against another standard, so change it to fit your own best practices.

EAD

Middle East Librarians Association

The Middle East Librarians Association is a orginization I've just encountered. They have an annual conference and journal, MELA Notes. Their Web site has some useful tools and PDF versions of their journal. Dues are cheap at only $30.00. Looks like a very good orginization. If you are cataloging materials from that part of the world this would be a great group to connect with.

MELA

MyLibrary@OCKHAM

MyLibrary@OCKHAM is an interesting project. OAI records are harvested, indexed, and categorized using open-source tools.

The purpose of MyLibrary@OCKHAM is to demonstrate ways a Find More Like This One service can be implemented through the use of "light-weight" protocols and open source software.

In other words, using sets of well-established computing techniques and freely available software, this system strives to enable people to get more out of scholarly research by proactively offering "intelligent" suggestions to improving their searches and identifying similar items.

MyLibrary
OAI

Podcasting

It seems podcasting is for older folks, not the young. Maybe it appeals to those who liked CB and short wave radios. It is a very linear form of communication and not very participatory. What does this mean for the library? Well, it could be a good tool to reach the over 45 crowd. Our content then should be aimed at that demographic, not the young. Just random thoughts since things have been pretty quiet on the cataloging front.

Podcasting

Wikis

I've been having some fun marking up the Metadata page I contributed to LISWiki. This my the first time I've done more than read something. The mark-up is a bit different than regular HTML. Nothing complicated, just different. There is a standard format for wiki pages, this structure could be useful when indexing and searching. A searcher could specify just how deep to search, topic level, subtopics, subsubtopics, etc.

The LISWiki, since it is growing by individual contributions, has spotty coverage. I suppose Wikipedia had major gaps at some point in time. LISWiki, if enough folks contribute, may grow to be just as complete. Jump in and contribute a bit. Some missing topics I noticed are: ISBD, GILS, FRBR, Paris Principles, XML, EAD, METS and MODS. Or edit a page (the metadata page could use a lot more attention).

Wikis