Greater Houston Area

The District 8 Fall Conference has been rescheduled for Saturday, Novemeber 12. The TLA District 8 web page has been and will continue to be updated. A few workshops will be changed so don't be afraid to try something new. New vendors are coming and we will have a difference main speaker but we will have a conference. I want to thank everyone for your perseverance. Remember We can be flexible-We can overcome obstacles-We are librarians. So please help us get the word out and if you are not registered you can register at the conference.

I'll still be there giving the presentation Free MARC Tools. Hope to see some of you there.

TLA

FRBR and Topic Maps

Alexander Sigel has put together a page looking into the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, topic maps and XTM: FRBR and XTM.

• How can FRBR used for the modelling of bibliographic relationships, using Knowledge Technologies like XTM, OWL/RDF?
• What are Published Subjects for FRBR to be used as shared vocabularies for XTM and OWL/RDF?

Seen on the FRBR weblog.

FRBR
XTM

ALA Mid-Winter

Given the comments I received, I've decided to attend ALA Mid-Winter. Hope to see some of you there.

End Users

I've been listening to a talk Bill Moen gave at the TLA 2004 conference on my MP3 player. (TLA makes CDs of the conference with MP3 files of the talks available for a very reasonable sum.) In it he talks about our end users. Those are the folks walking in during business hours and visiting our Web site. OK, nothing new. Then there are the staff. We have to circulate, weed, preserve, build bibliographies, do collection development, etc. All that makes us users of our own work. Again nothing new, but one aspect we often overlook. Then he mentioned software as an end user. New idea to me, turn on the light. Of course, with Z39.50, OAI, APIs, SRU/SRW, etc. it makes perfect sense. We should include all the interoperability aspects when discussing end users. Making an XML version of our work might make sense to our software end users.

Users

Greenstone Digital Library Software

Greenstone v2.62 has been released. This is a "stable" release of the software with no major new features but many bug fixes and minor improvements. See this page for a list of some of the most important changes in this version.

Greenstone is a suite of software for building and distributing digital library collections. It provides a new way of organizing information and publishing it on the Internet or on CD-ROM. Greenstone is produced by the New Zealand Digital Library Project at the University of Waikato, and developed and distributed in cooperation with UNESCO and the Human Info NGO. It is open-source, multilingual software, issued under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Greenstone
Repositories

Additions to the MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description

The codes listed below have been recently approved for use in MARC 21 records. The new codes will be added to the online MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions.

The codes should not be used in exchange records until after December 12, 2005. This 60-day waiting period is required to provide MARC 21 implementers time to include newly defined codes in any validation tables they may apply to the MARC fields where the codes are used.

MARC Term, Name, Title Sources & Other Sources

These codes are for use in subfield $2 in Bibliographic and Community Information records in fields 600-651 and 655 and field 040, subfield $f (Cataloging Source / Subject heading/thesaurus conventions) in Authority records.

Additions:

• hkcan - Hong Kong Chinese Authority File (Name) - HKCAN (Hong Kong: JULAC) [use after December 12, 2005]
• jhpb - Jezyk hasel przedmiotowych Biblioteki Narodowej = National Library of Poland Subject Headings (Warszawie: Biblioteki Narodowej) [use after December 12, 2005]
• jhpk - Jezyk hasel przedmiotowych KABA = KABA Subject Headings (Warszawie: Stowarzyszenie Bibliotekarzy Polskich, Centrum Formataw i Kartotek Hasel Wzorcowych Biblioteki Uniwersyteckiej w Warszawie) [use after December 12, 2005]
• pmcsg - Combined standards glossary (New Town Square, PA: Project Management Institute) [use after December 12, 2005]
• reroa - Indexation matihres RERO (autoritis) (Martigny: Riseau des bibliothhques de Suisse occidentale) [use after December 12, 2005]

MARC Relator Codes/Terms

Relator codes are for use in subfield $4 in name access fields. Relator terms are for use in subfield $e in name access fields.

Additions:

• acp - Art copyist - Use for a person (e.g., a painter or sculptor) who makes copies of works of visual art. [use after December 12, 2005]
• mcp - Music copyist - Use for a person who transcribes or copies musical notation. [use after December 12, 2005]

MARC

Web Essentials 05 Podcasts

Web Essentials 05 has podcasts of the talks. They include:

• State of the Web 2005 by Molly Holzschlag
• Beyond Usability: Designing the Complete User Experience by Jeffrey Veen
• Panel: Moving your organisation to standards
• Rapid Design Prototyping With Standards by Eric Meyer

They also have Flickr and blog coverage. Seen on Column Two

WE05
Podcasts

MARC Proposals

The cover sheets for the proposals presented at the Annual meetings of the MARC Advisory Committee have been updated with the results of the discussions.

• Proposal No. 2005-04R: Hierarchical Geographic Names in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format.
• Proposal No. 2005-06: Addition of Subfields for Relator Terms/Codes for Subject Access to Images.
• Proposal No. 2005-07: Revision of subfield $b in field 041 in the MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data.
• Proposal 2005-08: Changes to accommodate IAML coded data in bibliographic fields 008/18-19, 047 and 048.

MARC

Library Standards

I Propose a Standards Solution by Priscilla Caplan appears in the September 15, 2005 Library Journal.

People who care about standards are worried. As a community we're investing heavily in library systems, information systems, and repository systems that require appropriate and robust standards. At the same time, our standards development processes have become increasingly ad hoc, sponsorship is scattered, and mechanisms for ongoing maintenance are often informal and unfunded.

These problems are real, they are international, and they are generating some attention, including NISO's "Blue Ribbon" Panel report and a "standards summit" under the aegis of OCLC, the Research Libraries Group, and Coalition for Networked Information earlier this year. While others are looking at the problem and trying to come up with a solution, I want to start with a solution and see if it fits: I propose a library standards organization.

Standards

ALA Mid-Winter

Since ALA Mid-Winter is being held in San Antonio, I'm considering attending. I'm not an ALA guy, more SLA, so this would be my 1st ALA meeting. Would it be worth it? Any suggestions? Thanks.

ALA

Electronic Theses and Dissertation Tool

VTLS announces VALET for ETDs, a free, open-source, web submission solution for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs).

VTLS Inc. is pleased to announce that it is celebrating its 20th anniversary with a gift to the academic community: VALET for ETDs. Available free as open-source software, VALET is a Web submission solution for managing electronic theses and dissertations, which uses customizable, form-based templates to allow ETDs to be submitted into an underlying FEDORA repository.

Paraphrased from their press release.

ETDs

Wiki in OpenWorldCat

Seen on Lorcan Dempsey's weblog, always a good read

Well, it has arrived! Wiki functionality has gone live in OpenWorldCat. Check out the details and reviews tab here, for example.

We do not know how this will develop: we think it is really important to provide a central presence on the web where libraries and readers can engage in a conversation about books and other materials. We hope that this engages readers and libraries, and that we can collaboratively create something that it would be impossible for parties to create individually. Try it!

OpenWorldCat
Wikis

Koha News

Koha 2.2.4 is here. Koha 2.2.4 should be the last release of the 2.2 branch with new features. Koha 2.2.5 should contain only bugfixes. However, Koha 3.0 is already on the way and should give libraries a new great experience

Koha is the first Open-Source Integrated Library System (ILS). Released at 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 has more than 247,000 lines of code, and was developed by more than 30 different developers.

With the 2.2 version, Koha is now a mature product, with a lot of nice features. It's used in more than 50 libraries, of all kinds, of all sizes.

Koha

MARC Tool, ruby-marc

Now available, ruby-marc a ruby library for processing MARC data. I've also FURLed it.

MARC