Linking to Amazon or Open WorldCat

A while back I received a nice note from a person at OCLC mentioning that I could link to Open WorldCat rather than Amazon when mentioning a book. The truth is I get about $20.00 to $40.00 a year in Amazon credits by linking to them. It has been a nice surprise when I get a note from them saying I have so much credit with them. Yet I feel I should help spread the use of Open WorldCat.

So, I'm going to take a survey and I'll go by that and any comments I receive.

ALA Midwinter

I'll be going to ALA Midwinter. Since this is my 1st ALA conference I'm open to suggestions about what not to miss. MARBI sessions, the OCLC blogger get-together, Walt's get-together are on my schedule. But what else? Any suggestions gladly taken.

ALA

LPI Podcast

I'm happy to say that my weekly podcast for the patrons of the Lunar and Planetary Institute library is now available on iTunes.

Podcasting

MARC Content Designation Utilization Project

The MARC Content Designation Utilization (MCDU) Project is now making available the first set of results from analyses of the MCDU dataset of more than 56 million MARC bibliographic records from OCLC's WorldCat database. Separate data reports containing basic frequency count analysis are posted on the project website; go there to view the reports.

MARC

MARBI Discussion Papers

The following discussion papers are available for review by the MARC community. They will be discussed at the Midwinter 2006 ALA meetings in San Antonio.

• Discussion Paper 2006-DP01: Recording geographic coordinates in the MARC 21 Authority Format
• Discussion Paper 2006-DP02: Addition of coded value to 008 for content alerts in the MARC 21 Bibliographic format
• Discussion Paper 2006-DP03: Incorporation of Former Headings into MARC 21 Authority Records
  
• Discussion Paper 2006-DP05: Indicating coverage dates for indexes in the MARC 21 Holdings Format

There will be one more discussion paper that will be posted shortly.

See agenda for discussion times.

MARC
MARBI

MarcEdit Now Does RSS

MarcEdit, the free MARC tool from Terry Reese now has an RSS reader.

At this point, the RSS reader is designed for querying my blog to allow for instant notification of changes in the application (since I've been posting all changes to my blog). However, I'm thinking that I'll likely tap the new RSS engine so that you can setup schedules to query particular sites and get MARC records from RSS data. I'm thinking that this might be useful when dealing with online Serial vendors or aggregators -- but I'll have to think on it a little more. Anyway, information on the new rss notification component can be found here: MarcEdit and RSS.

MarcEdit
RSS

OpenURL

Emerging Uses for the OpenURL Framework by Ann Apps and Ross MacIntyre appears in Proceedings ELPUB2005 : The Ninth ICCC International Conference on Electronic Publishing.

This paper describes the OpenURL Framework, both the original 'de facto' standard version 0.1, and the NISO standard Z39.88-2004, 'The OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services'. The explanation is illustrated by examples from Zetoc, a journal article and conference paper current awareness service available in the UK. Various emerging novel uses of the OpenURL Framework are described. Evaluation studies indicate positive reader appreciation of OpenURL technology providing direct access to discovered articles.

OpenURL