Librarians to Speak for First Time After Judge Rules Against Patriot Gag

This is from an ACLU e-amil about the Patriot Act's National Security Letter (NSL)

Addressing a related case from Connecticut, the appeals court effectively lifted a gag that has prevented Connecticut librarians who received an NSL from disclosing their identities. The ACLU said it will hold a news conference on Tuesday, May 30, to allow the gagged librarians to speak publicly for the first time about this case.

FreeSpeech

MARC Updates

LC has announced updates for the MARC manuals.

• Update 6: MARC 21 Format for Authority Data
• Update 6: MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data
• Update 6: MARC 21 Format for Classification Data
• Update 6: MARC 21 Format for Community Information
• Update 6: MARC 21 Format for Holdings Data

They are available from the Cataloging Distribution Service

MARC21

Swoogle for the Semantic Web

Here is a tool for searching structured data on the Web, Swoogle.

Swoogle is a crawler-based indexing and retrieval system for Semantic Web Documents (SWDs), that is, web documents written in RDF or OWL. Swoogle discovers, digests, analyzes and indexes online SWDs and provide query and report service through a web interface.

They have a "Submit URL" feature so you can add your RDF and OWL pages to their directory.

RDF

Too Easy

Had a nice comment from a new patron yesterday, he said getting a card and checking items out was too easy. He was very pleased to have a 2 week check out on the video, same as books. I guess our registration is OK. Not available on-line yet, maybe that is something to investigate. Anyone have a registration page they would be willing to share? Something where the folks fill in the form and then the info gets e-mailed to us.

Registration

SRU/SRW

TechEssence.Info has a short introduction to SRU/SRW.

SRU/SRW

SRU Search Specification

The SRU folks have released for comment CQL Bibliographic Searching Proposal "This proposal is intended as a blueprint for further work. At this point we request comments both on the approach in general and the specific details."

SRU

Use Metadata

Creative Commons has released ccPublisher 2.

ccPublisher is an application which allows users to select licenses for their work and publish them to the Internet Archive for permanent, free hosting. Files in supported formats will have license information embedded in them. If you're more into hosting your work yourself, ccPublisher will generate some HTML for you that lets others validate the license it embeds in the file.

ccPublisher

2nd Life for Old Books

A very good idea in the latest issue of PNLA Quarterly recovering books. Books with old, worn covers have lower circulation that bright shiny new covers. Someone at Boulder City High School had the good idea of printing out new covers for books rather than replacing them.

Circulation

Conference

Here is a conference idea I just had. Why not get the Web 2.0 and L20 folks together. Get the folk from Digg, 37 Signals, Amber McArthur, Leo Laporte together with the Code4lib and Library 2.0 folks? That would be one I'd not miss.

Congresses