Subject retrieval in OPAC's

Schallier, Wouter (2005) Subject retrieval in OPAC's: a study of three interfaces. In Gascón, Jesús and Burguillos, Ferran and Pons, Amadeu, Eds. Proceedings La dimensión humana de la organización del conociemento / The human dimension of knowledge organization - 7° Congreso del Capítulo Español de ISKO, pages pp. 557-567, Barcelona.

In this paper we study three OPAC interfaces of K.U.Leuven University Library. All three interfaces have been on-line between 2002 and 2005. The characteristics of these OPACs (search fields, labeling of the fields, search facilities, searching vs. browsing, basic vs. advanced search) are systematically examined. Special attention is given to subject search and display, and more specifically to Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). This comparison is particularly interesting because the indexing and classification tools (UDC, Library of Congress Subject Headings, MeSH) remain the same in all three OPACs. However, the way these tools are presented for subject retrieval in the respective OPACs undergoes an interesting evolution. It is demonstrated that subject search and display in library catalogs can be largely improved by investing in optimal use of existing tools. We also stress the importance of user-oriented OPAC design.

OPAC
Subjects

MODS @ Connotea

Connotea, the bibliographic bookmarking tool from Nature, will now export records in MODS XML format. It also exports in RIS, BibTeX, and EndNote formats.

MODS
Connotea

Unshelved Book Club

Unshelved now has an index to their Sunday book club strips.

Unshelved

Texas BarCamp

Austin will be the site of BarCampTexas Saturday August 26th to Sunday 27th. A good opportunity for the L2 folks to mix it up with the Web 2.0 crowd.

What do you want to hear, what do you want to say and what could you live without? Are you an expert in something cool? Is there some trend we should know about?

• Agile Development experience reports - what has worked in your organization? What hasn't?
• Scalability. This could be either general routes to engineering for scale, or technology/platform/software stack-specific post mortems (e.g. I know how to do this with LAMP, but I'm curious how RoR would change the picture, or J2EE, or...). What happens when your site's url is in the screen crawl on CNN Headline news?
• Designing for Mobile/Portable Devices
• Workshop on Audacity
• Deploying a Commercial Web Application/Product: War Stories
• Tips for Building Community & Attracting User Contributions
• Ad Management Tools: Options other than Google?
• Calendaring (Caldev, hcalendar, tool comparisons, Outlook exports)
• Microformats: Commercial Uses

barcamptexas

MARC Tool in PHP

There is a pre-alpha release of a tool for working with MARC records, currently named PEAR_MARC. If you enjoy trying out new tools and offering suggestions on improvements and bugs this is one for you.

The core MARC decoding routine was taken from the php-marc package that Christoffer Landtman coded for the Emilda open source library management system. The decoding routine was based on the algorithm contained in Perl's MARC::Record package. Christoffer generously relicensed php-marc under an LGPL license so that I could use it as the basis of a (hopefully, eventually) official PEAR package. PEAR_MARC itself will therefore be licensed under LGPL.

MARC

TMEA Nomination Progress

Well, it was not a good weekend for Cora. The system is against an elementary or college person getting the necessary nominations. The vocal, orchestra, and band divisions must show up for UIL tasks. For elementary and college, there is no such compelling reason. In some regions there are only 1 or 2 folks from elementary there. So they don't have the votes from their own division to get a candidate on the ballot.

Cora picked up one region. The Orchestra and Vocal division candidates have both secured enough nominations to be on the ballot. She still needs two more. If you know any music teachers in Texas, or know someone how might, ask them to attend their region meeting this coming weekend and support Cora. They can check here on their region meeting details.

TMEA

Access to Classification Schedules

Tim over at Library Thing is Angry about classification. Or at least the lack of access to classification schedules. Lots of comments agree with him.

Preventing open access to Dewey is, of course, in the interest of its owner, OCLC. (We'll leave aside the issue of OCLC's non-profit status.) But why do I need to pay for access to the LC's data? Libraries exist to give information away, and the federal government exists because I consent to and pay for it. So, how does this lead to me paying $575 for a 1-4 user site license of LC's primitive Classification Web? I can't see any way to get that to work with LibraryThing, and my proposed use would also violate their terms of service anyway. These require all users to share the same physical location.

Classification

Metadata or at Least Tagging

Metadata: Practical, Painless, Profitable by Christine Connors appears in the latest ASIS&T Bulletin.

Incrementally add value with metadata-based services. Start small, aim at high-value content. Add Suggested Sites or Suggested People to search engine results pages. Get forward thinking website developers to use RDF/A or Microformats to tag sections of their content.

Most of the article deals with tagging by employees in a business setting.

Metadata