Friday, April 27, 2007

Problems at LC

Back in January we received an invoice for our subscription to Classification Web. We paid it from our deposit account. Since then we have continued to receive invoices and no replies from LC. We have e-mailed them many times. We call, but the voice-mailbox is full. never does a person answer. Now they have cancelled my access, since we did not paid the bill. Only we did, months ago. What is going on at the Cataloging Distribution Service? Anyone have a secret to contacting them?

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Microformats

Karen Coombs at Library Web Chic points to a nice Firefox extension, Operator.
Operator leverages microformats that are already available on many web pages to provide new ways to interact with web services.

Operator lets you combine pieces of information on Web sites with applications in ways that are useful. For instance, Flickr + Google Maps, Upcoming.org + Google Calendar, Yahoo! Local + your address book, and many more possibilities and permutations. All of these scenarios are possible due to Microformats, an emerging standard for injecting semantics into HTML.

Have to see if it works with COinS.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control

The 2nd meeting of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control in the series of three public hearings is scheduled for May 9th at the American Library Association's headquarters in Chicago.

In preparation for that meeting, the Working Group subgroup that is coordinating the meeting has worked with Nancy Fallgren, consultant to the Working Group, to develop a background paper.

News from LC

Bibliographic records distributed by CDS will no longer have a record status set to *p*. This record status was for Cataloging in Publication (CIP) records that had been previously distributed with an encoding level of *8*.

This change in the use of record status value *p* in distributed records was made after considering a variety of factors including system limitations, receipt of records from sources outside the Library of Congress, and the amount of resources required to program for continued distribution. An additional factor relates to the meaning of value *p*. Although customers may have expected this status to indicate the item was published and available, in fact, this status has always meant only that the cataloging record had been upgraded. While the reason for the upgraded record is often the availability of the published item, this is not true in all cases.

LibVive

LibVive, the library podcast, is always worth a listen. The April 23 show is special because it includes a PSA by me for my podcast from the LPI Library. The stories covered in this epsoide include:
  • Man found shot at library
  • Man threatens legal action against city
  • MySpace joins with Illinois Library Association to promote online safety
  • Kentucky attempts to meet demand for library construction project funds
  • Researchers’ use of academic libraries and their services
  • Anonymous donor gives Philadelphia library $15 million
  • Libraries: Shhh... it's a book bar.