Genre/Form Authority Records

The draft of Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings H1913 is available of comment.

In working to define the guidelines for the creation and application of these headings, the Cataloging Policy and Support Office (CPSO) has drafted instruction sheet H 1913 for the Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings.... Note that this instruction sheet covers only the development and use of genre/form headings for motion pictures, television programs, and videos; however, the plan is to create similar instruction sheets for other areas where genre/form headings can be created and applied, such as music, radio, law, etc. Because this instruction sheet will serve as the model for these other subject areas, CPSO invites comments, suggestions for improvement, etc.

Vacation

I'll be in the Washington D.C. area June 11-15. Any suggestions? We are going to visit a brewery, Old Dominion. Maybe catach a play at the Folger Library. We have been to Glen Echo, any other dancing going on?

RSS Ping

RSS Ping looks like a useful combination of the RSS/Atom metadata and the Ping function. This work is in progress, so librarians could contribute to the development.

RSS Ping combines RSS item metadata with site update information. It enhances the current ping specification, adding information about exactly what has been updated or published, with the notification that something has been updated. RSS Ping reduces the need to revisit or work done by aggregators and search engines when revisiting the publisher site after being pinged, to provide truly real-time updates for information on the Web.

CDWA-Lite

A request for comments:

CDWA-Lite is a lightweight XML schema that describes core information for cultural materials and their visual surrogates....

The Advisory Committee for this standard is seeking broad community review of it from a technical viewpoint as well as for its value in collection cataloging and access/sharing. We encourage completion of the survey (or those parts of it you are comfortable with)

Fun Videos

The latest Tiki Bar is one of their best. Kevin Rose is a guest and very funny.

There has been lots of to-do about the code to crack HD-DVDs being available. The best or at least most amusing item is this episode of Geek Brief. Cali Lewis may be at the next Texas Library Association annual conference. She lives in Dallas and the conference is in Dallas. Could be fun.

MARC21 Updates

Update No. 7 (October 2006) to all five MARC 21 Formats (authority, bibliographic, classification, community information and holdings) is now available from the Library of Congress. This update includes changes made to the MARC 21 formats resulting from proposals which were considered by the ALA ALCTS/LITA/RUSA Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee (MARBI) at its 2006 meetings, the Canadian Committee on MARC (CCM) at its meetings in 2006 and by the Book Industry Communications/Bibliographic Standards Technical Subgroup (BIC/BSTS) at its 2006 meetings.

More information about this update may be found online at:

• Authority format
• Bibliographic format
• Classification format
• Community Information
• Holdings format

xISBN API

The api for xISBN that Xiaoming Liu previewed at the Code4Lib meeting is now officially launched and supported, and provisions for commercial use are now in place.

For those of you who missed it, in addition to "related" ISBN's, xISBN will now also return metadata such as title, edition, language and publication year that can be used to distinguish manifestations of a work. xISBN supports a RESTful API, as well as OpenURL and UNAPI, and can return results in a variety of formats.

xISBN is free for non-commercial, low volume use.