Drill Clouds

Lorcan Dempsey mentions Drill Clouds in his discussion of some interesting work being done at CISTI. They are Tag Clouds 2.0, ones that enhance the searching and presentation of results. Might be something worth considering.

Ungava extends tag clouds to make them a useful tool for search refinement. That is, to use a tag cloud to refine an existing query by adding new elements to the query through interactions with the cloud. As this results in a kind of drill-down search behaviour, these new clouds have been named drill clouds.

OAI-ORE Meeting

Seen on several e-mail lists.

A meeting will be held on March 3, 2008 at Johns Hopkins University to roll-out the first beta release of the OAI-ORE specifications. These specifications describe a data model to identify and describe aggregations of web resources, and the encoding of the data model in the XML-based Atom syndication format.

Additional details are available at:

• The full press release for this event
• The registration site for the meeting

Note that registration is required and space is limited.

3000 Entries

Recently, this weblog passed the 3000 postings mark. Since Tuesday, March 5, 2002, when the first item was posted there have been at least 3000 news items I thought would be of interest to catalogers. Maybe a few less, there were some of general library interest and a couple of personal entries. Cataloging is changing. Catalogablog has tried to keep everyone, myself included, aware of what is happening. What a long strange trip its been and promises to be.

xISSN Web Service

OCLC has announced a companion to the xISBN service, the xISSN Web Service.

The xISSN Web service supplies ISSNs and other information associated with serial publications represented in WorldCat. Submit an ISSN to this service, and it returns a list of related ISSNs and selected metadata. The service is based on WorldCat, the world's largest network of library content and services. The current xISSN database covers 575,573 ISSNs.

Ideal for Web-enabled search applications, such as library catalogs and OpenURL Resolvers, and based on associations made in the WorldCat database, xISSN enables an end user to link to information about alternate versions of serial publications.

This is an API, requests are accepted using REST (or OpenURL or unAPI), this is not a place you can type an ISSN in a box and get back a list.

WorldCat and the Future of Bibliographic Control

Karen Calhoun spoke on WorldCat and the future of bibliographic control at the recent OCLC Members Council.

One bit I found interesting was that Baker and Taylor Cataloging Plus libraries are now OCLC members. These were described as small school libraries, ones that would never have joined otherwise. I wonder if this is a route the Lunar and Planetary Institute (MPOW) could use to join. We can not afford the set-up and training fees for OCLC, but just might be able to pay the yearly dues. (Maybe.) We have a lot of unique or rare records to contribute and I'd love to become a NACO library, since we have access to the planetary science community. But we can just not afford OCLC as the fees are currently structured.

MARC Jack-o-lantern

Now this is scary, a MARC Jack-o-lantern. A year old, but still fun.

Electronic Integrating Resources

News from OLAC.

I am pleased to announce that an updated version of OLAC's Introduction to Cataloging Electronic Integrating Resources: An Online Training Presentation is now available.

I would like to thank Steve Miller for his work in updating this presentation to reflect current rules and practices (primarily the transition to biblevel "i" by OCLC and the removal of the prohibition against physical description of remote electronic resources).

I would also like to acknowledge the Subcommittee on Maintenance for CAPC Resources (David Prochazka, Paige Andrew, Richard N. Leigh, and Susan Leister) for their work in organizing a review of the resources on the CAPC web site and arranging for those that have become out-of-date to be updated or archived.