PCC Series Policies and Practices

The PCC Ad Hoc Series Review Task Force seeks your comments on its "Discussion Paper on PCC Series Policies and Practices"

The paper is intended to generate comments useful in making recommendations for the future direction of PCC series practices and policies. Any individuals or organizations interested in series control policies, practices, and services are welcome to comment.

The task force membership and charges are available.

Encoding RDA, Resource Description and Access data in MARC 21

The following discussion paper is available for review by the MARC
community:

Discussion Paper No. 2008-DP04: Encoding RDA, Resource Description and Access data in MARC 21.

VuFind, New Release

Version 0.7 of VuFind is now available.

VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include:

• Catalog Records
• Locally Cached Journals
• Digital Library Items
• Institutional Repository
• Institutional Bibliography
• Other Library Collections and Resources

VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of the components. And since it's open source, you can modify the modules to best fit your need or you can add new modules to extend your resource offerings.

It is Solr powered, which seems to be a trend these days.

Study of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records

During spring and early summer of 2007, the School of Library and Information Science at Kent State University conducted a Delphi study on critical FRBR issues as part of an IMLS-funded project concerning the research and development of FRBR-based retrieval systems.

The greatest concern was "Need to develop cataloging rules in line with FRBR." A bit further down the list was "Need to verify and validate the FRBR model against real data and in different communities to make sure the model is valid and applicable."

Rights Metadta

Creative Commons has announced that their rights metadata will now be semantically richer.

First, the RDF/XML we serve for each license is now considerably more informative. It includes:

• an explicit pointer to the license legalcode
• information on when the license was deprecated (for example, the Developing Nations 2.0 metadata)
• information about what license replaces this one (for example, the Attribution 1.0 Generic metadata)
• an explicit assertion about the license’s jurisdiction; this was previously encoded only by convention

In addition to the RDF/XML, we’re starting to encode license information as RDFa on the license deeds. Try using the GetN3 bookmarklet on the Attribution 3.0 Unported deed for an example.

We’re also starting to use this metadata to power our own applications. The OpenOffice.org Addin ships with a copy of the RDF and uses SPARQL to determine the license you’ve selected. As we continue to build out the tools around CC licenses we’ll be moving in a similar direction, looking for ways we can leverage this resource we already have.

You can build on it, too; everything we do goes into source control. You can find the RDF files in the license.rdf module. A description of the namespace is also available.

Object Reuse and Exchange Specs

Now available, the Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange specification.

Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE) defines standards for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources. This document provides an introduction and lists the specifications and user guide documents that make up the OAI-ORE standards.

Response to the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control Report

A wiki has been put together to respond to the lack of any mention of open date in the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control's report. If you agree with the statement, sign it, it is a wiki after all.

The draft report of the Library of Congress's Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control features many interesting suggestions. In particular we wholeheartedly endorse the vision of a bibliographic ecosystem which is "collaborative, decentralized, international in scope and web-based". However, we are concerned that the report lacks any discussion of a key component for any future of bibliographic data: open licensing and access.

UMich OAI Toolkit

The University of Michigan have released their open-source OAI toolkit on SourceForge. This toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in Perl.

FRBR Book

While I might not want to find this under the tree, it is on my must read list. Understanding FRBR : what it is and how it will affect our retrieval tools

What is FRBR, and why is everyone talking about it? Is it really going to revolutionize cataloguing? And if so, what form will it take? Taylor and her compadres won't even try to teach you how to construct a hierarchical catalog record. Instead, their efforts are directed towards showcasing what's possible when digital technology and traditional cataloging practice meet. Serials, art, music, moving images, maps, and archival materials are just a few of the formats covered. Not for catalogers only.