Authority Tools

OLAC has announced an update to one of their resources.

The online resources Authority Tools for Audiovisual and Music Catalogers: an Annotated List of Useful Resources, has been revised and updated. Along with some editorial updates of URLs and new edition information, reviews were added for the following titles:

• Opera : an encyclopedia of world premieres and significant performances, singers, composers, librettists, arias and conductors, 1597-2000
• A dictionary-catalog of modern British composers
• Encyclopedia of the blues (ISBN: 0415926998)

I've also just received my OLAC Newsletter.

FRBR Talk

Wiliam Denton mentions on his FRBR Blog that he will be speaking at the Ontario Library Association’s 2008 Superconference. I just finished his essay in Arlene Taylor’s Understanding FRBR: What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools (Amazon WorldCat) and if speaks even half as well as he writes it should be an enjoyable session. If you want or need a history of cataloging, his essay would be a good start.

LOC Tagging Experiment on Flickr

The Library of Congress has uploaded two collections of photographs to Flickr and invited people to add tags. The sets are 1930s-40s in Color and News in the 1910s. It will be interesting to see how sucessful the tagging project is.

These images have the rights statement "no known copyright restrictions", an experimental rights statement for Flickr. Reaction from Flickr users seems to be extremely positive.

NISO to Develop Standard Identification for Institutions

FOAF for institutions from the folks at NISO.

Members of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have voted to approve the creation of a working group to explore issues surrounding institutional identification. This working group will be charged with proposing an identifier that will uniquely identify institutions and that will describe relationships between entities within institutions. This new NISO group will also consider what minimum set of data is required for unique identification as well as what other data may be used to support the business models of respective organizations, while also taking into account privacy and security issues.

There are and have been other schemes to identify institutions. The MARC Code List for Organizations is a good source for libraries and their parent institutions. You can even request codes there. Does your institution have a code? Then there is the SAN (Standard Address Number) for organizations in (or served by) the publishing industry. Once there was someone who kept track of institution numbers in barcodes, but I'm sure that has gone the way of the 8-track.