Friday, March 28, 2008

Additions to the MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions

The codes listed below have been recently approved for use in MARC 21 records. The codes will be added to the online MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions.

The codes should not be used in exchange records until after May 28, 2008.
This 60-day waiting period is required to provide MARC 21 implementers time to include newly defined codes in any validation tables they may apply to the MARC fields where the codes are used.

Category Code Sources
The following code is for use in subfield $2 in field 072 (Subject Category Code/Code Source) in Authority and Bibliographic records.

Addition:
ekz
Systematiken der ekz [use only after May 28, 2008]
Classification
The following codes are for use in subfield $2 in field 084 in Bibliographic and Community Information records (Other Classification Number), in subfield $2 in field 084 in Classification records (Classification Scheme and Edition) and in subfield $2 in field 065 in Authority records (Other Classification Number).

Additions:
dopaed
DOPAED der UB Erlangen [use only after May 28, 2008]
methepp
Methode Eppelsheimer [use only after May 28, 2008]
ssgn
Sondersammelgebiets-Nummer [use only after May 28, 2008]
Description Conventions
The following codes are for use in subfield $e in field 040 in Bibliographic and Authority records (Description Conventions).

Additions:
din1505
Titelangaben von Dokumenten (Berlin: Beuth) [use only after May 28, 2008]
vd16
Formalerschliessung nach dem Verzeichnis der Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts (VD 16) [use only after May 28, 2008]
vd17
Formalerschliessung nach dem Verzeichnis der Drucke des 17.
Jahrhunderts (VD 17) [use only after May 28, 2008]
rakddb
Ansetzungsform gemaess der RAK - Anwendung Der Deutschen Bibliothek [use only after May 28, 2008]
Other codes
The following code is for use in subfield $2 in field 210 in Bibliographic records (Abbreviated Title).

Addition:
din1430
Key Title nach DIN 1430 (Berlin: Beuth) [use only after May 28, 2008]
The following code is for use in subfield $2 in field 044 (Country of Publishing/Producing Entity Code) in bibliographic records.

Addition:
swdl
Lndercode der Schlagwortnormdatei (SWD) (Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) [use only after May 28, 2008]
Term, Name, Title Sources
The following code is for use in subfield $2 in fields 600-657 in Bibliographic and Community Information records, and in subfield $f in fields 040 (Cataloging Source) and subfield $2 in fields 700-788 (Heading Linking Entries / Source of heading or term) in Authority records.

Addition:
rswkaf
Alternativform zum Hauptschlagwort [use only after May 28, 2008]
The codes listed below were previously defined for use in subfield $2 in fields 600-651 in Bibliographic and Community Information records, and in subfield $f (Subject heading or thesaurus conventions) in field 040 in MARC 21 Authority records.

Usage has been expanded to subfield $2 in fields 654-657 and 662 in Bibliographic records (Subject Added Entries/Index Terms); subfield $2 in fields 654-657 in Community Information records (Subject Added Entries/Index Terms); and subfield $2 in fields 700-788 (Heading Linking Entries / Source of heading or term) in Authority records.
rswk
Regeln fr den Schlagwortkatalog (Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) (3MB PDF file) [use in new fields only after May 28, 2008]
swd
Schlagwortnormdatei (Leipzig, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin: Deutsche Nationalbibliothek) [use in new fields only after May 28, 2008]

TLA Conference

At TLA I'll be a room host for the session by Cali Lewis. Tuesday, 2 PM @ the NetFair. I'll also be at the RDA preconference.

I lost the election as councilor for the Digital Libraries group, I do think the best person won. So I'll be passing on the DL business meeting, but will most likely hit most of their sessions. I'll be starting a Twitter for the conference. I'm looking forward to seeing some folks soon.

This morning I restarted my Facebook account. I got bored with it about a year ago and shut it down. Today I reactivated it. Everything was still there. The information does not get erased when you close it down.

USEMARCON Plus

A new version of USEMARCON Plus, The Universal MARC Record Convertor, is available.
USEMARCON facilitates the conversion of catalogue records from one MARC format to another e.g. from UKMARC to UNIMARC. The software was designed as a toolbox-style application, allowing users with detailed knowledge of the source and target MARC formats to develop rules governing the behaviour of the conversion. Rules files may be supplemented by additional tables for more accurate conversion of MARC-specific character sets or coded information. The tables and rules files are simple ASCII text files and can be created using any standard text editor such as MS Windows Notepad.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Microformats

Microformats University: 100+ Articles and Resources by Jessica Hupp.
Microformats are small formatting pieces designed to make your data easier to read by both users and software. Although their use is not widespread, it’s important that every web developer becomes familiar with them, as they’re sure to be an integral part of the web’s future. Because of this, there are a number of articles and resources out there devoted to microformats. We’ve compiled more than 100 of the best here.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Additions to the MARC Country and Geographic Area Code Lists

As the result of Kosovo declaring independence from Serbia in February 2008, new country and geographic area codes have been defined for use in MARC records.
  1. MARC country code change

    The new country code is:
    kv
    Kosovo
    Kosovo was previously coded rb for Serbia from February 2007-May 2008. From 1992-April 2007 it was coded yu for Serbia and Montenegro. Prior to October 1992, yu was used for Yugoslavia, which included the Socialist republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
  2. MARC geographic area code change

    The new geographic area code is:
    e-kv
    Kosovo
    Kosovo was previously coded e-rb for Serbia from February 2007-May 2008.
Yugoslavia [e-yu] will be retained for works on Yugoslavia as a whole (including the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) and former Yugoslav republics before they separated.

Code4Lib Journal

The 2nd issue of Code4Lib Journal is now available. Plenty of good articles.

LibraryThing API

Tim Spalding has released an API for LibraryThing.
I just released a Javascript/JSON API to LibraryThing core work data.

http://www.librarything.com/thingology/2008/03/first-cut-works-json-api.php

It's basically a riff on what Google did recently—a way to link to LibraryThing if we have a book, and not if we don't. It also includes copy and review counts, and the average rating. It takes ISBNs, LCCNs and OCLC numbers.

Next up will be a JSON API into member books, so members can design their own widgets and mash their library up with the contents of a page.

It's all very beta, and my ears are wide open.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Organizing Without Organizations

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is a talk by Clay Shirky discussing his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. (WorldCat Amazon) It is available in both video and audio. Seen on Thing-ology.

OAI Toolkit

Now available on Sourceforge, OAI4J a client library for PMH and ORE
OAI4J is an open-source client library for OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE created by the National Library of Sweden. The library is object-oriented in it's design and written in Java. It can be used to harvest metadata from OAI-PMH compliant repositories. It can also be used to create new OAI-ORE Resource Maps from scratch, to parse existing ones and to serialize them to xml.
This is the 1st tool I've noticed that works on the new OAI-ORE specs.

Tagging Structures and the Organization of Information

Analyzing Communal Tag Relationships for Enhanced Navigation and User Modeling by Edwin Simpson and Mark H. Butler (HPL-2008-24)
The increasing amount of available information has created a demand for better, more automated methods of finding and organizing different types of information resource. This chapter investigates methods of improving navigation, personalization and recommendation of information resources using collaboratively generated tags to model resources and users. We discuss the advantages and limitations of tags, and describe using relationships between tags to discover latent structures that could be used to automatically organize a community's tags. We give a hierarchical clustering algorithm for extracting latent structure and explain methods for determining tag specificity. Next we explain how latent structure visualizations could enhance navigation. Finally we discuss future trends including using latent tag structures to model users and their current tasks for recommendation and user interface personalization. Publication Info: Submitted to (Book) Collaborative & Social Information Retrieval and Access: Techniques for Improved User Modeling, Edited by Max Chevalier, Christine Julien and Chantal Soule-Dupuy, published by IGI Global.

RDF Browsing Tool

A new Hp report of possible interest, Humboldt: Exploring Linked Data by Georgi Kobilarov and Ian Dickinson (HPL-2008-23)
Abstract: We present Humboldt, a novel user interface for browsing RDF data. Current user interfaces for browsing RDF data are reviewed. We argue that browsing tasks require both a facet browser's ability to select and process groups of resources at a time and a 'resource at a time' browser's ability to navigate anywhere in a dataset. We describe Humboldt which combines these two features in a single coherent interface. Our approach is based on the operation of pivoting, which enables the user to move the focus of a browsing from one set of resources to a set of related resources. With repeated use of the pivot operation the user can browse anywhere in the data. We describe a preliminary evaluation of our approach and discuss its implications for further development. Publication Info: To be presented and published in Linked Data on the Web (LDW'08), Beijing, China, April 2008