More MARBI News

Some more MARBI news.

The following papers are available for review by the MARC community:

• Proposal No. 2008-04: Changes to Nature of entire work and nature of content codes in field 008 of the MARC 21 bibliographic format
• Proposal No. 2008-09: Definition of Videorecording format codes in field 007/04 of the MARC 21 Bibliographic format
• Proposal No. 2008-10: Definition of a subfield for Other standard number in field 534 of the MARC 21 bibliographic format

Additional proposals and discussion papers will be posted shortly.

The draft agenda for the 2008 ALA Annual MARBI meetings is available online.

Please note that there is a strong possibility that MARBI may meet during its Monday afternoon time slot of 1:30-3:30 for continuation of the discussion.

Skype News

Skype now lets you set your mobile number as your caller-id on outgoing calls. Very nice. I'm set up.

ALA Annual MARBI Meeting

Posted to many e-mail distribution lists.

The following papers are available for review by the MARC community:

• Proposal No. 2008-06: Adding information associated with the Series Added Entry fields (800-830)
• Proposal No. 2008-07: Making field 440 (Series Statement/Added Entry--Title) obsolete in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
• Proposal No. 2008-08: Definition of subfield $z in field 017 of the MARC 21 Bibliographic and addition of the field to the MARC 21 Holdings formats
• Discussion Paper 2008-DP06: Coding deposit programs as methods of acquisitions in field 008/07 of the MARC 21 holdings format

Additional proposals and discussion papers will be posted shortly.

The draft agenda for the 2008 ALA Annual MARBI meetings will be made available soon.

Yahoo Search Monkey

Another step towards the Semantic Web, Yahoo SearchMonkey.

SearchMonkey is fundamentally about transforming the way search results are compiled and displayed by leveraging the same structured data that powers the millions of pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. By sharing structured data with Yahoo!, site owners and content publishers can build more useful, relevant and visually appealing search results, which can increase the quantity and quality of traffic from Yahoo! Search....

You can share data by embedding microformats, using semantic web standards such as RDF, sharing an XML data feed directly with Yahoo! Search, or using the SearchMonkey developer tool to build custom data services that extract structured data from your pages.

LibriVox

LibriVox is becoming a valuable resource for free audio books. They just reached 1500 titles in the collection.

We’ve had a pretty extraordinary May. We cataloged our 1,500th book, James Baldwin’s children’s history book, Four Great Americans, which was a great accomplishment. (Considering seven months ago we were at 1,000).

But we also had an impressively productive month: we released 115 (!) audiobooks into the public domain, almost four per day. Our previous record for monthly production was 77, reached in July 2007.

Is anyone cataloging these and adding them to their collection? Burning them to CDs and adding those to the collection? A few months back the Nebraska Library Commission made news by adding a few books licensed under Creative Commons to their catalog. Anyone doing the same for the LibriVox materials? Adding the records to OCLC for sharing or making them available via OAI-PMH?

Code4Lib Conference

The video from the Code4Lib Conference is now on Archive.org. Note that you can get the MPEG2 high def format there. Some talks include:

• MARCThing Casey Durfee discusses MARCThing, a self-contained web service which aims to do for MARC and Z39.50 what Solr did for searching.
• OpenURL Ross Singer and Jonathan Rochkind describe Ümlaut, an open source OpenURL middleware layer intended to improve the link resolving chain by analyzing incoming citations and intelligently querying resources to better enable access to them.
• Blacklight Bess Sadler describes Blacklight, a Solr based OPAC replacement being developed by University of Virginia Library.
• Scriblio Casey Bisson describes Scriblio, the OPAC replacement based on the WordPress authoring system.
• A Metadata Registry Jon Phipps gives an introduction to the Metadata Registry, an open source vocabulary, metadata schema, and DC application profile manager and registry.

And plenty more.

Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE ) Specifications

The Open Archives Initiative has announced the public beta release of Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications.

Over the past eighteen months the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), in a project called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), has gathered international experts from the publishing, web, library, and eScience community to develop standards for the identification and description of aggregations of online information resources. These aggregations, sometimes called compound digital objects, may combine distributed resources with multiple media types including text, images, data, and video. The goal of these standards is to expose the rich content in these aggregations to applications that support authoring, deposit, exchange, visualization, reuse, and preservation. Although a motivating use case for the work is the changing nature of scholarship and scholarly communication, and the need for cyberinfrastructure to support that scholarship, the intent of the effort is to develop standards that generalize across all web-based information including the increasing popular social networks of “web 2.0”.

FGDC Digital Cartographic Standard for Geologic Map Symbolization

Found this sitting in the draft folder for quite some time. Here it is at last. The PostScript version of the FGDC Digital Cartographic Standard for Geologic Map Symbolization is now available as a USGS Techniques and Methods publication.

Geologic Map Symbolization

The PostScript version of the FGDC Digital Cartographic Standard for Geologic Map Symbolization is now available as a USGS Techniques and Methods publication.

Improving Subject Searching

Improving subject searching in databases through a combination of descriptors and UDC by Granados, Mariangels and Nicolau, Anna (2008) In Proceedings BOBCATSSS'08: Providing acces for everyone, Zadar (Croatia)

Problems with subject access to online catalogues and databases are not new. Studies on the use of OPACs have revealed two apparently endemic problems: on the one hand, the large number of searches with zero hits (failed searches) and on the other, the retrieval of an excessive amount of bibliographic records (information overload).

In this paper we describe a new information retrieval technique based on the combination of descriptor weighting and the use of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) call numbers.

The use of classification call numbers in order to search the catalogue has traditionally been very restricted. In most catalogues, call numbers are used only as topographical indicators and are not searchable. The new system described here makes much fuller use of them.

The system is based on the hypothesis that a set of descriptors correspond to a UDC call number. Through the analysis of the frequency of distribution of descriptors and call numbers, we create a set of clusters that allow increasing precision and recall. At the same time, these clusters offer alternative search modes, making it possible to systematize the indexing process and increase its consistency. Here we present a case study of the use of the system with the ERIC database.