2008 Midwinter MARBI Meeting Minutes

The 2008 Midwinter MARBI Meeting minutes are now available online.

Cataloging Principles and RDA

Cataloging Principles and RDA by Barbara Tillett is the newly available webcast from LC.

The second in a series on RDA: Resource Description and Access, the next generation cataloging code designed for the digital environment. This presentation deals with the cataloging principles that have influenced the development of RDA; the challenges they present to the international sharing of bibliographic and authority data; and the challenges they present to the developers of RDA.

Metadata for Resource Discovery

Metadata to Support Next-Generation Library Resource Discovery: Lessons from the eXtensilble Catalog, Phase 1 by Jennifer Bowen has been published in the June 2008 issue of Information Technology and Libraries (p. 6-19).

The slides for her upcoming talk at ALA as part of the ALCTS Program, Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging (Sunday morning, June 29, 8 AM-12 PM, Anaheim Convention Center, Room 204B) are on the XC Shared Results Page.

The next time nominations roll around for Movers and Shakers someone should nominate Jennifer. Her work on RDA and the eXtensilble Catalog more than qualify her.

Delay in Publication of 31st Edition of Library of Congress Subject Headings

News from LC.

Delay in publication of 31st edition of Library of Congress Subject Headings

Due to production problems, the 31st edition of the five-volume printed edition of the Library of Congress Subject Headings, commonly referred to as the Red Books, will not be available until the spring of 2009. The data cutoff date for the 31st edition will now be December 31, 2008.

Open Source OPAC

Rapi is yet another open-source OPAC project. It uses Lucene and Ruby like most of the projects do.

Rapi is an open-source project of the WING group in the School of Computing, National University of Singapore licensed under the MIT license. Rapi provides an OPAC package that allows you to:

1. Build a Lucene index from your MARC files
2. Screen scrape live circulation data from your own iii OPAC
3. Wrap your OPAC with a customizable user interface

The user interface packaged with Rapi has been tested with Firefox 2 and 3 as well as Internet Explorer 7. The user interface supports a variety of features including tabs, an overview+details view, and a suggestion bar among many others. Note that although the user interface supports query suggestions, the package currently does not provide any suggestion modules. With that said, if you do have query suggestion modules, they can be easily integrated with the package. As an example, our live demo incorporates a spelling suggestion module.

Distributed Metadata Control Systems

Distributed Version Control and Library Metadata by Galen M. Charlton.

Distributed version control systems (DVCSs) are effective tools for managing source code and other artifacts produced by software projects with multiple contributors. This article describes DVCSs and compares them with traditional centralized version control systems, then describes extending the DVCS model to improve the exchange of library metadata.

Interesting suggestion. Network theory applied here. Only one node would be useless, two or three nodes interesting depending on the institutions, something like the old Linked System Project. More widespread adoption would make it much more useful.

Approved Books

The Open Library folks are considering adding information about banning to their bibliographic records. Other than MPAA ratings does anyone add approval by some body to their bibliographic records? I can remember seeing Nihil obstat and Imprimi potest on some books growing up. Is this still useful to some patrons for selecting an item?

Cross-concordances

Mayr, Philipp and Petras, Vivien (2008) Cross-concordances: terminology mapping and its effectiveness for information retrieval. World Library and Information Congress: 74th IFLA General Conference and Council, Québec, Canada.

The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research funded a major terminology mapping initiative, which found its conclusion in 2007. The task of this terminology mapping initiative was to organize, create and manage ‘cross-concordances’ between controlled vocabularies (thesauri, classification systems, subject heading lists) centred around the social sciences but quickly extending to other subject areas. 64 crosswalks with more than 500,000 relations were established. In the final phase of the project, a major evaluation effort to test and measure the effectiveness of the vocabulary mappings in an information system environment was conducted. The paper reports on the cross-concordance work and evaluation results.

Script Codes

One of the issues being considered by MARBI, Discussion Paper No. 2008-DP05, is how to indicate the script used in the bibliographic record. There is strong support for using the ISO 15924 Code List, Codes for the representation of names of scripts or Codes pour la représentation des noms d’écritures.