OCLC's Expert Community Experiment

Good news from OCLC.

In response to requests from the cataloging community, OCLC is introducing the Expert Community Experiment which enables cataloging members to make more changes to WorldCat records.

During the Experiment, members with full level cataloging authorizations have the ability to improve and upgrade more WorldCat master records than has been previously possible. The Experiment begins in mid-February 2009, and is expected to last six months.

Introductory web information sessions will be held throughout February for those interested in participating in the Experiment.

Please see the Expert Community Experiment page to register to attend a web sessions. More information will be added to this page over the next few days.

Stimulus Package

Ask and you shall receive or at least find. It seems ALA was on the ball and has been active in asking for funding for libraries. Include Public Libraries in Recovery Funding! is a page where you can send an email to your senators. I've used it to send mine a message.

Los Angeles

Next weekend I'm heading out to Los Angeles for ER&L. I'm going in a couple days early and staying with my brother in the desert. Right now I plan to visit the La Brea Tar Pits and Griffith Observatory. Any other suggestions? How about a good place to eat near either of those places? Any English Country, Contra or International Folk dancing in the desert next weekend? At UCLA next week? Thanks.

Stimulus Package

Where are the libraries in the stimulus package? I've been swamped with petitions and write your rep forms from lots of medical, green, social services groups but not one has mentioned libraries. I know we could use the cash. Has LC, OCLC, or ALA or some other big player made a play for the funding? If so let me know, I'd gladly support and spread the word about the effort.

We know libraries are a good investment, they are underfunded, and the salaries are comparatively low. Sounds like a good place to invest some funds. Libraries are also counter-cyclical, business goes up in bad times. So our need and importance to our communities are greater now than a few years back.

Electronic Resouces and Libraries 2009

Next week I'll be at ER&L. Having some fun picking out sessions. Here are the presentations I currently plan to be at:

• Metadata Crosswalking
• Let's Stop Talking About Repositories
• Holistic Budgeting
• Sharing the Buck (aside, I'd love to find some libraries to share resources with)
• Open Source ILS Panel
• The Seismology of Google Scholar
• Electronic Resources in the Next Gen Cat
• Parterships
• Managing Freely Available E-Resource Collections

I'll be at some other sessions too, but I've yet to choose between two I equally want to see. I hope to see some folks who follow Catalogablog there.

Cataloging Info by the Crowd

The LibraryThing weblog has a post about their users adding author information.

On Thursday we introduced a silly new "meme" page called "Dead or Alive?" which listed your authors by their mortal status--alive, dead, unknown or "not a person." (See the blog post or check out yours.) The feature drew on the birth and death dates of the authors in our Common Knowledge system, a free (Creative Commons) "fielded wiki" for miscellaneous "cataloging" information (think "Wikipedia for book info"). To move an author from the "unknown" column, members had to find their dates and enter them onto into Common Knowledge.

What are the implications? Would this be useful in disambiguation? If the links are stable, COOL, PURLS, or something like that would a link here be a useful result return on an author search in our catalog? Just thinking out-loud.

Very few of the folks writing on library topics have had their birth dates entered. Hint to Meredith, Terry, Andrew, ....