TechKNOW

The new issue of TechKNOW is available.

• Joining Together to Recycle Library Discards and E-Waste / Miriam Kahn, MBK Consulting and Adjunct Faculty at KSU School of Library and Information Science
• New ALA ALCTS Public Libraries Technical Services Group Holds Inaugural Meeting in Chicago / Cynthia Whitacre, OCLC
• Coordinator's Corner / Andrea Christman, Technical Services Division Coordinator, Dayton Metro Library
• MarcEdit: A Powerful Program / Roger M. Miller, Cataloging Services Department Manager, Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County
• Book Review: Magic Search: Getting the Best Results from Your Catalog and Beyond
• Social Tagging, Folksonomies and Controlled Vocabularies--Can't They Just be Friends? / Margaret Maurer, Head, Catalog & Metadata, Kent State University Libraries
• SERIES-L: A New Tool for Cooperative Quality Control / Ian Fairclough, George Mason University
• Book Review: Standard Cataloging for School and Public Libraries, 4th edition

Serve America Act

Are any libraries making use of the funds available in the Serve America Act? Seems like there are several areas where libraries could fit the requirements.

Introduction to RDFa

A List Apart (the other ALA) has the article Introduction to RDFa by Mark Birbeck.

RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) is having its five minutes of fame: Google is beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes websites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets.” Yahoo!, meanwhile, has been processing RDFa for about a year. With these two giants of search on the same trajectory, a new kind of web is closer than ever before.

ERMes Electronic Resource Management (ERM) Software

ERMes, an open source Electronic Resource Management system, is being developed by the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and has code contributed by Iowa State University. ERMes provides basic organization and management functions critical to an ERM along with various reports including COUNTER use reports. ERMes is freely available for download.

The ERMes Website
The ERMes Blog

From an announcement sent to ERIL-L.

"Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) -- Draft Report" -- Invitation for Review

The IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records is seeking comments on thier draft.

IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records (FRSAR)

Invitation to participate:

Review of "Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD) -- Draft Report" Available through: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/index.html or directly from: http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/FRSAR/report090623.pdf (2,800 kb)

Comments deadline: July 31, 2009

Vocabulary Mapping Framework

The Vocabulary Mapping Framework sounds interesting.

A new initiative, the Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF), has been announced by a consortium of partners. This will create an extensive and authoritative mapping of vocabularies from nine major content metadata standards, creating a downloadable tool to support interoperability across communities. The mapping will also be extensible to other standards. The work builds on the principles of interoperability established in the indecs Content Model and is an expansion of the existing RDA/ONIX Framework into a comprehensive vocabulary of resource relators and categories, which will be a superset of those used in major standards from the publisher/producer, education and bibliographic/heritage communities.

Some of the vocabularies include: CIDOC, CRM, DCMI, DDEX, DOI, FRBR, MARC21, LOM, ONIX, and RDA. I'll have to take another look at the indecs Content Model, like the DCMI Abstract Model, it seems to be too little discussed.

MARCView and MARConvert Now Open Source

The source code for the MARCView and MARConvert products is now available for download.

MARCView is the easiest way to view, search, and print ANSI/ISO standard MARC records, UNIMARC records, and MARCXML records. It will also handle many files that are not strictly MARC. (It cannot be used to edit MARC records....)

MARConvert handles special problems or unusual requirements in converting records into or out of MARC21, UNIMARC, or MARCXML bibliographic or authority formats. It will also convert MARC records from one character set to another.

All Back Issues of Cataloging Service Bulletin Now Available Free Online

News from LC.

All 123 issues of Cataloging Service Bulletin (CSB) are now available at no cost. CSB is a quarterly bulletin that includes current, new, and revised information about LC cataloging and classification practices and policies. CSB lists revised AACR2 rules, LC Rule Interpretations, changes to the ALA/LC Romanization tables, changes to the LC Subject Headings, and includes "Cataloging Publication News" and "News of Cataloging Projects," and more.

CSB Issue 1 (summer 1978) through the current issue 123 (Spring 2009) can be accessed directly from the Library of Congress's Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS) website. The entire 31 years of CSB are made available by LC as a free service to the worldwide library community.