Call for OLAC Conference Scholarship Applications

OLAC is offering a scholarship to attend the conference.

OLAC will award one Conference Scholarship that will provide funds for a member of Online Audiovisual Catalogers to attend the OLAC 2012 Conference in Albuquerque, NM, October 18-21, 2012. Website of conference: http://olac2012.weebly.com/

Eligibility:
Any personal member of OLAC who has never attended an OLAC Conference is eligible for the OLAC Conference Scholarship.

Award Description:
The award amount of up to $1,000 will cover reasonable estimated costs for registration for the conference, preconference if desired, lodging, travel, and meals. The scholarship will be distributed after the conference in the form of a reimbursement, so the award recipient should save receipts.

Conditions/Requirements:
The recipient must confirm in writing that he or she will attend. The recipient must attend the full conference, including the business meeting where the award will be announced, and the recipient must write a brief report for the OLAC Board indicating what he or she gained and found to be most helpful in his or her work. This report will be published in the OLAC newsletter

Applicants must include a completed application form (below), a current resume, and a cover letter describing why the applicant wishes to attend the Conference, how the receipt/non-receipt of the scholarship will influence his or her ability to attend the conference, and potential applications to his or her present and future job responsibilities.

Application Deadline
The application and supporting materials must be received no later than Friday June 29, 2012. The award will be announced no later than Friday, July 20, 2012.

More details and application information are available on the OLAC site.

NISO Teleconference

News from NISO.

NISO will hold its next Open Teleconference in our monthly series on Monday, June 8th at 3:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time.

The topic for the June call will be a recap of the ISO TC 46 meeting, which was held in Berlin, Germany, from May 7 - 11, 2012. Todd Carpenter and Nettie Lagace of NISO will talk about the meeting and NISO's role there.

TC 46 is an ISO (International Organization for Standardization) technical committee, focused on Information and Documentation. Its scope includes standardization of practices relating to libraries, documentation and information centres, publishing, archives, records management, museum documentation, indexing and abstracting services, and information science. NISO is designated by ANSI to represent U.S. interests as the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to TC46.

Four TC 46 Subcommittees hold plenary meetings during this week: SC 4 (Technical interoperability), SC 8 (Quality - Statistics and performance evaluation), SC 9 (Identification and description), SC 11 (Archives/records management), along with meetings of other subcommittee working and discussion groups and of course the final TC 46 plenary. NISO also serves as the Secretariat for SC 9, with Todd Carpenter serving as the SC 9 Secretary.

The call on Monday is free and anyone is welcome to participate. To join, simply dial 877-375-2160 and enter the code: 17800743#. All calls are held from 3-4 p.m. Eastern time.

Teleconferences are recorded and available after the event.

RDA NACO Training

NACO is providing training to their members but anyone can take advantage of the resources to understand how name authority records will be created using RDA.

This training is designed for existing NACO Program members who are making the transition from AACR2 to RDA: Resource Description & Access for NACO contributions. It is assumed that participants are comfortable with creating and updating NACO authority records in the MARC 21 Authority Format, and are aware of NACO documentation and contribution parameters.

This training is general in nature, and highlights the differences between AACR2 NACO headings and references, and RDA NACO authorized access points and variant access points. There is a concentration on the new RDA-inspired MARC 21 fields that can be added to NACO authority records.

This training is not designed for new NACO Program members with no previous authority experience, and it does not cover specialized areas of NACO work, such as authorized access points for music, law, series, and religious materials.

Thanks to Gary D. Price for bringing this to my attention.
http://www.infodocket.com/2012/05/17/free-cooperative-cataloging-at-library-of-congress-launches-rda-cataloger-training/

LC's Linked Data Service

Exciting news from LC.

We are experimenting with a new feature of LC's Linked Data Service designed to more easily make use of the available data by providing a simple way to import the data into OWL ontologies, especially via OWL editors such as Protégé [1] or TopBraid Composer [2].

As you all know, we published a number of vocabularies and value lists - such as the MARC Lists for example - as MADS/RDF Authorities, SKOS Concepts, and RDF Resources quite some time ago.

Although the data made available (URIs, labels, etc) are useable in ontologies and OWL editors as is, our own use cases have led us to simplify the process of making use of them in ontologies and OWL editors. To this end, we've modified the output so that the data are readily understandable by an OWL editor (for example, we output rdfs:label for the label properties in addition to skos:prefLabel and madsrdf:authoritativeLabel because OWL editors appear pre-configured to understand rdfs:label and not necessarily skos:prefLabel) and we've created mini-ontologies designed for import into other ontologies. The idea is that the mini-ontology will import all that is needed to make use of the vocabularies and value lists in an user-friendly manner.

For example, to make use of the ISO639-2 Languages one could import the following ontology:

http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/iso639-2_Languages

This will import all the ISO639-2 Language resources, and required data (such as labels and RDF types), and the ISO639-2 Language Class (also defined by LC). Once imported, you would then define an Object Property, the range of which is a resource that is an instance of an ISO639-2 Language (http://id.loc.gov/vocabulary/iso639-2/iso639-2_Language).

The following URIs resolve to the mini-ontologies we've created:

http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/MARC_Languages
http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/MARC_GeographicAreas
http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/MARC_Countries
http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/iso639-1_Languages
http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/iso639-2_Languages
http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/iso639-5_Languages

(The following is a list of properties)
http://id.loc.gov/ontologies/Roles

Please feel welcome to try these out in your own ontologies. Feedback (suggestions, quibbles, good/bad) is welcome.

[1] http://protege.stanford.edu/
[2] http://www.topquadrant.com/products/TB_Composer.html

Romanization Table Proposals

Proposal for Revision of the Lepcha Romanization Table

The Policy and Standards Division of the Library of Congress has received a revision proposal for the Lepcha ALA-LC romanization table from Charles Riley of Yale University. The proposal aims to align the Lepcha ALA-LC romanization table more closely with current Lepcha language scholarship, and is largely based on the work of Heleen Plaisier.

The revision proposal www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman_lepcha_proposal.pdf (PDF, 88 KB) highlights all additions and changes. A separate document www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman_lepcha_explanation.pdf (PDF, 221 KB) enumerates changes in the revision proposal.

Proposal for Manchu Romanization Table

A proposal for a Manchu romanization table was developed in 1998 by Wayne Richter of Western Washington University and circulated in CSB 83. No further action was taken at that time. The Policy and Standards Division is interested in completing work on this table and it is available for review at Manchu Romanization www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/manchu.pdf [PDF, 165 KB]

LC to Add Subject Category Codes to Selected Subject Authority Records

The Library of Congress has announced they will add subject category codes to selected subject authority records.

No earlier than August 2012, the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) of the Library of Congress will begin an experiment to add subject category codes (MARC 21 tag 072) to authority records for subject headings. It is anticipated that the addition of this information will enhance the usability of LCSH on the Semantic Web; assist catalogers by allowing integrated library systems (ILSs) and resource discovery platforms to provide a list of the subdivisions that are appropriate to headings being assigned; and improve automatic heading string creation and validation in ILSs and resource discovery platforms.

VIAF and Wikipedia

Over on Wikipedia there is talk of using VIAF more to provide authority control.

This could lead to content generation in two directions: wikipages for authors etc. who do not yet have a wikipage, and (though I don't know anything about the institutional process by which these are generated) name authority records for individuals who at present do not have them.