Library of Congress Systems Offline

News from LC.

All Library of Congress systems will be taken offline beginning Friday evening. This includes LCCN Permalink, Z39.50 and SRU services, ID.LOC.GOV, all listservs, and, of course, the catalog. All Library systems. Service will be restored by Tuesday.

The Library of Congress has planned extensive electrical work and power maintenance for this coming weekend. As a protective measure, all Library systems will be powered down. The maintenance period is scheduled for completion by Tuesday morning, when it is expected all Library systems will have been restored to normal operation. Though it is anticipated work will not be fully completed until late Monday (or very early Tuesday morning), services will be start coming back online many hours before then.

NISO and the Future of Bib Exchange

The latest NISO Newsletter leads off with the article, NISO and the Future of Bib Exchange.

Our bibliographic exchange ecosystem is incredibly complex. The contributors to this process are numerous and occasionally have competing interests. Beyond this, the metadata that we need to discover content travels a circuitous route through our information community involving a variety of organizations and providers. Much of this exchange, at least within the library community, is centered around antiquated formats that need to be transformed to interoperate with modern information exchange systems. Designing and achieving this transformation will require a great deal of collaboration and consensus among all the affected stakeholders.

Belarusian Romanization Table Revision Approved

The Belarusian romanization table is now available.

The ALA-LC Romanization tables are developed jointly by the Library of Congress (LC) and the American Library Association (ALA). Romanization schemes enable the cataloging of foreign language materials. Romanized cataloging in turn supports circulation, acquisitions, serials check-in, shelflisting, shelving, and reference, particularly in library catalogs that are unable to display non-roman alphabet information.

The ALCTS Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA) recently received and reviewed a proposal to revise the Belarusian romanization table. The table has subsequently been approved.

CIP Records Enhanced

News for OCLC users, CIP records can now be enhanced.

OCLC is pleased to announce to our cataloging members that additional functionality has been added to the Expert Community to enable upgrading of Cataloging in Publication (CIP) records by member libraries, even when they are coded “pcc” in the 042 field.

OCLC has previously excluded all records that were coded as being Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC BIBCO records) from Expert Community replaces. Library of Congress CIP records (DLC Encoding Level 8 records) were not being coded as “pcc” at the time the Expert Community began, but are currently routinely coded in this manner. Not being able to permanently upgrade master records in WorldCat for LC CIP has long been a source of frustration for catalogers. OCLC has heard this frustration and is responding by adding new functionality to enable upgrading of CIP. Records coded as “pcc” with other encoding levels continue to be excluded from Expert Community replaces.

Beginning today, November 5, 2012, catalogers using full level (or higher) OCLC cataloging authorizations will be able to edit/upgrade all fields in LC CIP records that may be edited in other non-pcc master records with one exception. That exception is that the encoding level coding may not be changed. It will remain “8” until an official CIP upgrade is loaded to WorldCat from LC, from a CIP upgrade partner, or is changed by an institution with National Level Enhance authorization. The entire record may be upgraded as needed, including description and subject cataloging; only the encoding level may not be changed. When upgrading a CIP record, never remove correct and accurate information from a master record simply because your institution does not find it useful. This includes LC or Dewey Decimal classification numbers, LC or other subject headings, or other useful fields such as summaries or table of contents information.

Using a full level authorization, catalogers may lock, edit, and then replace the LC CIP records when using Connexion Browser or Client. When using the Client, catalogers may just edit and replace without the first step of “lock” if desired, to upgrade LC CIP.

The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

The BASE search engine has an interesting tool package.

The search engine BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) It is a tool for searching Open Access contents and automatic classification is active since 2004 and includes 37,4 million documents from 2900 mostly academic repositories. Special features are a truncation function, a search history, sorting, a drilldown function and the cooperation of linguistic tools. Interoperability is guaranteed through the possibility to bind BASE to different interfaces.

They also provide help on "Integration of BASE into local infrastructures" and a "Validate OAI Interface." You can also suggest a repository of them to harvest. Is your institution's OAI-PMH metadata being harvested?