SRU Approved as OASIS Standard

News from OASIS via OCLC, that SRU has been approved as OASIS Standard.

SRU (Search and Retrieve via URL) 2.0 has been approved as a standard by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS). SRU is the web-based successor to Z39.50.

Functionality supported by SRU includes defining a standard query grammar for complex interoperable searching, the ability to specify the format of the documents returned and the mime-type of the response. SRU includes a capability to allow client software to query the server for functionality, include a complex description of the databases being searched.

Does SRW (Search and Retrieve via the Web) still have any life left? Once they were most often written together as SRU/SRW.

Proposal for Revision of the Urdu, Pushto, and Sindhi (in Arabic script) Romanization Tables

News from LC.

The Policy and Standards Division of the Library of Congress has received a revision proposal for the Urdu (in Arabic Script), Pushto, and Sindhi (in Arabic script) ALA-LC romanization tables. The proposal recommends a change in the romanization of the letters Svad, Zvad, Toe, and Zoe, as well as several minor corrections to the Urdu table.

The revision proposal http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman_urdu_proposal.pdf[PDF, 251 KB] highlights all additions and changes. A separate document < http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman_urdu_proposal_explanation.doc[DOC, 33 KB] enumerates changes in the revision proposal.

MODS in RDF

News from LC about MODS in RDF.

As a result of requests from the MODS community and for its own explorations into Linked Data, the Library of Congress has developed MODS/RDF, an ontology for MODS. This work has been informed by the previous work of developing a MADS/RDF ontology, which is in use now in id.loc.gov, LC's Linked Data Service, and by discussions in the MODS Editorial Committee. MODS/RDF may be used to create born-RDF MODS, or it may be used to create an RDF description corresponding to an existing MODS XML record. (An XSLT is available to help create MODS/RDF from MODS XML.)

Although it is still a draft and work in progress, LC would like to share its work on the ontology to encourage experimentation with MODS modeled as RDF. As the Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative and its BIBFRAME data model is emerging, it is clear that much work is going into expressing bibliographic data as RDF. We will be working on a mapping of MODS to BIBFRAME as the BIBFRAME model stabilizes, and this initial work on MODS/RDF may inform that task.

The ontology may be found at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/modsrdf/

Open-source Automated Library System Article

OPALS, the Open-source Automated Library System, is another option when considering Koha and Evergreen. A newspaper wrote OPALS expands research possibilities for John Abbott College students.

It’s quick, efficient and cheap. The system, which received tops honours from Perceptions 2012: An International Survey of Library Automation, was developed by the Pointe-Claire-based company Bibliofiche 11 years ago and has been reinvented three times since then in response to changing technology and client requests.

Music Cataloging using RDA

Comments are invited on Best Practices for Music Cataloging using RDA and MARC21

The MLA-BCC RDA Music Implementation Task Force is happy to announce the release of the first complete draft of "Best Practices for Music Cataloging using RDA and MARC21." This document represents over sixteen months of effort by the task force to determine and articulate best practices for the description of music resources (chiefly scores and audio recordings). In the increasingly decentralized environment of library metadata standards, this document addresses the need for specific guidance for catalogers describing music resources that is authoritative, yet flexible to the needs of individual institutions. It is intended to supplement the text of RDA itself, and accounts for (though does not presume full adherence to) the Library of Congress-Program for Cooperative Cataloging Policy Statements (LC-PCC PS).

MARC Tag Usage

OCLC will examine MARC tag usage in the WorldCat database.The goal of this new MARC Usage in WorldCat activity is to provide an evidence base for testing assertions about the value of capturing various attributes by demonstrating whether the cataloging community has made the effort to populate specific tags, not just to define them in anticipation of use.

OCLC Research seeks to use evidence of usage, as depicted in WorldCat, the largest aggregation of library data in the world, to inform decisions about where we go from here with the data that has been encoded using the MARC standard.