Planet Cataloging

Please join us for the Dewey Breakfast/Update at the ALA Annual Conference on Saturday, July 11, 7:00–8:20 a.m., Chicago Hilton, Lake Michigan Room. The program will feature a presentation on planned functionality in WebDewey 2.0 (with time for input from attendees), plus three brief presentations in a session entitled “What does it mean to ‘use Dewey’?”   In the latter, we’ll be discussing uses of the new 083 and 085 fields in the MARC Bibliographic format (both fields are slated to be introduced in WorldCat in August 2009), the use of a DDC-driven representation in seven languages to provide access to digital resources in the World Digital Library, and a multilingual DDC linked data prototype service.  

For those of you who attended my talk at the Texas Library Association Conference in April 2009 by the same name as the upcoming session, we’ll be showing new content at the Dewey Breakfast/Update at ALA. (By the way, Renee Patzer of Topeka and Shawnee County [KS] Public Library also participated in the same TLA program [Looking beyond Shelf Location: The Benefits of the Dewey Decimal Classification System in Libraries], and demonstrated a great use of the DDC to build “Dewey neighborhoods” in her library—her presentation and supporting materials are here.)

If you haven’t done so already, please register for the Dewey Breakfast/Update here.  See you next week in Chicago.

Interesting post from the State Library of Kansas. They've cataloged 1,000 Wikipedia articles primarily focused in their niche.

We have cataloged about 1,000 Wikipedia articles analytically at the State Library providing links via the Kansas Library Catalog, WorldCat/OCLC and the State Library’s consortium OPAC, ATLAS. Most all of the Wikipedia articles we’ve cataloged are concerned with Kansas, Kansans or current topics with few resources initially available via standard library resources. We had one of the first records in WorldCat/OCLC linking to information on then-Supreme-Court-nominee, John G. Roberts, as well as an early record on Hurricane Katrina. We followed these entries with other cataloging records accessing more substantive resources, but yes, the initial records were for Wikipedia articles.

News from OLAC.

CAPC's Moving Image Work-Level Records Task Force has completed a draft of its report and recommendations for operational definitions for a sample of five attributes of or roles needed for moving image work/primary expression records.

We started out with the intention to simply write definitions for each term. However, while thinking about these pieces of information in the context of a shared, online database, we decided that it would be useful to investigate at least some types of "data about data" and to consider how we might be able to accommodate different types of data (e.g., both identifiers and textual strings) and deal with different levels of data reliability. We have tried to explain our reasoning and process in the introductory section. We do not believe that this draft has reached its final form yet, but we do think that we have come to a point where it would be useful to get feedback from a larger group on the perceived viability of our general approach. To evaluate the document, you may find it helpful to attempt to create a few sample records using these guidelines.

This section will also include an annotated list of potential sources for work-level information. The secondary sources section is not quite complete, but we hope to issue a draft in the near future.

The draft report is available on the OLAC web site as Part 3a. We will take comments and suggestions on the draft through Friday, July 31.

Comments are sought.

We've a new feature to LibraryThing for Libraries, suggested by Lare over at the Seattle Public Library. He was looking for a way to show off just some of their reviews—reviews for their summer reading program.

Libraries can now add "categories" for their reviewers to check off—library book club books, Big Read books, reviews by library staff, etc. And the library can show off just one category of reviews in their LTFL blog widget.

Seattle has made blog-widget pages for their kids section, teen section, and even their adult section of the site. By categorizing the reviews into age-related groups, they can feature items in their catalog that would interest the patrons for each demographic.

We'll be releasing some more cool features at American Library Association meeting in Chicago next week.

The Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) of the American Library Association (ALA) has released Fiber to the Library: How Public Libraries Can Benefit from Using Fiber Optics for their Broadband Internet Connections It "articulates the benefits of fiber optic technology for public libraries and strategies to obtain such fiber connectivity. An important goal of this policy brief is to help applicants include “fiber to the library” in their federal broadband stimulus funding proposals under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)."

My local library, Helen Hall, is receiving Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant funds to get a new cooling system.

Call for Papers....

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly

CCQ welcomes the submission of research, theory, and practice papers relevant to the broad field of bibliographic organization.

This journal, published now 8 times a year by Taylor & Francis, LLC, is respected as an international forum that emphasizes research and review articles, description of new programs and technologies relevant to cataloging and classification, and considered speculative articles on improved methods of bibliographic control for the future.

Articles are particularly welcome in areas dealing with research-based cataloging practice, including user behavior, user needs and benefits.

Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts via email with attached word document to the Editor, Sandra K. Roe, Bibliographic Services Librarian, Illinois State University (email: skroe@ilstu.edu).

Special Issues
Colleagues interested in guest editing a special issue or expanded double issue are invited to contact the Editor with a general proposal, tentative schedule, and CVs. Previous special issues have included:

Metadata and Open Access Repositories (Michael Babinec and Holly Mercer, Guest Editors)
Bibliographic Database Quality (Jeffrey Beall and Stephen Hearn, Guest Editors)
The Intellectual and Professional World of Cataloging (Qiang Jin, Guest Editor)
Knitting the Semantic Web (Jane Greenberg and Eva Méndez, Guest Editor)
Cataloger, Editor and Scholar: Essays in Honor of Ruth C. Carter (Robert Holley, Guest Editor)

Annual Best Paper Award
Taylor & Francis sponsors an annual prize for CCQ with a small financial stipend for the Best Paper of the Year.

Free Print Sample
A free print specimen copy may be obtained by sending an email to marisa.starr@taylorandfrancis.com>

For More Details
Further details may be found at the CCQ home page.

Digital librarians and archivists might be interested in this. NASA is seeking ideas on how to analyze and catalog notes from Wernher von Braun into an electronic system.

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the historic first moon landing, NASA is seeking ideas from the public, academia, and industry about how to analyze and catalog notes from spaceflight pioneer Wernher von Braun into an electronic, searchable database or other system.

Von Braun was the first director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and a key figure in the development of the Saturn V rocket and NASA's Apollo program. NASA has a full collection of "Weekly Notes" von Braun wrote during the 1960s and 1970s. These notes were used to track programmatic and institutional issues at Marshall, and are considered by many historians to be a valuable source of data.

NASA has issued a request for information and is looking for concepts that will provide an innovative resource for agency engineers and scientists, as well as researchers in academia

The MODS Editorial Committee is looking for community input on geospatial information in MODS.

In considering changes for future versions of MODS, the MODS/MADS Editorial Committee is starting to think about how to better handle geospatial information. Detailed geospatial information in the form of coordinates, etc. is becoming more and more common and can promote many innovative user interactions with resources. Currently MODS has poor support for this information.

The committee would like to bring together use cases for supporting geospatial access to resources from MODS and/or MADS implementations. We are interested both in use cases that you already have in your MODS/MADS implementation and that any local geospatial experts you have access to can provide, to help us inform how MODS and/or MADS should evolve to better handle this information. It should be noted this discussion came to the Editorial Committee from the more specific geospatial elements (latitude/longitude, equinox/epoch) in RDA, although we want to look beyond RDA for guidance in this decision.

So far, we have identified the following use cases for geospatial data:

To allow resources with a geospatial component (interpreted widely) to be plotted on an interactive map-based interface
Interactively overlaying different maps, including aerial photographs, digitized historic maps, and current maps in a GIS environment
To index coordinate data about the geographic coverage of a resource for retrieval purposes
To index coordinate data about the geographic origin of a resource for retrieval purposes

What others can you provide?

Are there more specific use cases both for geospatial *coverage* (what a resource is about or represents) and geospatial *origin* (where a resource is from, for example, a soil sample)? This distinction seems important but it would be useful to understand what is done differently in each case.

There is some question as to whether the appropriate place for this information is MODS or MADS - thoughts on this issue? Should MODS/MADS be looking to embedding or referencing other standards for this information, and, if so, which and where? What is the best balance between functionality (and potentially complexity) and ease of creation/maintenance/use?

We look forward to hearing discussion on this issue - it's a complex but important one that will benefit from community contribution.

I'm not the most diligent of bloggers, by any means, and the contents of this blog are pretty narrow in terms of topics. Mostly I have written about Google books, about RDA and other library metadata developments, and recently about OCLC. Although each post is probably offensive to someone out there, the total number of enemies that I can make is probably quite small -- and compared to some bloggers nearly infinitesimal.

So imagine my surprise this morning when I received a notice from Google saying that my blog had been marked as Spam, and would be removed if I didn't take action. There are two ways that your blog can get the Spam qualification: 1) if it is caught by Google's automatic spam detectors and 2) if someone clicks on the "flag blog" link and reports it as spam.

Given the technical nature of my posts, I find the first possibility highly unlikely. This means that I must consider the latter. I hope it is only coincidence that my latest post (and one that has lingered here as the latest for a bit too long, perhaps) is a critique of OCLC and its record use policy. I would love to be able to say that I know that OCLC would not stoop to this kind of censorship, but unfortunately I have experience to the contrary.

Earlier this year I arrived in Dublin only to be refused admittance to a meeting that they had agreed that I could attend (and that I had flown all of the way to Ohio to attend). Than, a few months ago when OCLC was told that I would be writing an article for InfoToday on their "web-scale service" the journal's editor received numerous phone calls from OCLC's press person voicing OCLC management's "concern" that I had been chosen to write the article. What the editor was supposed to do about that concern wasn't articulated, but she kept me on the story and even resisted their request to review the article before it was published. It was a dramatic couple of days, and I'm very grateful to her for her unwavering defense of freedom of the press.

I admit that it is at least equally likely that some random person with a cosmic grudge decided to click on "this is spam," but you may understand why I'm beginning to be a bit paranoid, and wondering if I don't have real enemies.

Layar created a ripple of interest a while ago. It is yet to be released. It is an application for Android based phones which will allow data from various partner resources to be 'layered' over the view through a camera phone. Partners discussed include banks (for ATMs), realtors, and a social network site with data about venues. They describe it as an augmented reality application: objects viewed through the camera may be augmented by data about those objects.

Layar is derived from location based services and works on mobile phones that include a camera, GPS and a compass. Layar is first avaliable for handsets with the Android operating system (the G1 and HTC Magic). It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers. This makes Layar a new type of browser which combines digital and reality, which offers an augmented view of the world. [Sprxmobile - Layar]

[image: layar.eu via Tito Sierra M-Libraries 09 ppt]

Tito Sierra referenced Layar in his presentation about WolfWalk, project, at the Second M-Libraries Conference in Vancouver last week. WolfWalk is a pilot project at NCSU as I mentioned the other day. It is working on an iPod application which aims to create what Tito called a 'geomobile collection'. Here is what the project pages say:

A pilot project to create a mobile application that enables users to explore NC State campus history using a location-aware map-based interface. The application supports a map view (using Google Maps) with geotagged placemarks for approximately 60 major sites of interest on the NCSU campus, and a browse view for quickly locating a known site by name. Each site has several historical images associated with it that are sourced from NCSU Special Collections Research Center digital archives. [WolfWalk]

Tito discussed how they thought this would be of interest to alumni and was careful to describe it as a modest proof-of-concept. I thought it succeeded very well in demonstrating his contention that the challenge is not just to provide small-screen versions of digital collections but to leverage the capabilities of new mobile technologies to provide new ways of experiencing those collections. In this case, the collections augment the experience of the buildings on campus by providing historic context at the point of interaction; at the same time, the app provides a map-based approach to digital collections.

The screencast and powerpoint presentation are well worth a look. The WolfWalk pictures above are screenshots of the screencast.

Mlib09

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Back in March I wrote a longish post about “My personal journey into ebooks.” Things have since changed so I feel that I ought to add some commentary to those thoughts.

As a caveat, these comments only pertain to me, at least as intended. They may apply to you as an individual reader but I do not intend for them to be generalized.

I have for all intents and purposes currently quit reading ebooks on my Touch. None of the issues I mentioned in the original post are the issue though. Simply put …

I came to the realization that the circumstances in which I was using my Touch to read books were not good circumstances in which to do so. Other than as stated in my previous post, and to no greater extent, there are no interface issues that have brought about this change.

Context: I was reading books on my Touch during bus rides to and from campus, waiting for the bus at the end of the day, and at lunch. My bus rides are about 10 minutes long and my average and usual bus wait is 10 minutes.

Trying to read while watching for the correct bus or the correct stop does not make for quality reading. Perhaps if I had a longer bus ride reading on the bus would be better. But I don’t. So I quit.

[I have also not been reading much in the way of print lately either but for other reasons. I am trying to get back in the swing since between all the other things I have going on I do need to "relax" and sustained reading is good for that.]

Today I did start reading from my Touch again at lunch (The Importance of Being Earnest). Lunch is a longer sustained period than the bus waiting/riding and it is easier to choose my stopping point so retention is greatly improved. Also, truth be told, it is easier to read from the Touch at lunch than a print book. It lays flat and stays open with no problems. If I need to eat with my fingers it becomes a small problem but I eat at a place where I need a fork (or chopsticks) most days of the week.

I have no aversion to reading on my Touch at home if need be and I will on occasion. But then I also have several 100s of print books here that need reading (A very conservative estimate).

I did read several more books than those mentioned in my earlier post before I quit using the Touch to do so. Assuming I can find more sources of free books for the Touch I imagine I will continue to use it for reading at times where I can have a semi-sustained reading experience but it is inconvenient to carry a print book.

So I guess the main point is I realized that the situations in which I was trying to read ebooks were generally not good for reading for me.  It was the situations and not ebooks or the Touch itself that caused me to quit. I will just have to see where it goes from here.

Catching up on something from last month: Sharing Standards for Bibliographic Data Worldwide: An Overview of Changes in Cataloguing Practices, a talk by Barbara Tillett at the Atlantic Provinces Library Association Conference 2009 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Built on foundations established by the Anglo-American CataloguingRules (AACR), RDA (Resouce Description and Access) will provide a comprehensive set of guidelines and instructions on resource description and access covering all types of content and media. The new standard is being developed for use primarily in libraries, but consultations are being undertaken with othercommunities (archives, museums, publishers, etc.) in an effort to attain an effective level of alignment between RDA and the metadata standards used in those communities, increasing the ability to share metadata among diverse communities. Cataloguers aren’t the only professionals who will be affected by these new rules. Increasing the ability to share metadata outside of our own organizations and changing description and access rules will impact the entire information profession. Along with providing an overview of RDA and its underlying conceptual model (FRBR- Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records), examples of how FRBR can benefit circulation, reference and serials will be explored.

Laurel Tarulli says it was a very good talk:

Not only did she explain RDA and FRBR in a way that made complete sense (and I’ve been to other RDA sessions), but she also touched on how this is something the entire profession needs to be paying attention to, not just cataloguers. This is interesting because, up until now, many librarians have brushed it aside as a cataloguing issue. Not so! How information is retrieved, what it will retrieve and how it is presented will all change. The relationship gathering is what really excites me. And, it should excite all librarians in and out of the cataloguing department.

The June 22 accident on the Washington, DC, Metrorail Red Line has been in the news, e.g., “Red Line Train Operator Used Brakes In Failed Bid to Stop Six-Car Train” and “Washington Metro Checking 3,000 Circuits After Crash.”  The accident is of special interest to two DDC assistant editors, Rebecca and Juli, who usually ride the Red Line to and from work—but were still at work when the accident occurred.  Our hearts go out to the people who were involved in the accident and their families.

The interdisciplinary number for works on transportation accidents and transportation safety is 363.12 Transportation hazards, as shown in the unsubdivided Relative Index entries:

At 363.12 is the class-here note “Class here accidents.” Because class-here notes have hierarchical force, transportation accidents are also classed in appropriate subdivisions of 363.12.   

The interdisciplinary number for works on railroad accidents and on railroad safety is 363.122 Rail transportation, as shown in the unsubdivided Relative Index entries:

Local rail transit systems do not approximate the whole of railroad transportation; consequently, works about accidents and safety in local rail transit are in standing room in 363.122, and nothing further can be added.  Examples of works classed in standing room at 363.122 are The Malbone Street Wreck, about a 1918 accident on the New York subway, and Light Rail Service: Pedestrian and Vehicular Safety.

A couple of articles on linked data.

Linked Data - The Story So Far by Christian Bizer, Tom Heath, and Tim Berners-Lee

The term Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. These best practices have been adopted by an increasing number of data providers over the last three years, leading to the creation of a global data space containing billions of assertions - the Web of Data. In this article we present the concept and technical principles of Linked Data, and situate these within the broader context of related technological developments. We describe progress to date in publishing Linked Data on the Web, review applications that have been developed to exploit the Web of Data, and map out a research agenda for the Linked Data community as it moves forward.

DBpedia - A Crystallization Point for the Web of Data by Christian Bizer, Jens Lehmann, Georgi Kobilarov, Soren Auer, Christian Becker, Richard Cyganiak and Sebastian Hellmann

The DBpedia project is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information accessible on the Web. The resulting DBpedia knowledge base currently describes over 2.6 million entities. For each of these entities, DBpedia defines a globally unique identifier that can be dereferenced over the Web into a rich RDF description of the entity, including human-readable definitions in 30 languages, relationships to other resources, classifications in four concept hierarchies, various facts as well as data-level links to other Web data sources describing the entity. Over the last year, an increasing number of data publishers have begun to set data-level links to DBpedia resources, making DBpedia a central interlinking hub for the emerging Web of data. Currently, the Web of interlinked data sources around DBpedia provides approximately 4.7 billion pieces of information and covers domains such as geographic information, people, companies, films, music, genes, drugs, books, and scientific publications. This article describes the extraction of the DBpedia knowledge base, the current status of interlinking DBpedia with other data sources on the Web, and gives an overview of applications that facilitate the Web of Data around DBpedia.

The latest issue of SCATNews, the newsletter of the IFLA Cataloguing Section, is now available.

The report of IFLA's Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR) on Functional Requirements for Authority Data, has been published by K.G. Saur as Nr. 34 in the IFLA Series on bibliographic control. There is currently no information about the availability of the full text from IFLA.

Functional Requirements for Authority Data - A Conceptual Model
Edited by Glenn E. Patton
München: K.G. Saur. (IFLA Series on Bibliographic Control; Nr. 34)
ISBN 978-3-598-24282-3
Euro 59.95 / for USA, Canada, Mexico US$ 84.00.
For IFLA members Euro 49.95 / for USA, Canada, Mexico US$ 70.00

IFLA link

http://www.ifla.org/en/news/new-ifla-publication-functional-requirements-for-authority-data

Publisher link

http://www.degruyter.de/cont/fb/bb/detailEn.cfm?id=IS-9783598242823-1

IFLA has a new book available, Functional Requirements for Authority Data: A Conceptual Model.

This book represents one portion of the extension and expansion of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. FRBR has been published as Nr 19 in the present Series. It contains a further analysis of attributes of various entities that are the centre of focus for authority data (persons, families, corporate bodies, works, expressions, manifestations, items, concepts, objects, events, and places), the name by which these entities are known, and the controlled access points created by cataloguers for them. The conceptual model describes the attributes of these entities and the relationships between them.

A couple of the other cataloging blogs posted this news over a week ago. But I also wanted to weigh in on the Vocabulary Mapping Framework [pdf].

I posted this update Thursday.  It fixes some problems found in 0.9.1.  The main issue with 0.9.1 was that the svn got foobared a little bit and some files needed for install were left out of the package.  Files that were left out and errors that they caused:

1) migrations 031 & 032 – would cause a method not found error of is_private when adding/editing collections

2) QueryAPI note found – the services directory was left out

3) classic_pagination not found – the classic_pagination plugin was left out

 

The errors were a bit of suprise because all the files were in the svn, but they had become weirdly locked.  I had to run svn cleanup a few times and then switch branches between the dev and trunk to finally get everything synced up.  But, I’ve had outside confirmation that everything is good now.  So if you were trying to install 0.9.1 and had trouble, pick up 0.9.2.  It should solve your problem. 

You can find it at: http://www.libraryfind.org

 

–TR

Seen on David Bigwood’s Catalogablog, quoting something else:

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

FRSAD is the new name for FRSAR, just as FRAD started as FRANAR, Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records. Which you can now hold in your hands, because Functional Requirements for Authority Data is finished and now in book form.

This book represents one portion of the extension and expansion of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. FRBR has been published as Nr 19 in the present Series. It contains a further analysis of attributes of various entities that are the centre of focus for authority data (persons, families, corporate bodies, works, expressions, manifestations, items, concepts, objects, events, and places), the name by which these entities are known, and the controlled access points created by cataloguers for them. The conceptual model describes the attributes of these entities and the relationships between them.

It costs €69.95 or USD $84 for North Americans.

There are no links on IFLA’s site to a downloadable FRAD, and there’s no mention of the FRSAD draft. The FRSAD group is hosting the draft on their own web site. Neither group announced their news on the FRBR mailing list. I’m bewildered. I assume the final FRAD text will be available to download soon. Open access to FRBR was a major contributor to its success.

I traveled home from the 2nd M-Libraries Conference in UBC, Vancouver, yesterday. I was interested to come across several relevant news stories in the reading materials I had bought en route: The Globe and Mail, The Economist (last week's, as it turns out), and The Financial Times. This underlined the topicality of the conference themes.

The iPhone was prominent at the conference, in discussion, but also in practice as they were slipped in and out of pockets and bags throughout. In an interesting presentation about their WolfWalk project, Tito Sierra of NCSU opened with some general remarks about geo-location and touch screens as distinctive capacities supporting new applications. He also reminded people of the importance of the Apple Apps store in reducing transaction costs for users: search and acquisition of apps was now straightforward. What Apple has done is to create a network of developers around its successful platform. The App Store is key to this as it allows app developers to find users, and users to find apps, and in the process the value of the iPhone/iTouch is increased. This point was reinforced in a story about Apple's success in countering the effects of the current downturn in the Financial Times. John Gapper quotes work by Hagel and Seely Brown of Deloitte which shows that lower costs of entry brought about by regulatory and technical trends are creating stronger competitive challenges for companies. Apple's ability to resist this trend depends on the way in which it has created a platform around which a network of partners has built thousands of apps. So, for the Palm Pre to be successful, for example, it not only has to compete with the iPhone on price and features, but also on its ability to become a platform for app developers. Much of the value of the iPhone now derives from the apps which are available to its users.

I was also struck by the number of Mlib09 delegates who were using netbooks. I suppose you would expect this at such a conference, but this did not make it any less striking. The Economist had an article on netbooks, focusing on their challenge to the computer and software industry generally. They report Gartner figures that 21M netbooks will ship this year, twice as many as last year, accounting for more than 15% of the laptop market. By the end of 2008, netbook pioneer Asus had sold nearly 5M Eees. I was interested to read that Microsoft was heavily discounting Windows XP to netbook providers to counter the Linux challenge. Acer and other firms plan to use Android.

One of the hits of the conference was the discussion by Kate Robinson of the use of QR Codes in the catalog at the University of Bath (blogged here earlier this year). It prompted discussion of the variety of ways in which people and materials could be tied into the network.

The Globe and Mail had several stories about capturing data from codes.

• Databars. A discussion of the use of Databars, smaller than barcodes, in retail and supply-chain operations.
• Samplesaint: a story about how this company, which creates digital media for cell phones, now distributes discount coupons for redemption by on-screen scanning at the checkout. Coupons can be received in various ways, including in response to an on-the-spot request by texting a number found on the relevant shelf.
• There is also a general discussion of the use of cell phones as payment devices.

Interestingly, these were opposite an advert for IBM (featuring a barcode image) which promoted its ability to make supply chains smarter and more efficient.

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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

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.

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, 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.

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

We made history in the RA world at APLA this year. For the first time outside of Ontario, an RA in a Day pre-conference session was held in Canada. I was able to speak at this conference in a presentation called Social Catalogues: Enriching Content that Enhances RA Services. Social catalogues will play a vital [...]

Hate crimes and hate crime laws in the United States have been in the news recently, e.g., “Holocaust Museum Shooter James von Brunn Had History of Hate,” “Immigration Debate Tied to Rise in Hate Crimes,” and “Holder Tells Congress New Hate Crime Law Needed.”

A check of the Relative Index yields:

Because the class-here note has hierarchical force, murder as a hate crime is classed in 364.1523 Murder.  An example of a work about murder as a hate crime is Hate Crime: The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas. It is classed in 364.152309764159 Murder in Jasper County, Texas, built as shown:

I’ve been wondering when Google would go at FRBR. Dan Cohen, one of the people behind Zotero, is at the Digital Humanities 2009 conference and he’s covering it on Twitter. He was just at a talk given by Jon Orwant, the Perl guru who now works on Google Books.

• There are 120M works & 165M manifestations of works worldwide in FRBR terms according to Google. #dh09
• For those not hip to FRBR: “What is FRBR?” from Library of Congress: http://is.gd/1dgeQ #dh09
• @Musebrarian says he would be interested in how they are interpreting “works” and “manifestations.”
• @Musebrarian Orwant says they don’t do ultrastrict FRBR, but it’s close. But the numbers seem off to me; could use more explanation.

A brief personal note: I have left my job at Ball State University so I can have more time to pursue my career as a freelance web developer.

For about two years, now, my wife and I have been building up our business, Adelie Design, Stephanie doing the design, me doing the coding. Business is good—good enough that working nights and weekends isn’t enough anymore (and doesn’t leave enough time to see the family!). So I’m “retiring”, which is to say that I’ll be staying home and working 40 fewer hours each week.

I’m glad to be leaving, but it’s been a pretty good four years at Ball State. To my colleagues and friends there: thank you. I hope to remain involved in libraries, and especially the code4lib community. Hopefully I’ll have some free time I can devote to “fun” projects.

If you, reader, know of anyone needing a web developer or designer, please have them contact me.

We have been busy adding new files to the  Virtual International Authority File, streamlining our handling of files, adding new features and getting that last bug out of the system.

Currently we are loading personal name records from 16 different authority files:

Bibliothèque nationale de France
National Library of the Czech Republic
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
National Library of Israel
Library of Congress
National Library of Sweden
National Library of Australia
Bibliotheca Alexandrina (Egypt)
Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico (Italy)
Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal
Biblioteca Nacional de España
Swiss National Library
Vatican Library

That may look like only 13 files, but Israel has four authority files based on the script of the names.  Some of the files are still small test files, but should be full files soon.

We still have lots of work to do, both in the interface and in the record matching, but we are pleased with what we have accomplished so far.

--Th

Are you curious to see what RDA Online will look like?

A FRBRy one-day preconference before the 2009 American Library Association conference is scheduled. Description taken from this PDF:

RDA, FRBR, and FRAD: Making the Connection

Friday, July 10, 8:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

This pre-conference concentrates on the role of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) in Resource Description and Access (RDA). The necessity of understanding these new conceptual foundations is key to the transition to the future cataloging environment. Participants will hear from a panel of experts on FRBR and FRAD attributes and relationships, new terminology and concepts, and participate in practical hands-on exercises.

Speakers: Barbara Tillett, Chief, Cataloging Policy and Support Office, Library of Congress; Robert Maxwell, Metadata & Special Collection Cataloging Dept Chair, Brigham Young University; Tom Delsey, RDA Editor, JSC; Glenn Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management, OCLC

Tickets: Advance: ALA Member, $249;

ALCTS Division/RT Member, $199; Non-Member, $289; Student, $99

Onsite: ALA Member, $299; ALCTS Division/RT Member, $249; Non-Member, $339; Student, $99

Event Code: AS4

Via e-mail John F. Myers sent to AUTOCAT. Sounds like there’ll be a lot of RDA on the agenda at the ALA.

Last week, I addressed a group of librarians about cloud computing trends, web-scale, and how OCLC plans to apply them to library management systems and services.  One of the thematic questions before I took the podium was whether libraries are entering a renaissance period.  That discussion might have been more interesting had the previous topic not been the very sorry state of library funding.

Technology applications makes for a boring topic in comparison to state funding, the indispensible nature of libraries, and a pending or impossible library renaissance.  But my interest in this space--the very reason I became a systems librarian, for spending the last decade as a "practical advocate" for next-generation library automation--is the opportunity to do the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason. 

If "scale" is the theme, then the challenge is to use technology and technological platforms not only to consolidate services and make them more efficient, but also to create the capacity for libraries to concentrate their efforts on first principles and their collaboartive ethic.  Put simply, and without implying mutual exclusivity:

• Disciplinary support and collection-building in academic libraries
• Physical space, local touch, education, and reader services in public libraries
• From planting the seeds of reading to the first taste of the fruits of research in school libraries

Could there be more proof that libraries are indispensible?  If you're willing to believe Wikipedia (gasp!), then renaissance can mean a rebellion against teaching and learning based on classical sources.  Consider thinking less of the output of the time period and what was required to create those outputs.  So, yes, I would say we are entering a renaissance.

The highlight at APLA (for me) was Barbara Tillett’s presentation on FRBR and RDA. Given the feedback that I received from others who attended this session, I can also say that it was a highlight for many of them as well. Barbara’s presentation was on RDA, with a twist. Not only did she explain RDA and [...]

E-mail announcement from Nathalie Schulz sent to the rda-l mailing list:

News from the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA:

• Finalization of RDA text: The RDA text was handed to the co-publishers on schedule on 22 June. RDA is scheduled to be released at the end of November 2009.
• New Chair: Alan Danskin will be the JSC Chair from 1 July 2009. Danskin is the Metadata and Bibliographic Standards Coordinator at the British Library.
• During July, the JSC Secretariat will move to the British Library: jscsecretary@bl.uk
• Web site: The JSC Web site has moved to http://www.rda-jsc.org/. There are redirections in place from the old site to pages on the new site explaining the change.

I haven’t been keeping up with everything about Resource Description and Access, the new cataloguing rules, because there’s an awful lot going on and I find it a bit confusing. When it’s done and released then we can, I hope, all see how it implements FRBR and how we can use it. I think access will be by subscription only, though. Perhaps things like the RDF schemas, which will be public, will be enough.

In a world where funding is decreasing and demand is increasing, libraries and librarians are looking for ways to provide access to content without submitting their bottom line to costly and sometimes little-used online journal subscriptions.

The ALCTS CCS Electronic Resources Interest Group invites you to attend its panel discussion “Pay-Per-View Options: Is Transactional Access Right For My Institution?” on Saturday, July 11, 2009, from 10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m, Chicago Hilton, Continental Ballroom B.

The discussion will center on the experiences of libraries and publishers as they implement and manage transactional access models at their institutions. The panelists will discuss why transactional access was right for their institution, the driving forces behind their decisions, the implementation process, technical implementation and management of the access, and the outcomes of their endeavors. Following the presentations will be a “question and answer” period, as well as an open forum for audience members to share their experience(s) with fellow session participants.

The panel includes:

Pay Per View – Where We Were, Where We Are and Where Are We Going Next?

Beth R. Bernhardt
Jackson Library
University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Between 2002 and 2003, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) set up several different types of pay-per-view options that provided users with over 3,500 unsubscribed titles.  A few years later the library set up access to many of these titles through Consortium Big Deals. This presentation will talk about what options the library experimented with, what is still there, compare its pay-per-view statistics with its big deals and discuss how libraries might use pay-per-view options in the coming years.

Developing a Pay-Per-View Model in a Financially Challenging Budget Year

Nicole Mitchell and Elizabeth Lorbeer
Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham

Anticipated reductions at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, for fiscal year 2009/2010 will result in a content budget of roughly half what it was four years ago.  The library went from having packages with almost every commercial and society publisher to just a few packages in 2009.  Over 4,500 titles were cancelled for 2009, with only 52 journals being reinstated by user request.  In exploring a solution for next fiscal year, the library began to investigate investing twenty percent of its journal budget to subsidized pay-per-view by setting up deposit accounts with the publishers, with a goal to significantly lower user fees for article access.

Fast Food Nation/Google Generation/Financial Down Turn…Meet the Library

Ryan Weir and Ashley Ireland
Murray State University
Murray, Kentucky

Murray State University has recently undertaken a project that will be the inaugural step in its transition to both providing optimized digital access and change of the landscape of its journal acquisitions from a model that has been traditionally print to one that is primarily electronic.  Alongside this transition, the library also added a just-in-time element to its previous just-in-case-only model.  During this presentation, participants will have a window into Murray State’s experience, including: the driving forces behind its decisions, its selection of Science Direct as a vendor, the implementation process, the outcomes, and where the library sees itself headed in the future.

Transactional Access: A Publisher’s Take

Mark Rothenbuhler
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

The final presentation will offer the perspective of a major publisher about its experience offering streamlined article access via prepaid tokens. Mark Rothenbuhler from Wiley will discuss the realities and potential benefits of transactional access to journal articles to libraries and publishers, and offer suggestions as to what libraries should be thinking about.

Cataloging & Classification Quarterly

CCQ welcomes the submission of research, theory, and practice papers relevant to the broad field of bibliographic organization.

This journal, published now 8 times a year by Taylor & Francis, LLC, is respected as an international forum that emphasizes research and review articles, description of new programs and technologies relevant to cataloging and classification, and considered speculative articles on improved methods of bibliographic control for the future.

Articles are particularly welcome in areas dealing with research-based cataloging practice, including user behavior, user needs and benefits.

Authors are encouraged to submit manuscripts via email with attached word document to the Editor, Sandra K. Roe, Bibliographic Services Librarian, Illinois State University  (email: skroe@ilstu.edu).

Special Issues
Colleagues interested in guest editing a special issue or expanded double issue are invited to contact the Editor with a general proposal, tentative schedule, and CVs.  Previous special issues have included:

*Metadata and Open Access Repositories (Michael Babinec and Holly Mercer, Guest Editors)

*Bibliographic Database Quality (Jeffrey Beall and Stephen Hearn, Guest Editors)

*The Intellectual and Professional World of Cataloging (Qiang Jin, Guest Editor)

*Knitting the Semantic Web (Jane Greenberg and Eva Méndez, Guest Editor)

*Cataloger, Editor and Scholar: Essays in Honor of Ruth C. Carter (Robert Holley, Guest Editor)

Annual Best Paper Award
Taylor & Francis sponsors an annual prize for CCQ with a small financial stipend for the Best Paper of the Year.

Free Print Sample
A free print specimen copy may be obtained by sending an email to <Marisa.starr@taylorandfrancis.com>

For More Details
Further details may be found at the CCQ home page: http://catalogingandclassificationquarterly.com/

Effective immediately, jenniferlang.net is no longer active. You may have noticed that I wasn’t posting much, anyway.

My new blog address is jenniferbax.net.

Cataloging-related posts will feed automatically to Planet Cataloging.

My contact information is now:

Jennifer W. Baxmeyer
Electronic Resources Cataloging Coordinator
Princeton University
Firestone Library Room 2-7-G
Princeton NJ 08544

News from the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA:

Finalization of RDA text. The RDA text was handed to the co-publishers on schedule on 22 June. RDA is scheduled to be released at the end of November 2009.

New Chair. Alan Danskin will be the JSC Chair from 1 July 2009. Alan is the Metadata and Bibliographic Standards Coordinator at the British Library.  During July, the JSC Secretariat will move to the British Library: jscsecretary@bl.uk.

Web site. The JSC web site has moved to: http://www.rda-jsc.org/ . There are redirections in place from the old site to pages on the new site explaining the change.

Beginning in 1991, OCLC used its Duplicate Detection and Resolution (DDR) software to match WorldCat bibliographic records in the books format against themselves to find and merge duplicates.

By mid-2005 when WorldCat migrated to its new platform, sixteen runs through WorldCat had been completed, resulting in the elimination of a total of 1.6 million duplicate records.

In 2005, a project was started to re-invent the DDR software to work in the new environment and to expand its capabilities to deal with all types of bibliographic records.  This large multi-year project is now bearing fruit.  Great improvements to our matching software, which are a key component of the new DDR