Planet Cataloging

Catalogue & Index Blog: Visit to Thackray Museum, Leeds, on Tuesday 21st February 2012

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:55:00 +0000

The award-winning Thackray Museum tells the story of medicine and explains how advances in medicine have changed our lives. Their Medical History Resource Centre provides access to the museum’s collection of over 40,000 objects and its library of 9,000 books (including surgical textbooks, pharmacopoeias, histories of medical institutions and organisations, biographies, local and trade directories) plus 12,000 trade catalogues.

This visit will provide an insight into the varied aspects of providing access to this special but very diverse stock. There will also be an opportunity to visit the museum. The visit takes place from 14:00 - 16:00 hrs at

Thackray Museum
Beckett Street
Leeds
LS9 7LN

This is a free event, however the museum is a charitable company, so any donations would be gratefully received. Places are limited to 15.

For further details and to book a place please contact Esther Arens (esther.arens@gmx.de) to book a place.

mod librarian: Metadata Monday: A Book About Tagging

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 13:30:00 +0000

I ran across an interesting book on Amazon recently - Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web by Gene Smith. Written in the dark ages of social media, 2008, this book still offers a relevant and insightful look into the power of people for tagging the internet universe.

Touting tags as a springboard to new ideas, Smith explores tagging for classification, visualization and exploration. As one might expect, taxonomies and folksonomies are discussed as well as real world examples from Flickr and Amazon.

As more and more metadata is generated collectively, it is worth revisiting this resource.

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Catalogablog: LCGFT for Moving Images: Best Practices

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:05:09 +0000

The OLAC Cataloging Policy Committee (CAPC) has approved the document Library of Congress Genre-Form Thesaurus (LCGFT) for Moving Images: Best Practices. It provides guidelines, with examples, for the usage of LCGFT for moving image materials, and complement existing official guidelines.

The purpose of this document is to provide guidelines, with examples, for the usage of Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT) for moving image materials. These guidelines are intended to complement existing official guidelines. As genre/form practice in general is currently being reviewed by several other committees, these guidelines will need to be revisited in the future; however, these best practices fulfill the need for short-term guidance.

In controversial areas, where existing rules have been questioned as to their usefulness, suggestions are offered for a consistent local practice that libraries might adopt for their own catalogs while still staying compliant with rules for record creation and editing in shared bibliographic databases.

all things cataloged: saskiayave

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:47:16 +0000

Structured data (stored in a relational database with its controlled rows and columns in tables where the pieces of information fit neatly and are identifiable and addressable) and unstructured data (in textual documents, for example, that may be marked up by XML but whose information is not forced into a strict table structure) appear to be something like the two ends on a data management continuum.

In his article for the recent edition of the Code4Lib journal entitled “Using XSLT’s SQL Extension with Encyclopedia Virginia”, Matthew Gibson shows a way to bridge the gulf between these two worlds, using an SQL extension to XSLT to leverage the contents of a relational database in an XML context.

I particularly liked his description of the strength of the relational database for certain tasks and information needs like the ones of his specific project, the Encyclopedia Virginia:

“version control over every piece of content that goes into the encyclopedia
one-to-many relationship management of, for instance, one author and/or editor to many articles, one chronological event referenced by many articles, and one media object shared by many articles
most importantly, more efficient and scalable performance in looking up and retrieving data.”

Certain pieces of information require efficiency and consistency through reference to unique keys in the relational database, which is harder to achieve within a pure XML environment.

Both XML and relational databases have strengths and weaknesses, and whether or not you choose a hybrid approach like the one described in the article depends on your data and workflow requirements.

habitually probing generalist: Two-Thirds Book Challenge Update 4

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:54:33 +0000

This is the 3rd update to the Two-Thirds book Challenge.

2/3 Book Challenge: A Visit from the Goon Squad

E read this for her book club back in November but didn’t get the review posted until early January. She has been having a legitimately busy life the last several months. Hopefully things will calm down for her soon.

“I can say definitively that [Jennifer] Egan is a master storyteller. A Visit from the Goon Squad weaves in and out of time, with a number of stories told in layers, folding and unfolding onto themselves.”

“I wish I’d written this review closer to finishing the book – or to my book club’s discussion – as there are aspects of it that we found problematic that I’ve since forgotten.”

“And in that exchange lies the weight of the book, the way we measure the passage of time, all of the things we want to say but can’t, all of the things we try to say but fail to communicate, all of the moments in time that slip through our fingers.”

Sounds intriguing; see her review for more details.

Jen

Eleven Minutes, Paulo Coelho

“I read his book The Alchemist sometime in the last year or two and liked it. His writing is simple in quite a beautiful way. I like simplicity. I get lost in lyricism and can’t uncover deeper meanings. Coelho is right up my alley, but I don’t think that I could tear through his books one after the other. … In Eleven Minutes Coelho delves into love and prostitution, through the eyes of the young and beautiful Maria. Ah, love.”

Jen says she is too jaded for the love story here but I wonder if it wasn’t perhaps the storytelling. There are many ways to tell of love, and only a very few approach the sublimity of being in love.

The Violets of March, Sarah Jio

“The Violets of March, …, is a delicious meal laid out stunningly on the table.”

“What a wonderful book. Romance and mystery (not a murder mystery–an historical mystery), beautifully woven together.”

“It’s the characters, not the romance, that will stick with me for a while. I’ll wonder about them and what they’re up to, the way I do with old friends I haven’t spoken with in a while.”

Jen references her comment in her previous review about being jaded, which has, perhaps, not been mitigated by this book but temporarily overcome.

Yes, Jen, some of us do use our amazon wish lists like that. By the way, you can put a comment, link, etc. in the notes for each item on your wish list to help keep track of just that issue. I try to do so when I read a review somewhere; it helps if I can go back 6 months or 2 years later and see why I once thought I wanted a title and to get some additional (original) input into whether it still speaks to me.

Mark

Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

“This is the 4th book that I have finished in my Two-Thirds Book Challenge. I started it 6 October 2011 and finished it 15 January 2012. I had not intended to take so long but it is somewhat complex and, in all honesty, the rampant Freudianism/psychoanalysis is simply too much at times.”

But it is a classic text and I do believe it is worth reading.

Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return

“The gist is a comparison of how primitive or archaic humans viewed history versus how historical man views history. For archaic human, Eliade claims, everything that mattered—that had meaning—was a repeat of an archetype of some previous event or action in ‘primordial’ time, and that these things were endlessly repeated as the world was, in fact, repeatedly re-created anew.”

Modern, historical, humans have lost that which then leads us straight into the “terror of history,” a form of existential crisis.

I found this an excellent and engaging book, which, for me, generated as many questions as it may have answered. I like that.

Stay tuned for next month’s installment and good reading, whatever that may be for you!

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Big data .. big trend

dempseyl@oclc.org (Lorcan Dempsey) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:31:56 +0000

[I spoke at the Lita Top Technology Trends at Dallas. I had a trend in reserve - big data - but did not use it. Here is something along the lines of what I might have said ...]

Big Data is a big trend, but as with expressions for other newly forming areas, it may evoke different things for different people.

A few years ago, academic libraries might have thought of scientific or biomedical data when they heard the expression 'big data'. In particular, the publication of The Fourth Paradigm: data-intensive scientific discovery helped crystallise awareness of developments in scientific practice.

More recently, however, big data has become a much more general term, across various domains. Indeed, it is now common to read about big data in the general business press. One comes across it in government and medicine, and in education. For example, a recent article in Inside Higher Ed talks about 'big data' and 'predictive analytics' in relation to course data and student retention. There are two interesting aspects of this, one, the data, and, two, the management environment ...

The rise of webscale services which handle large amounts of users, transactions and data has made the management of big data a more visible issue. At the same time, as more material is digital, as more business processes are automated, and as more activities shed usage data, organizations are having to cope with greater volume and variety of relatively unstructured data. Analytics, the extraction of intelligence from usage data has become a major activity. Here is a helpful characterization by Edd Dumbill on O'Reilly Radar.

As a catch-all term, "big data" can be pretty nebulous, in the same way that the term "cloud" covers diverse technologies. Input data to big data systems could be chatter from social networks, web server logs, traffic flow sensors, satellite imagery, broadcast audio streams, banking transactions, MP3s of rock music, the content of web pages, scans of government documents, GPS trails, telemetry from automobiles, financial market data, the list goes on. Are these all really the same thing? [What is big data?]

In a brief discussion of big data as a possible trend on FaceBook, Leslie Johnston provided an interesting perspective on issues from the Library of Congress.

Our collections are not just discovered by people and looked at, they are discovered by processes and analyzed using increasingly sophisticated tools in the hands of individual researchers, using just laptops. And we not only have TB/PB of digital collections, we will have billions of items, so fully manual processing/cataloging is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

Leslie expanded on some of the actual data ...

5 million newspaper pages, images with OCR, available via API, used in NSF digging into data project for data mining, combined with other collections used in new visualizations, and in an image analysis project.

5 billion files of all types in a single institutional web archive - researchers do not search for and view individual archived sites, they analyze sites over time, and characterize entire corpuses, such as campaign web sites over 10 years.

Extreme example: over 50 billion tweets: many research requests received to do linguistic analysis, graph analysis, track geographic spread of news stories, etc.

Collection of 100s of thousands of electronic journal articles, which require article-level discovery: they don't all come with metadata and no one can afford to create it manually.

The remark about manual creation of metadata is one example where current processing methods do not scale. Leslie also notes:

And we cannot do manual individual file QA for mass digitization or catalog web archives or tweets without automated extraction. And when we start talking about video and audio, it all requires automated extraction or processing. I know of one request that we process a video to produce an audio-only track so that a transcript could then be automatically generated. LC has 20 PB of video and audio. Can you imagine what it would take to provide that level of service? Researchers started asking a few years ago to get files so they could do it themselves.

The Library of Congress may be a special case, but other organizations are facing similar issues. We are familiar with discussions about research data curation in university settings. Referring to the university challenge, Leslie then points to another interesting example.

I hear this from research libraries, but also from archives, especially state archives that are mandated to take in all state records, physical and electronic. Email archives are already Big Data for a lot of state archives.

Indeed, national or state institutions with responsibility for public records are reconfiguring organizations and systems to manage large volumes of e-records. My colleague Jackie Dooley pointed me at the recent Presidential Mandate on Managing Government Records which has implications for agencies and NARA.

In this context, it is not surprising that we are seeing a growing interest in data mining across domains (Leslie mentions the 'digging into data' challenge). The term 'data scientist' is cropping up in job ads and position titles. A couple of years ago, Hal Varian's comments on the importance of data and the skills required to analyse it were widely noticed.

The ability to take data - to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it's going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complementary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it. [Hal Varian on how the web challenges managers - reg required]

It is clear from this discussion that existing systems are not well suited to manage and analyse these types of data, and this introduces the second topic, the management environment. Indeed, for Dumbill, this is the defining characteristic of big data:

Big data is data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems. The data is too big, moves too fast, or doesn't fit the strictures of your database architectures. To gain value from this data, you must choose an alternative way to process it.

And alternative ways have been emerging, assisted by the webscale companies who had to face these challenges early on. Google provided MapReduce, described by Edd Dumbill as follows:

The important innovation of MapReduce is the ability to take a query over a dataset, divide it, and run it in parallel over multiple nodes. Distributing the computation solves the issue of data too large to fit onto a single machine. Combine this technique with commodity Linux servers and you have a cost-effective alternative to massive computing arrays. [What is Apache Hadoop]

MapReduce is a central part of Hadoop, whose development was supported by Yahoo, and whose further development is now supported within the Apache Software Foundation.

Hadoop brings the ability to cheaply process large amounts of data, regardless of its structure. By large, we mean from 10-100 gigabytes and above. How is this different from what went before?

Existing enterprise data warehouses and relational databases excel at processing structured data and can store massive amounts of data, though at a cost: This requirement for structure restricts the kinds of data that can be processed, and it imposes an inertia that makes data warehouses unsuited for agile exploration of massive heterogenous data. The amount of effort required to warehouse data often means that valuable data sources in organizations are never mined. This is where Hadoop can make a big difference. [What is Apache Hadoop]

The availability of the Hadoop family of technologies (again, nicely described by Dumbill) and cheap commodity hardware has made processing of large amounts of data more accessible. Cloud options are also emerging, from Amazon, Microsoft and others. Uptake has been rapid.

So, while Hadoop and related technologies have emerged in the context of the Big Data requirements of webscale companies, they are becoming more widely deployed. Their scalability, coupled with lower cost, have made them an attractive option across a range of data processing tasks. They may be used with 'big data' and not so big data.

In this way, my big data trend may more realistically be two trends. We are indeed having to process greater volume and variety of data. The description of data management at the Library of Congress provides some nice examples. Several technologies, notably the Hadoop framework, have emerged as a result of such challenges. However, these are now also finding more broad adoption as they reduce costs and provide greater flexibility.

Coda: In OCLC research we have been using MapReduce for several years and more recently have been using Hadoop. We have been also working with colleagues elsewhere in OCLC as we look at where and how Hadoop might provide benefits.

Metadata: This Blog is Splitting Into Two

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:10:00 +0000

On this blog, Metadata, I'll continue to post about my main research interest, metadata.

I have a new blog where I'll post about scholarly open-access publishing. It is called Scholarly Open Access.

It is located at http://scholarlyoa.com/

I invite you to visit the new site and leave comments.

--Jeffrey Beall

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First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): marketing

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 09:05:59 +0000

Today I spent the morning trying to finish Facet’s marketing questionnaire. It’s something I find really difficult – I think mainly because it has the word “marketing” in it! There are sections that are straightforward information – like which listservs might want to know about the book, and which journals’ book reviews editors would be [...]

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): #libday8 - Plantin-Moretus Museum

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:07:31 +0000

The conference visits were today. I had reason to be doubly glad that I went to the Miraeus Lecture on Tuesday, as I had to miss the visit to the Hendrik Conscience Library in favour of answering proof queries. I did make the visit to the wonderful Plantin-Moretus Museum, which was magical. It began to [...]

Catalogablog: Code{4}lib Journal

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 10:18:20 +0000

The latest issue of the Code{4}lib Journal has some articles of interest.

HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org
Jason Ronallo

On June 2, 2011, Bing, Google, and Yahoo! announced the joint effort Schema.org. When the big search engines talk, Web site authors listen. This article is an introduction to Microdata and Schema.org. The first section describes what HTML5, Microdata and Schema.org are, and the problems they have been designed to solve. With this foundation in place section 2 provides a practical tutorial of how to use Microdata and Schema.org using a real life example from the cultural heritage sector. Along the way some tools for implementers will also be introduced. Issues with applying these technologies to cultural heritage materials will crop up along with opportunities to improve the situation.

Using VuFind, XAMPP, and Flash Drives to Build an Offline Library Catalog for Use in a Liberal Arts in Prison Program
Julia Bauder

When Grinnell College expanded its Liberal Arts in Prison Program to include the First Year of College Program in the Newton Correctional Facility, the Grinnell College Libraries needed to find a way to support the research needs of inmates who had no access to the Internet. The library used VuFind running on XAMPP installed on flash drives to provide access to the Libraries’ catalog. Once the student identified a book, it would be delivered from the Libraries to students on request. This article describes the process of getting VuFind operating in an environment with no Internet access and limited control of the computing environment.

Improving the presentation of library data using FRBR and Linked data
Anne-Lena Westrum, Asgeir Rekkavik, Kim Tallerås

When a library end-user searches the online catalogue for works by a particular author, he will typically get a long list that contains different translations and editions of all the books by that author, sorted by title or date of issue. As an attempt to make some order in this chaos, the Pode project has applied a method of automated FRBRizing based on the information contained in MARC records. The project has also experimented with RDF representation to demonstrate how an author’s complete production can be presented as a short and lucid list of unique works, which can easily be browsed by their different expressions and manifestations. Furthermore, by linking instances in the dataset to matching or corresponding instances in external sets, the presentation has been enriched with additional information about authors and works.

Presenting results as dynamically generated co-authorship subgraphs in semantic digital library collections
James Powell, Tamara M. McMahon, Ketan Mane, Laniece Miller, Linn Collins

Semantic web representations of data are by definition graphs, and these graphs can be explored using concepts from graph theory. This paper demonstrates how semantically mapped bibliographic metadata, combined with a lightweight software architecture and Web-based graph visualization tools, can be used to generate dynamic authorship graphs in response to typical user queries, as an alternative to more common text-based results presentations. It also shows how centrality measures and path analysis techniques from social network analysis can be used to enhance the visualization of query results. The resulting graphs require modestly more cognitive engagement from the user but offer insights not available from text.

On Dentographs, A New Method of Visualizing Library Collections
William Denton

A dentograph is a visualization of a library’s collection built on the idea that a classification scheme is a mathematical function mapping one set of things (books or the universe of knowledge) onto another (a set of numbers and letters). Dentographs can visualize aspects of just one collection or can be used to compare two or more collections. This article describes how to build them, with examples and code using Ruby and R, and discusses some problems and future directions.

Work and Expression: citybibs

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:37:28 +0000

Behind the scenes

Contributed by: Heather

For many years, Bib Services has been running occasional “behind-the-scenes” tours under the heading “Journey of the Book” – which we thought was an original title until we Googled it, when we found that there is nothing new under the sun. These tours, which follow a book through the processes of ordering, receipt, cataloguing and processing, were devised as a means of introducing new library staff to the work of our department – because, as a centralised department, we have contact with everyone, everywhere, at some time or another and because most people like to be able to put a face to a name. We wanted to be able to demonstrate not only that we existed, but that we were helpful, friendly and that the work we did in the back-room had a direct impact on the work they did on the front line.

After a while it occurred to us that perhaps library users would also be interested to see behind the scenes, and we started to offer a similar tour to the public. This covers pretty much the same ground, but we have to be careful to explain things in layman’s terms and not to assume that anyone knows, for example, what a catalogue is, what it does or why it might be useful.

Gradually we noticed that some of the people on these public tours were, in fact, colleagues from other library services – and who doesn’t like to have a look and see how another library does things? This did give us problems sometimes, when a group might include curious but uninformed library users alongside fellow cataloguers who were looking for a lot more detail. And so we devised a third “flavour” of tour – one specifically for professional colleagues.

Although it takes time and work to organise the tours – setting up displays, preparing handouts and “goody-bags”, and devising and collating feedback forms – and although it can be tiring and slightly stressful to be suddenly in public view and acting as a tour guide, we have found the experience to be well worth the effort.

Sometimes “to see ourselves as others see us” can be uncomfortable. Working in the back room tends to be isolating and we make assumptions about our customers’ knowledge and expectations that turn out to be wrong. Things which we regard as being self-evident, often aren’t. And so we learn as much as our visitors and, in the case of professional colleagues, often make contacts that endure to the benefit of all concerned.

As always, we’d be pleased to hear your comments. Perhaps you have tried something similar and would like to share your experiences, or perhaps you are contemplating a similar project and would like to ask further questions about ours?

Our next tours, which are Public Journeys of the Book, will be on Wednesday 8th of February. Unfortunately, these are now almost sold out, but we will be announcing the details of any future tours on W&E.

If you would like to be sent details when the next tours are announced, please leave your contact details here, or e-mail us at bssgeneral@cityoflondon.gov.uk

The Cataloguing Librarian: Laurie Tarulli

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:04:07 +0000

Quite often I receive emails from students in MLIS programs asking for advice. This can be as simple as help with a paper, a cataloguing question or long-term career advice. Sometimes these emails also involve in-depth questions regarding the future … Continue reading →

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): 02-02.University

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:36:14 +0000

I’m privileged to be spending the end of the week at the beautiful City campus Hof Van Liere of the University of Antwerp (main gate pictured) at the IFLA Rare Books and Manuscripts Section Mid-term, entitled Ambassadors of the Book. As conference chair Pierre Delsaedt expressed it in his introduction to the conference theme, the [...]

schenizzle: gugek

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:35:15 +0000

I use a couple simple mappings in my vimrc to preview markdown documents in my
browser. It isn’t as cool as something like Marked for Mac OS X but it gets
the job done on the workstation.

This uses a Python installation of markdown just installed using:

pip install python-markdown

The vimrc includes:

nmap md :%!markdown %

nmap p :w!:!start /min cmd /c markdown -x tables % > "C:\temp\temp.html"
&& "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
"file://C:/temp/temp.html"

imap p :w!:!start /min cmd /c markdown -x tables % > "C:\temp\temp.html"
&& "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
"file://C:/temp/temp.html"

Catalogue & Index Blog: CILIP's Body of Professional Knowledge - your views needed.

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:03:00 +0000

CILIP has just launched the first phase of consultation on the current Body of Professional Knowledge. They would like to encourage you to participate in the survey to gain an understanding of what members, potential members, the wider sector and key stakeholders want from a BPK, what the key principles and quality criteria might be and how it might be used both now and in the future. This consultation is about developing a quality framework for the BPK, not the content.

The Project Board have taken on the role of developing an initial draft of the new BPK. Once the draft is completed, there will be a consultation on the content and they will ask consultees to score the BPK on how it matches the key quality criteria that have been defined as a result of this exercise. This will be Part 2 of the consultation.

For more information and to participate in the survey, please go to the website: www.cilip.org.uk/futureskillsproject and click on the link - The Body of Professional Knowledge Consultation - Part 1.

The survey will close at midnight on Sunday 26th February.

For more information about the Future Skills Project, check out the website or contact them at futureskills@cilip.org.uk

Metalogger: The Battle Has Begun

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:03:37 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a wonderfully encouraging article about academics taking on the tyranny of the academic publishing industry. The bottom line of the issue is the argument that publicly funded research should by rights be made publicly available.

It’s by Josh Fischman, A few excerpts:

A protest against Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific journal publisher, is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company’s journals, including refereeing papers.

. . . . .

Protesters . . . say Elsevier is emblematic of an abusive publishing industry. “The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities,” says Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “Then they charge us to read it.” Mr. Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook.

Those views highlight a split that could spell serious trouble for journal publishers, and for researchers. Price complaints are not new, but some observers say this is the first time that the suppliers of journal content—the scientists—are upset enough to cut the supply line. But, if publishers are correct, those scientists could cut themselves off from valuable research tools.

According to the boycotters, Elsevier, which publishes over 2,000 journals including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet, is abusing academic researchers in three areas. First there are the prices. Then the company bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don’t want in order to get a few things they do want. And, most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed federal law, the Research Works Act (HR 3699), that could prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available.

. . . .

[T]he protest has also reached junior scholars like Mr. Abrahams of Albert Einstein, who has yet to gain tenure.

“I have three papers I’m hoping to submit in the next 12 weeks. One was destined for Cell, and another for Neuron,” also published by Elsevier, he said. “It would have been a real feather in my cap to publish there. But I won’t, based on this week’s discussions.” His work, focused on identifying genes related to autism, will go other places. “There are other good journals. And, long term, I’d like my library to be able to use its limited resources to better ends” than high journal prices, he said.

That could signal real problems for Elsevier, says Kevin Smith, director of scholarly communications at Duke University Libraries. “Librarians have long complained about prices and bundling journals together, and nothing has changed,” he says. “Now it’s not just the customers who are complaining. It’s the suppliers.”

Academic librarians may buy journals, but it’s the scientists who produce and submit articles that make them worth buying, he says. “If they are upset, there is a chance they may change the system.”

. . . .

Nor does the Elsevier infrastructure impress younger scholars like Mr. Abrahams. “It could disappear tomorrow, and I’d never notice that it’s gone,” he said.

There is also the related question of long-term preservation. Libraries have traditionally been the repositories for this purpose but online journal publishers have robbed libraries of that ability and have forced the academic world to trust private companies whose bottom line is the profit margin with the preservation of our research heritage.

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): #libday8 - bindings information

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:25:26 +0000

Today’s photo was not taken today, but last term, during my colleague Fred Bearman’s bindings practical in INSTG012. It came to mind today, during Nicholas Pickwoad’s presentation at the IFLA RBMS Mid-term. Speaking on his Ligatus project to develop a thesaurus for bindings terms and, beyond that, his career-long advocacy of the significance of plain [...]

Bibliographic Wilderness: Forcing a one column page in Blacklight 3.2

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:18:26 +0000

I have a Blacklight 3.2 app which uses the default CSS (which is now based on compass with susy grids for layout), and a rails layout that’s a barely customized version of the stock layout.

This layout is normally a two-column display, with a sidebar and main area.

But on some pages, I don’t want a sidebar. I want the main area to take up the whole width. if there’s any content in the ‘sidebar’ area, it should just be beneath the main area in normal page flow, not beside it. (Sometimes I might hide the sidebar entirely, other times let it flow beneath).

I don’t want to have to give different pages different layouts. The DOM should be the same after all, it’s just a question of forcing the sidebar below instead of side-by-side.

I had a way to do this with previous yui-grids based Blacklight layout. Here’s a way to do it with the compass susy based layout too. Thanks to James Stuart for the hints. All errors mine — I confess I don’t entirely understand what’s going on here (I understand about 85% of it), and haven’t thoroughly tested this yet, but it makes sense and appears to work. There’s probably a nicer way to do this.

First, in my layout, I have it add a class to the <body> if such a class (or space seperated class literals) are in the @body_class ivar.

  <body class="<%= @body_class %>">

So far, that won’t do anything though, the CSS is still the same. So now we want to add CSS overrides such that when .one_column wrapper, override the CSS to force both the main and sidebar areas to be full width. We’re going to do that with plain old CSS overrides (although using scss/compass/susy to generate the CSS) — there’s probably a cleverer way integrate into BL’s existing scss context to make things more clean and re-use variables already declared and such, but this is good enough.

We’re going to add a new .css.scss file in our app, and require it in our ‘application.css’ manifest after the Blacklight styles are included, so it can override them CSS cascade style.

*= require force_one_column

./app/assets/force_one_column.css.scss

/* give us access to the compass susy mixins like
prefix/columns/omega. possibly also set up BL's default column widths
and such? */
@import "blacklight/grids/susy_framework"; 

.one_column {
   #bd  {
      #main {
        @include columns(24,24);
        @include omega(24);
      }
      #sidebar {
        @include columns(24,24);
        @include omega(24);
      }
   }
}

That’s it, it works.

Note that we needed to know standard BL susy layout is 24 columns. If someone changes that, our stuff will break and have to be fixed. There’s probably a way to make this more robust by incorporating this in the single existing BL scss (with access to it’s variables) in your local ./app/assets/blacklight_themes/standard.scss.css (or similar), but this is good enough for me for now.
Susy docs say one ought to be able to use `@include full(24)` instead of `@include columns(24,24); @include omega(24);` but for some reason that didn’t work for me, I dunno.

Filed under: General

A portal to my Cataloguing Aids website: ebook readers

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:17:33 +0000

I’ve been cataloging a LOT of ebooks lately and I wonder….

Why is the ISBN the same for epub and pdf versions of some titles – while other titles have two separate and distinct ISBNs for the two formats? If anyone knows the answer I’d love a reply.

TSLL TechScans: LITA/ALCTS MARC Formats Interest Group slides from Midwinter available

noreply@blogger.com (Jean Pajerek) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:03:00 +0000

Slides from the LITA/ALCTS MARC Formats Interest Group presentations made last month at ALA Midwinter are available at: http://connect.ala.org/node/163477. The speakers, Kelley McGrath, Jennifer Bowen, and Diane Hillmann, addressed the topic: "What Lies Beyond MARC?" Mark Ehlert has also made available a paper on the relationship between RDA and MARC (http://connect.ala.org/files/MARCandRDA_rev.pdf).

Catalogue & Index Blog: DVD cataloguing - can you help?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:42:00 +0000

I run a small DVD library (2,000 titles) at the University of Bristol School of Modern Languages. I need a film cataloguing system which is available online for our 1100 students (i.e. not a simple database). Do you have any suggestions as to where I might get advice on suitable software?
Thank you for your help.
(Posted on behalf of Nick Bartram, University of Bristol. Please reply to him direct - email: nick.bartram@bristol.ac.uk )

Bibliographic Wilderness: Alan Lomax archives to be digitized and made open access

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:27:45 +0000

From the New York Times. Folklorist’s Global Jukebox Goes Digital.

Just as he dreamed, his vast archive — some 5,000 hours of sound recordings, 400,000 feet of film, 3,000 videotapes, 5,000 photographs and piles of manuscripts, much of it tucked away in forgotten or inaccessible corners — is being digitized so that the collection can be accessed online. About 17,000 music tracks will be available for free streaming by the end of February, and later some of that music may be for sale as CDs or digital downloads.

It’s not entirely clear to me if every single piece of content will be free, but the article seems to say a huge chunk will. But even before digitization, the Association for Cultural Equity, which apparently is custodian of this material, had an admirable policy aimed at getting the material out there for use in cultural/creative projects, without letting cost be a barrier:

“We go from the attitude that we just want everyone to use it, whatever their budget is,” Mr. Fleming said. “If it’s educational or for the press, it’s usually no charge, and when someone has a budget, well, then we just want to get roughly what other people are getting.”

How many ostensibly not-for-profit library and archival special collections have similar policies?

As the digitization rush in mass produced publications changes the role of libraries, our unique rare/special materials are what may still distinguish libraries. Getting them out in use without letting cost be a barrier will not only fulfill our missions (books are for use), but remind the public that libraries (not Google, not Amazon) really are just about the only institutions whose primary interests are in serving our users, not in making a buck off them. It’s from that standpoint that libraries can expect the popular support needed to make our funding sustainable as the environment changes around us. On the other hand, miseducating patrons about copyright in order to try to maintain/maximize income streams is counter-productive to our missions (in at least a couple different ways), and will teach the public that we’re no more on their side than any of the commercial information institutions and that there’s no reason to support us over them.

I have a personal interest in folk music, and am very excited to see/hear the digitized and released archives. Much respect to the custodians of these archives for prioritizing the public interest as per their mission.

(The article is somewhat vague on exactly what’s going on organizationally and who’s doing it, so I’m not entirely sure who deserves the credit. Obviously written for an audience more interested in Lomax’s music, rather than who’s doing it and how like us library geeks are interested in. The Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center may also deserve some of the credit? We’ll also have to wait to see if the entire digitization output will be open access or the open access component will be as large as the article suggests, I sadly wouldn’t be surprised if the article has over-stated that aspect, but wait hopefully.)

Another part also sounds like an awesome show of responsibility to the folk communities that generated the content, cultural repatriation instead of appropriation, very unusual even amongst non-profit cultural heritage institutions:

The Association for Cultural Equity also has what it calls a repatriation program, meant to make Lomax’s work available to the communities where it was obtained and to pay royalties to the heirs of those whose music was recorded.

Filed under: General

Catalogablog: Metadata Harvested

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:09:18 +0000

Jason Ronallo at Preliminary Inventory of Digital Collections writes about Common Crawl, Web Data Commons, and Microdata.

The other day I discovered the Web Data Commons, which is building on top of the Common Crawl to extract Microformat, Microdata, and RDFa data and make it available for free download. This means that there is starting to be free structured data from a big portion of the Web available for for anyone to play with at very low cost. Common Crawl takes care of the crawling and then Web Data Commons will do data extraction. This opens up new possibilities for services, specialized search, and aggregations of content. Big web data is being opened up for small startups and individuals.

Is your library being crawled? Does it have metadata able to be harvested? Should it? Just asking.

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): Screen shot 2012-01-31 at 22.56.42

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:08:19 +0000

I’m not really the best of travellers – hate being away from home and family and in amongst unfamiliar people and places. So what a joy this evening to hear Michael Suarez give the Miraeus Lecture at the Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience this evening. As you can see from the photo, it turned out to be a [...]

Catalogablog: MARCXML to MODS 3.4 XSLT (Revision 1.75)

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:52:36 +0000

Image via WikipediaThe revised version of MARCXML to MODS 3.4 XSLT has been announced.

The Library of Congress' MARCXML to MODS 3.4 XSLT stylesheet (Revision 1.75) http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/MARC21slim2MODS3-4.xsl is now available--it incorporates edits made in response to comments received since the release of Revision 1.74.

The MODS 3.4 XSLT is based on the MARC to MODS 3.4 mapping made available by the Library of Congress in July of 2010 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-mapping.html. The mapping and the XSLT are also available via the Library of Congress' MODS Web site. They They will be revised periodically as users' comments are received and as subsequent MODS Editorial Committee analysis and decisions evolve.

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): #libday8 Cataloguing Examples

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 22:28:55 +0000

One of the big issues we faced with Practical Cataloguing was how to illustrate the examples. In the end, we decided on ten full examples forming a chapter at the back of the book, with copies of title pages (t.p.), title page versos (t.p. versos) and other pages as appropriate. We included other records and partial records [...]

Catalogablog: VuFind 1.3 Released

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:19:15 +0000

Image by nengard via FlickrVuFind, the library portal software, has a new version.

The latest version of the VuFind Open Source discovery software has just been released.

The new release includes several significant enhancements:
A new "book bag" feature has been added for shopping-cart-style bulk actions (save, email, export multiple records).
VuFind is now driven by Apache Solr 3.5, the latest version of the powerful index engine.
New optional search plug-ins have been added for visual timelines, Google Maps integration and Europeana searches.
Enhanced RSS feeds allow VuFind results to be easily shared with external services such as Elsevier's SciVerse platform.
Syndetics integration has been improved.
VuFind's default theme now uses jQuery and Blueprint for a more dynamic, polished interface.
Additionally, several bug fixes and minor improvements have been incorporated.

Various librarian-like stuff: carolslib

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:34:02 +0000

I had an “Aha” moment at ALA MW. There I was, sitting and listening to the Big Heads of Technical Services (no, really, that’s what it is called), when suddenly my brain began to function. Let’s see it if works in essay form. I believe I have seen the future – the bigger picture – [...]

mod librarian: Metadata Monday: Is Pinterest Crowdsourcing Data?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:30:00 +0000

By now, I am sure you are all aware of Pinterest - the well designed curation site allowing ease of sharing or as they put it "Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web."

Pinterest is being touted as the next big thing in social media and as exemplifying a cosmic shift from search to discovery. While I have long been a fan of using social bookmarking tools like Diigo and Delicious to collect content for my blog, Pinterest takes this type of curation to a new more visually appealing level.

I think I will find it useful in organizing ideas and inspirations for shopping and reading and movie watching in my personal life and it is fascinating to see what my friends pin - from my shoe obsessed art director pal with impeccable taste to photography buffs and crafty crafters.

I can't help but wonder, however, if the rich data collected from the participants will somehow mean that now we are all crowdsourcing market research. Like a giant digital focus group, we are telling advertisers what interests us and doesn't. I see a future where my sidebars become even more Orwellian.

Permalink | Leave a comment »

First thus: Re: Considerations on Linked Data (Was: Showing birth and death dates)

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:37:46 +0000

On 1/28/2012 6:51 PM, Karen Coyle wrote:

<snip>
On 1/28/12 9:03 AM, James Weinheimer wrote:

But concerning linked data: Accessing bits and pieces of bibliographic records in the cloud using URIs may be a good idea, or maybe not. Eliminating the need for multiple, redundant local databases may also be a good idea, or maybe not. There are many questions that would need to be decided before entering on such an arrangement. One of the most critical involves intellectual property. I think we all know that struggles over intellectual property are becoming more complicated and more intense as the internet grows and becomes more important in each person's life.
This is a mis-interpretation of linked data, IMO. There is nothing inherent in linked data that says that you must store your data 'in the cloud' nor that you must use cloud-based data. Linked data is used today in enterprise situations that are "off line." It is a useful data management method in itself.

Most organizations look at a multi-tiered data model today. There is the internal, highly controlled data that is used to manage operational functions, like warehousing, billing, service creation.

Then there is the linking that allows your data to take your users out to the world of Web-based information, or to lead people from the Web into your institution. These links can fail, but the important design decision is to decide where you can risk that failure (e.g. sometimes a user won't get from Wikipedia to the library and vice versa) and when you cannot (e.g. the FRBR Work data must always be available).

This is really not new; we already design systems to 'fail gracefully' for non-essential services, and to capture and control data where failure is catastrophic.

I think it's best to think about linked data like this: if I write a paper and put it on the web, anyone can link to it. This linking enhances discovery, but it doesn't change the content of my paper nor its solidity as a unit. If those people stop linking to me, nothing changes for me. If I link from my paper to other information, I know that information is not guaranteed to be there. If I absolutely need that remote information for the integrity of my work, I generally make a local copy of it. If the remote document disappears, I get a 404 message and I can decide if I want to change something. Much of this negotiation between links now happens as automated processes, and the use of URIs for linked data makes it likely that many links will be made, and un-made, without human intervention.

I envision that libraries will create a controlled pool of library data that is not dependent on the open cloud. This is where cataloging will take place, this is where inventory control will take place, and this is where library systems can pull data for library system displays if they wish. Whether or not we also allow others to link to this data (not changing it or its integrity in any way) is a decision we'll have to make. Meanwhile, library systems will link opportunistically to a wide range of information on the web.

We shouldn't be afraid of the web -- we all use it every day; our users live on it. There is no 100% guarantee that everything out there will be stable, but if it were terribly unstable we wouldn't be using it the way we are today. Use gmail? You have no control over that. Use Wikipedia? That's someone else's data. Use google or bing? Ditto.

Essentially, as a system for information discovery and exchange, the Web works. Yes, it could perhaps fail, but if it does, library linking to resources like Wikipedia or DBPedia will be the least of our worries.
</snip>

I don't think I am misinterpreting linked data, I am just recognizing a reality on the web. In a theoretical world, everyone wants to share and share equally. But we are in a different world, especially in today's climate, where everyone is trying desperately to cut budgets and save money wherever possible, plus to actually generate funds.

Today, there is a tremendous movement among organizations to "monetize" their data and their websites. Step one is to establish "ownership" of this information. These organizations need to do this, so I am not criticizing them, simply recognizing a fact that is happening in the world of business, and the library world as well.

There are different types of links: simple links into a paper, links into wikipedia and so on. Those can come and go as they please. But in the linked data world as foreseen by w3c and especially the FRBR data model, not all links are the same. For instance, a library catalog can add into their records the user reviews from Amazon. Let's suppose Amazon will eventually want money for you to link into those reviews. A library can dump those parts without much fuss, but if you have an FRBR data model and are relying on other agencies for work/expression and maybe even manifestation entities, that is a completely different matter. You are *absolutely dependent* on the agency that supplies this information, and whether you have the right to download copies to your own servers, etc. will have to be negotiated. But in the current melees over copyright on the web, it would be extremely naive for a library to
simply take such a right for granted.

I don't know what the future directions will be with library data: in the cloud or off the cloud, but "libraries" are not so monolithic and will probably implement a variety of solutions. Anyway, there is a world of difference between "being frightened" of the web and approaching it in a responsible, business-like manner, especially after some libraries have already lost rights to their own digitized resources.

Certainly the web is a great tool, but it is undergoing some fundamental changes right now in various areas, one of the most important is in the realm of rights. I am just saying that a simple belief that going to linked data will be the solution, could actually lead to nightmares.

Work and Expression: citybibs

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:22:31 +0000

Welcome to Work and Expression, the weblog of the Bibliographical Services Section of the City of London Libraries (sometimes known as BSS).

To introduce ourselves briefly, we are a section comprising thirteen people who are responsible for providing services in cataloguing, acquisitions and inter-library loans for the libraries of the City of London – the local authority for the Square Mile – and this blog is our collective voice.

We intend to use the blog to publicise what we do, to reflect on what we do and share those reflections with our readers. Our readership will, we hope, extend beyond our immediate colleagues in our own Department to our colleagues in the wider cataloguing and metadata community, the library community in general and the wider public beyond.

To discover more about who we are and what we do, watch out for the next few posts, which will include a promotional video that we have recently made and posted on YouTube, and an account of the Journey of the Book, one of the ways in which we are trying to promote a greater awareness of our work.

We hope that – like most good blogs – ours will, in time, develop a distinctive character of its own, but our aim is that the keynote will be variety – a variety of subjects, tones, perspectives, voices and of types of writing, from short, spontaneous sharings of thoughts to longer, more considered pieces.

We very much hope that what we write will prove thought-provoking and that our readership will feel free to contribute thoughts of their own by commenting on what we write – your comments will be very welcome. We would particularly interested to hear from anyone who has – or is intending to – attempted a project like this. Do share your experiences with us.

If you would like to keep up to date with Work and Expression then click on Follow on the sidebar to receive e-mail updates – or, if you have a blog of your own, you might like to add us to your blog roll.

So welcome again. We hope to find writing our blog a useful and an enjoyable experience, and that you will feel the same way about reading it.

Various librarian-like stuff: carolslib

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 16:26:47 +0000

Colleagues, Customers, Complete Strangers - Have you noticed the Blackhole of Communication? Have you experienced the wonders and delights of non-response? Have you continued in various forms, trying to communicate in all ways possible (email didn’t work, let’s try the phone, phone didn’t work, let’s try a friend/neighbor/adjacent cube…) to finally hear back from the [...]

Terry's Worklog: Proof of concept redux

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:44:23 +0000

So I’ve been spending my time making a few changes to my proof of concept cataloging application using my phone. A couple of things that I’ve learned along the way:

No matter how good the OCR is, I’m not sure it ever gets to a point where you can just happily scan a catalog card and get all the data perfectly. You can thank ISBD punctuation for that.
Setting holds data in OCLC is much easier than you’d think it would be, thanks to the Z39.50 Extended properties.
Adding a barcode reader really was easier than I thought it would be

Right now, the proof of concept allows users search (and set holdings) to OCLC (using their login credentials) or search and download records from US LC. You can scan a barcode to get the record, or you can scan a library card and allow the program to attempt to disassemble the metadata to determine the best search profile. Obviously, of the methods, this one is the most dodgy, but it’s interesting to see how it works and how OCR incrementally improves.

As I’ve been working on this, it’s been making me wonder what are the real life implications for a project like this. Obviously, one of the goals was to make taking catalog cards and making them easier to recon. But the ability to use the phone as a barcode scanner and catalog on the fly also makes me wonder if a tool like this could be used while shelf reading or at point of acquisition of a text, or at a circulation desk when working with a book without a record.

One benefit of this work as well, is that since this code is being written in C#, I’m starting to think about how I might co-op some of this work in MarcEdit. The idea being that a user could upload a set of images to a folder and then MarcEdit could OCR those images and utilize the data from those images to automatically retrieve records for that content. I’m not quite sure how reasonable of an idea this really is at this point due to limitations with OCR, but from a technical standpoint, I have all the components I would need to make this happen. So who knows, maybe this work will spawn something new and innovative yet. Well see.

–tr

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): snapshot

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:22:08 +0000

It’s the norm for participants in Library Day in the Life to write brief introductions to their week ahead, so this morning I posted a list of libday8 cataloguers on hv cats and highlighted the UCL DIS students who have agreed to blog their library school week. Now I suppose I should say something about [...]

High Visibility Cataloguing: DCheros

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:36:07 +0000

Here’s a list of people with catalog(u)ing / metadata / systems roles who have signed up for Library Day in the Life Round 8. It’s a rough list, put together from the descriptions people gave on the libday wiki page supplemented by people who contacted us letting us know they were taking part. If you’re involved in something catalog(ue)-related and want to be added here and to our twitterlist, let us know.

If we’ve included you here and you don’t think we should have; let us know.

[Edited 8pm, Monday 30th Jan to add 3 more cataloguers]

Image: DC Hero Minifigs (most of them) by Julian Fong. Copyright Commons, some rights reserved.

habitually probing generalist: Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 03:56:34 +0000

The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (Princeton Classic Editions)

Mircea Eliade, M. Eliade; Princeton University Press 2005

WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

This is the 5th book that I have read for My Two-Thirds Book Challenge.

I stated at the end of my review of Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces that I hoped that this might be a good follow-up book to Campbell and I have to say that I think it was. It is certainly a different project than Campbell’s but it dovetails nicely.

Contents:

Introduction to the 2005 Edition by Jonathan Z. Smith
Foreword
Preface
Chap. 1: Archetypes and Repetition

§ The Problem
§ Celestial Archetypes of Territories, Temples, and Cities
§ The Symbolism of the Center
§ Repetition of the Cosmogony
§ Divine Models of Rituals
§ Archetypes of Profane Activities
§ Myths and History

Chap. 2: The Regeneration of Time

§ Year, New Year, Cosmogony
§ Periodicity of the Creation
§ Continuous Regeneration of Time

Chap. 3: Misfortune and History

§ Normality of Suffering
§ History Regarded as Theophany
§ Cosmic Cycles and History
§ Destiny and History

Ch. 4: The Terror of History

§ Survival of the Myth of Eternal Return
§ The Difficulties of Historicism
§ Freedom and History
§ Despair or Faith

Bibliography
Index

This is a fairly complicated book but I found it in no way tiresome to read, as I often did Campbell. Is it more “true” than Campbell? I don’t think we can ever know that but most of it is certainly plausible. My biggest concern, as it is in many areas, is can we really get into the head of archaic man? So many things were so different then than how they are, or have been for a good while, for any of us that can read (or could have written) this book.

The gist is a comparison of how primitive or archaic humans viewed history versus how historical man views history. For archaic human, Eliade claims, everything that mattered—that had meaning—was a repeat of an archetype of some previous event or action in ‘primordial’ time, and that these things were endlessly repeated as the world was, in fact, repeatedly re-created anew.

“The essential theme of my investigation bears on the image of himself formed by the man of the archaic societies and on the place he assumes in the Cosmos. The chief difference between the man of the archaic and traditional societies and the man of the modern societies with their strong imprint of Judaeo-Christianity lies in the fact that the former feels himself indissolubly connected with the Cosmos, whereas the latter insists that he is connected only with History. …” xxvii-xxviii

“The reader will remember that they [traditional civilizations] defended themselves against it [history], either by periodically abolishing it through repetition of the cosmogony and a periodic regeneration of time or by giving historical events a metahistorical meaning, a meaning that was not only consoling but was above all coherent, that is, capable of being fitted into a well-consolidated system in which the cosmos and man’s existence had each its raison d’être.” 142

The Hebrews, with their faith in Yahweh and their interpretation of events being a manifestation of His will, gave us ‘history.’ This view evolves over time, eventually leading to historicism.

“Thus, for the first time, the [Hebrew] prophets placed a value on history, succeeded in transcending the traditional vision of the cycle (the conception that ensure all things will be repeated forever), and discovered a one-way time. This discovery was not to be immediately and fully accepted by the consciousness of the entire Jewish people, and the ancient conceptions were still long to survive.” 104

“It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God, and this conception, as we should expect, was taken up and amplified by Christianity.

We may even ask ourselves if monotheism, based upon the direct and personal revelation of the divinity, does not necessarily entail the “salvation” of time, its value within the frame of history.” 104

“From the seventeenth century on, linearism and the progressivistic conception of history assert themselves more and more, inaugurating faith in an infinite progress, a faith already proclaimed by Leibniz, predominant in the century of “enlightenment,” and popularized in the nineteenth century by the triumph of the ideas of the evolutionists. We must wait until our own century to see the beginnings of certain new reactions against this historical linearism and a certain revival of interest in the theory of cycles; …” 145-46

The problem for modern man is one of existentialism, although that term is never used. It is, though, described in the text in places.

“For our purpose, only one question concerns us: How can the “terror of history” be tolerated from the viewpoint of historicism? Justification of a historical event by the simple fact that it is a historical event, in other words, by the simple fact that it “happened that way,” will not go far toward freeing humanity from the terror that the event inspires.” 150

What is interesting, and Eliade points towards it even in 1949, is that there is a nostalgia, a return even, towards the archaic view of history.

“Some pages earlier, we noted various recent orientations that tend to reconfer value upon the myth of cyclical periodicity, even the myth of eternal return. … …, it is worth noting that the work of two of the most significant writers of our day–T. S. Eliot and James Joyce–is saturated with nostalgia for the myth of eternal repetition and, in the last analysis, for the abolition of time.” 153

I think this kind of thinking is also reflected in the current interest in the Mayan calendar and 2012, in various forms of magical thinking like that involved in the Singularity, and other views and ideas floating around in early 21st-century consumer culture. I would really love to have Eliade’s take on this.

Eliade’s analysis leads him to claim that Christianity is the answer modern man has arrived at to combat the “terror of history.”

“But we are able to observe here and now that such a position [historicist] affords a shelter from the terror of history only insofar as it postulates the existence at least of the Universal Spirit. What consolation should we find in knowing that the sufferings of millions of men have made possible the revelation of a limitary situation of the human condition if, beyond that limitary situation, there should be only nothingness?” 159-60

“In this respect, Christianity incontestibly proves to be the religion of “fallen man”: and this to the extent which modern man is irremediably identified with history and progress, and to which history and progress are a fall, both implying the final abandonment of the paradise of archetypes and repetition.” 162

Personally, this leaves me unsatisfied. I am not sure that this is simply an objective (or as objective as possible) analysis or whether it is the answer Eliade wanted. Throughout most of the book, and even in the final clause above [the final sentence of the book], he seems to be more positively drawn towards the archaic human view than that of the modern, historical human.

I wonder whether the existential crisis is not simply overstated here, as it is in many places. Or perhaps it was more of a crisis when this book was written; it was certainly more of a ‘movement’ then than now. Perhaps 21st-century humans, at least those of us living our lives in our blogs and on twitter and so on, are simply too busy to feel the ‘crisis’ as deeply.

Something from the foreword which I fully agree would be a good thing:

“Our chief intent has been to set forth certain governing lines of force in the speculative field of archaic societies. It seemed to us that a simple presentation of this field would not be without interest, especially for the philosopher accustomed to finding his problems and the mean of solving them in the texts of classic philosophy or in the spiritual history of the West. With us, it is an old conviction that Western philosophy is dangerously close to “provincializing” itself … by its obstinate refusal to recognize any “situations” except those of the man of the historical civilizations, in defiance of the experience of “primitive” man, of man as a member of the traditional societies. … Better yet: that the cardinal problems of metaphysics could be renewed through a knowledge of archaic ontology.” xxiv

There are some interesting comments in a couple of places regarding the views of the elites (particularly the educated/intellectual elite) vs. the common person that I found intriguing, and that speak to related issues of today.

I imagine that I will revisit this work in the future. I am not entirely sure I understood everything Eliade claims; in fact, I know I didn’t. Another read might not fully solve that issue but it would help immensely I imagine. And I do think some interesting work on current culture could be done with the framework he has outlined here.

Recommended.

First thus: Considerations on Linked Data (Was: Showing birth and death dates)

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:57:29 +0000

Posting to RDA-L

On 27/01/2012 22:47, Tillett, Barbara wrote:

<snip>
ISBD came out of the card catalog environment and was a tremendous tool when we were exchanging bibliographic records. We are no longer exchanging catalog cards. "Exchange" is being replaced by "re-use" of data in environments that can access a shared database (think of the way many of us use OCLC or SkyRiver). We are moving on to accessing records in shared datastores or through web services in the cloud, hopefully saving a lot of time and effort of catalogers by sharing the workload to create descriptions that can be augmented over time and maybe eventually eliminate the need for our multiple, redundant, local databases.

Even better will be when we can move beyond MARC and use linked data with URLs to identify entities and then display whatever language/script the user wants. We have seen the proof of that concept with VIAF-the Virtual International Authority File.
</snip>

This is a nice view of one possible future, but I do not see how this makes any difference with using "1978-" or "born 1978". I agree with an earlier post that stated the difference is more or less pointless. So if it's pointless, why change practices from what we have now? It only adds to complexity since people will be seeing "1978-" for a long, long time, just as they will be seeing [s.l.], [s.n.], [et al.] and so on forever because the abbreviations in the old records will never, ever change. At least I hope they won't be changed since projects to change those abbreviations would be the biggest waste of cataloging resources I could imagine, even after the economic environment improves. (I have mentioned before that it is a rather simple task to program the computer to render these abbreviations however we want automatically--so long as they are input consistently. Once the consistency goes away, it becomes much harder)

Abbreviations are some of the simplest parts of our catalogs. If people really do have such problems with abbreviations (and I have never seen any research demonstrating it), how are these same people handling the hard parts of our catalogs, such as subject access? Perhaps improving the harder parts of the catalog would have a greater impact on the public.

But concerning linked data:
Accessing bits and pieces of bibliographic records in the cloud using URIs may be a good idea, or maybe not. Eliminating the need for multiple, redundant local databases may also be a good idea, or maybe not. There are many questions that would need to be decided before entering on such an arrangement. One of the most critical involves intellectual property. I think we all know that struggles over intellectual property are becoming more complicated and more intense as the internet grows and becomes more important in each person's life.

In a linked data universe, intellectual property rights become garbled, so it seems to me that if you rely on another agency for critical parts of your records, you may not "own" those parts. For example, in an FRBR universe, what if your work and expression parts come from another agency, and all that is local are your manifestation and item records? That other agency then has tremendous power over you, therefore the relationship would have to be made very, very clear, so that the agency you relied on didn't decide to suddenly shut you down, or say that they need a bunch of money from you. Or start telling you what you can and cannot do.

When I look at the famous diagram http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/, with dbpedia in the center of the linked data universe, it has occurred to me: what if dbpedia disappeared or started demanding money to continue operations?

And we shouldn't reply that nothing like that could ever happen, because we all know that it can. Many libraries (and librarians) have already been seriously burned by losing rights to scanned images of materials in their own collections--losing the rights to their own metadata would just be too ironic!

This is, or at least should be, such an important consideration, that I personally do not know if the linked data concept, although very nice and convenient in theory, is all that great once it is transferred into reality. I remain highly skeptical until this is resolved.

There are many other practical issues with linked data as well, but perhaps not quite so vital as this.

all things cataloged: saskiayave

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:51:17 +0000

Taking part in Code Year (JavaScript) and working with SQL, I find it helps to get a few principles and differences straight, especially for a beginner like me. First off, JavaScript is Turing-complete and SQL is not (not considering extensions like PL/SQL which implements e.g. loops and variables). Moreover, JavaScript is an imperative and SQL is a declarative programming language – in SQL I tell the program what it should do without having to tell it how to do it (here’s a nice explanation of this contrast). Basically, I focus on describing the result I want to see and leave the execution up to the inner workings of the RDBMS. As a query and data manipulation, i.e. domain-specific language, SQL requires knowledge of the data structures which are its basis.

Two more formal differences that spring to mind:

SQL is not case-sensitive

syntax is easier in SQL (no brackets and braces, which I got a bit confused about – color coding helps to clarify the blocks that need these “boundaries”)

The precision and abstraction skills gained from cataloging prove to be invaluable when tackling coding. I realize that logic as one of the paradigms of programming is creeping in more and more, so in the long run it probably won’t be possible to avoid that subject …

025.431: The Dewey blog: Abridged Edition 15 and DDC 23 Webinars

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:29:50 +0000

On 7 February, OCLC is hosting two thirty-minute free webinars on the new abridged and full editions of the DDC. Each webinar is being presented live twice to accommodate the Dewey worldwide user community. Rebecca Green will present “DDC Abridged 15 Sneak Preview” at 10:00 a.m. EST and 5:30 p.m. EST, and Julianne Beall will present “DDC 23 Update” at 11:00 a.m. EST and 6:30 p.m. EST. Please register for either or both webinars using the link to the desired time slot for each.

The presentations from the Dewey Breakfast/Update at the ALA Midwinter Meeting on 21 January are now available here.

The Bib Blog: RDA and Linked Data

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:22:37 +0000

It was announced today that the RDA terms for Content Type, Carrier Type, and Media Type have been published as open linked data in the Open Metadata Registry. The terms in these vocabularies have been “derived from the RDA/ONIX framework for resource categorization which established an extensible methodology for categorization of resources according to [...]

Catalogue & Index Blog: Metadata and Web 2.0 seminar, Fri 2nd March

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 15:06:00 +0000

CIG Scotland is delighted to be holding its 5^th annual Metadata and Web 2.0 seminar, once again exploring the relationship and use of metadata in the Web 2.0 environment. Following the success of previous years this event is likely to fill up quickly, so please book early.

When Friday 2^nd March 2012, 10:00-16.15

Where National Library of Scotland, Board Room, George IV Bridge, Edinburgh

How much £30 inc VAT (includes refreshments and sandwich lunch)

Once again we have an exciting mix of speakers covering a range of topics - see the draft programme below (schedule and titles may change)

Draft Programme

10.00 Registration and coffee

10.30 Use of Web 2.0 in Digital Research / Nora McGregor, British Library

11.15 Professional Tweeting for Cataloguers / Lynn Corrigan, Edinburgh Napier University

12.00 Social Media and National Libraries / Bryan Christie, National Library of Scotland
12.45 Lunch
13.45 Mobile Strategies for Libraries pt1 / Karen Stevenson and Kay Munro, Glasgow University

Mobile Strategies for Libraries pt2 / Martin Morrey, Edinburgh University

14.45 Use of Libguides in Academic Libraries / Vicki Cormie, St Andrews University

15.30 Developments in Web 2.0 / Nicola Osborne, Edina

16.15 Close

You can register for the event by contacting CIGS Secretary Colin Duncan at Colin.Duncan@inverclyde.gov.uk. Please indicate whether you wish to be invoiced or pay on the day, and include details of your organisation and invoice address if applicable, and a purchase order number if required by your institution.

Please check the Slainte events calendar for further details, including updates to the programme - http://www.slainte.org.uk/events/EvntCalendar.cfm

Catalogablog: Additions to Source Codes for Vocabularies, Rules, and Schemes

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:28:37 +0000

The source code listed below has been recently approved. The code will be added to the applicable Source Codes for Vocabularies, Rules, and Schemes list. See the specific source code list for current usage in MARC fields and MODS/MADS elements.

The code should not be used in exchange records until 60 days after the date of this notice to provide implementers time to include the newly-defined code in any validation tables. Subject Heading and Term Source Codes

The following source code has been added to the Subject Heading and Term Source Codes list for usage in appropriate fields and elements.

Addition:

collett: Collett-bibliografi: litteratur av og om Camilla Collett (Oslo: Nasjonalbiblioteket)

Catalogablog: Publication of RDA terms for Content, Carrier, Media type Vocabularies

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 09:23:57 +0000

Image by American Library Association Publishing via FlickrNews about RDA vocabularies.

The Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC), the DCMI Bibliographic Metadata Task Group (formerly DCMI/RDA Task Group), and ALA Publishing (on behalf of the co-publishers of RDA) are pleased to announce the publication of a second set of vocabulary terms as linked open data. The RDA Carrier Type, Content Type and Media Type vocabularies have been reviewed, approved, and their status in the Open Metadata Registry (OMR) changed to ‘published.’ The finished vocabularies can be viewed following the links from the terms above. (The links lead to the description of the vocabulary itself, the specific terms can be viewed under the tab for ‘concepts’).

Terms in the Content Type vocabulary refer to the intellectual or artistic content of a resource, such as text or notated music; terms in the Carrier Type vocabulary refer to the means and methods by which content is conveyed including volume, sheet, computer disk; terms in the Media Type vocabulary specify the general type of intermediation device (if any) required to view, play or run the content of a resource. These vocabularies are derived from the RDA/ONIX framework for resource categorization which established an extensible methodology for categorization of resources according to content and carrier.

025.431: The Dewey blog: The World Wide Web and Special-purpose computer systems

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:03:16 +0000

This is the fourth in a set of posts on changes in 004-006 Computer science in DDC 23. As a previous post noted, some of these changes were incorporated into the DDC in November 2008, but others were new with the publication of DDC 23 in print and in WebDewey 2.0. Here we specifically address changes involving the World Wide Web (WWW), in the context not only of 006.7 Multimedia systems, but also of the expansion for 025.042 World Wide Web under 025.04 Information storage and retrieval systems. An expansion in 006 Special computer methods will also be introduced.

Continuing technological advances lead classifiers to question where best to class specific new and/or evolving computer and information science topics. Sometimes the number for a topic is provided in the schedules through an expansion for the topic, so that the topic has its own number. Sometimes information on where to class a topic is provided in Manual notes; sometimes it is given in other types of notes, especially including- and class-here notes; sometimes it is reflected only in indexing, which may appear in the print Relative Index or may appear only in WebDewey. (Hint: the classifier may need to check all these sources to find if the schedule gives guidance on how to handle a specific topic. Absent such guidance, classifiers have been known sometimes to make surprising choices!)

The table below indicates where selected WWW-related topics are to be classed under 006.7 Multimedia systems, as designated in DDC 23 through various of the means listed above:

Topic	Class number	How designated
Information architecture	006.7 Multimedia systems	In class-here note
Web page design
Web site development
Style sheet languages	006.74 Markup languages	In class-here note
Wikis	006.75 Specific types of multimedia systems	In including note at expansion (expansion from 006.7 introduced in 2008)
Blogs	006.752 Blogs	Expansion
Online social networks	006.754 Online social networks	Expansion
Web application frameworks	006.76 Programming	In class-here note
Rich Internet applications	006.78 Programs	In including note
Web services	006.78 Programs	In including note

The following are examples of works on these topics:

Title	Class number
Information architecture for the World Wide Web	006.7
The Web designer's idea book	006.7
The zen of CSS design: visual enlightenment for the web	006.74
The complete guide to wikis: how to set up, use, and benefit from wikis for teachers, business professionals, families, and friends	006.75
David Busch's quick snap guide to photoblogging with Wordpress: an instant start-up manual for creating and promoting your own photoblog	006.752
The complete idiot's guide to Facebook	006.754
Enabling context-aware web services: methods, architectures, and technologies	006.78

While all of the topics above are WWW-related, the interdisciplinary number for the World Wide Web is not in 006.7, but in 025.04. The Manual note at 004.678 vs. 006.7, 025.042, 384.33 gives guidance on which aspects of the web are classed in these several places. With regard to the numbers we have just looked at, it says: “Use 006.7 for general works about the use of HTML and XML to create hypertext documents on the World Wide Web, and works that discuss web page design or effective web pages.” The types of works which ought to be classed under 006.7 typically are works on the conceptual design of web sites and pages or works on the use of software that enable web operations.

Interdisciplinary works on the World Wide Web have been relocated from 004.678 Internet (where interdisciplinary works on the Internet remain) to the recently expanded 025.042 World Wide Web. The Manual note referenced above goes on to say that 025.042 is to be used for works “that emphasize search and retrieval” on the web, plus “works that describe information resources available on the Internet or WWW, or on how to find information there.”

The basic development under 025.042 is as follows:

025.042 World Wide Web (“Class here digital libraries, Internet literacy;” Web2.0 has been added as an index term displaying only in WebDewey, i.e., not in print)

025.0422 Web sites (“Class here directories of web sites, portals”)

025.0425 Search and retrieval (“Class here Internet searching“)

025.04252 Search engines

025.0427 Semantic web (the Relative Index term Resource Description Framework has been moved here; previously it had been assigned to 006.74)

The following are examples of works on these topics:

Title	Class number
Participative Web and user-created content: Web 2.0, wikis and social networking	025.042
Web portals: the new gateways to Internet information and services	025.0422
The extreme searcher's Internet handbook: a guide for the serious searcher	025.0425
The Semantic Web for knowledge and data management technologies and practices	025.0427

The final development to introduce is an expansion under 006.2 Special-purpose systems, where we now have:

006.2 Special-purpose systems

006.22 Embedded computer systems [formerly 004.1]

006.24 Automatic identification and data capture (AIDC) (“Including magnetic stripe encoding”)

(See references lead to numbers for optical character recognition, speaker recognition, and biometric identification.)

006.242 Bar coding [formerly 006.42]

006.245 Radio frequency identification

006.246 Smart cards

By establishing classes for special-purpose systems and, under it, for automatic identification and data capture, we have provided a better organization for topics—embedded computer systems, bar coding—that had previously been classed less felicitously elsewhere.

The following are examples of works on these topics:

Title	Class number
Real-time embedded systems: optimization, synthesis, and networking	006.22
Scan me : everybody's guide to the magical world of QR codes-- barcodes, mobile devices and hyperlinking the real to the virtual	006.242
RFID: radio frequency identification	006.245
Multi-application smart cards: technology and applications	006.246

New developments in 004-006 will continue indefinitely as new technologies, both new products and services, are created and more established technologies evolve. But for the time being, this and the previous posts on developments in 004-006 in DDC 23 are a snapshot of significant changes in the past several years. You can find the other posts by following these links:

Computer programming, programs, and data

Networking and computer communications

Computer hardware and storage

Catalogue & Index Blog: Catalogue & Index - call for papers

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:36:00 +0000

Issue 166 of Catalogue & Index will look back at two recent CIG events, on re-classification and on shelf-ready, including some of the papers presented on those days and also other papers on the same themes. If you have experience on either topic that you would like to share, do please get in touch with the editors, Heather Jardine (email: heatherjardine402@hotmail.com) or Cathy Broad (email: library@ethicalsoc.org.uk).

We would love to hear from you!

Three Catalogers Walk Into a Blog: orange-book1

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 14:57:27 +0000

In case you missed the update from the Dewey Blog (or ignored it because there were no pretty pictures)…There are new icons appearing in the WebDewey search results.

Built numbers are represented by a puzzle piece icon.

Manual notes are represented by a book icon.

Both types of icons are included in search results. For example, the search results for a search on 005.3 include the Manual note 005.3 (identified with the book icon) and the built number 005.3742 (identified with the puzzle piece icon). The puzzle piece icon also is used to identify built numbers in browse results. On the individual record display screen, the Manual icon appears next to the number and caption for the Manual note (for example, look at the Manual note for 005.3). In hierarchical displays for built numbers, the puzzle piece icon can appear anywhere in the hierarchical display for the number. For example, display the record for 338.47004 Computer industry. In the hierarchical display, the built number icon appears next to 338.47004, and also next to two built numbers in the downward hierarchy, 338.4700411 and 338.470046. (If you don’t see the icons associated with the aforementioned examples, it may be because relevant information has been cached in your browser. If you want to see the icons immediately and do not want to wait until the cache is refreshed, you can press <ctrl> + <F5> inside a WebDewey screen associated with one of the examples, which will cause your browser to reload the cached information.)

Thanks to A Portal to my Cataloging Aids and the Dewey Blog

First thus: Re: Harvard Technical Services layoffs

noreply@blogger.com (James Weinheimer) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:39:21 +0000

Posting to Autocat

On 1/25/2012 6:44 PM, Billie Hackney wrote:

<snip>
I have been surprised that no one has yet remarked on the articles about Technical Services areas at Harvard being targeted for layoff. Does anyone have any further information?

Feral Librarian: "What's Happening at Harvard?" (Jan. 19) Link: http://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/2012/01/19/whats-happening-at-harvard/

LJ article: "After Furor, Harvard Library Spokesperson says 'inaccurate' that all staff will have to reapply" (Jan. 19) Link: http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/01/academic-libraries/after-furor-harvard-library-spokesperson-says-inaccurate-that-all-staff-will-have-to-reapply/

Article in The Crimson: No Layoffs for Harvard Libraries, yesterday: Link: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/1/24/Harvard-no-layoffs-library-HUCTW-SLAM-Labor/
</snip>

I would like to add another link to these, in the Daily Kos, no less: "The Great Librarian Massacre of 2012": a cataloging librarian's view
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/20/1056635/-The-Great-Librarian-Massacre-of-2012:-a-cataloging-librarians-view

The news about Harvard shows that even the greatest libraries are unable to escape the changes that the rest of the information world is experiencing.

For my own opinion, this news makes me question once again, whether instituting RDA is such a great idea, especially in the current climate. The costs and general disruption will have serious impacts on catalogers, on other librarians and on libraries in general, from the smallest to the largest, and these impacts should not at all be discounted or ignored. When faced with fundamental problems of just maintaining current services, how are cataloging managers supposed to argue for the nebulous "advantages" we will supposedly get from RDA? What advantages will the manager be able to point to? Not additional copy records, not records that are simpler for catalogers to create, nor a catalog that is easier for the public to use. What is the responsible decision?

While I admit that there are immense problems with traditional library cataloging, and have discussed them at some length in previous posts, I still do not see how RDA solves any of them. "Cataloging reconsidered" does offer many solutions to problems of information management and retrieval--this I sincerely believe, and there should be an important place at the "solutions table" for catalogers but it will take some radical re-thinking for all involved.

It is hard to say how all of this will turn out.

Catalogablog: Cute Catalog

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 10:23:59 +0000

The 1st operational eXtensible catalog is Cute.Catalog at Kyushu University Library.

Cute.Catalog completely covers the bibliographic information of academic resources in Kyushu University which contain not only library holdings but also research output produced by Kyushu University researchers.

Cute.Catalog http://catalog.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/en

Cute.Catalog includes:
Research Outputs by Kyushu University Researchers: 250 thousands
Library Holdings of Printed Materials in Kyushu University Bibliographies: 1.6 million, Holdings 4 million
Accessible e-Journals: 51 thousands, e-Books: 53 thousands
Institutional Repository records: 17 thousands
Digital Collection: 10 thousands
Key enhanced features are:
advanced search
online link with 360 Link XML API
put a label of institutional production
social links and exporting features and more...

Planet Cataloging

Catalogue & Index Blog: Visit to Thackray Museum, Leeds, on Tuesday 21st February 2012

mod librarian: Metadata Monday: A Book About Tagging

Catalogablog: LCGFT for Moving Images: Best Practices

all things cataloged: saskiayave

habitually probing generalist: Two-Thirds Book Challenge Update 4

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Big data .. big trend

Metadata: This Blog is Splitting Into Two

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): marketing

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): #libday8 - Plantin-Moretus Museum

Catalogablog: Code{4}lib Journal

Work and Expression: citybibs

The Cataloguing Librarian: Laurie Tarulli

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): 02-02.University

schenizzle: gugek

Catalogue & Index Blog: CILIP's Body of Professional Knowledge - your views needed.

Metalogger: The Battle Has Begun

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): #libday8 - bindings information

Bibliographic Wilderness: Forcing a one column page in Blacklight 3.2

A portal to my Cataloguing Aids website: ebook readers

TSLL TechScans: LITA/ALCTS MARC Formats Interest Group slides from Midwinter available

Catalogue & Index Blog: DVD cataloguing - can you help?

Bibliographic Wilderness: Alan Lomax archives to be digitized and made open access

Catalogablog: Metadata Harvested

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First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): Screen shot 2012-01-31 at 22.56.42

Catalogablog: MARCXML to MODS 3.4 XSLT (Revision 1.75)

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First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): #libday8 Cataloguing Examples

Catalogablog: VuFind 1.3 Released

Various librarian-like stuff: carolslib

mod librarian: Metadata Monday: Is Pinterest Crowdsourcing Data?

First thus: Re: Considerations on Linked Data (Was: Showing birth and death dates)

Work and Expression: citybibs

Various librarian-like stuff: carolslib

Terry's Worklog: Proof of concept redux

First Person Narrative (Anne Welsh): snapshot

High Visibility Cataloguing: DCheros

habitually probing generalist: Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return

First thus: Considerations on Linked Data (Was: Showing birth and death dates)

all things cataloged: saskiayave

025.431: The Dewey blog: Abridged Edition 15 and DDC 23 Webinars

The Bib Blog: RDA and Linked Data

Catalogue & Index Blog: Metadata and Web 2.0 seminar, Fri 2nd March

Catalogablog: Additions to Source Codes for Vocabularies, Rules, and Schemes

Catalogablog: Publication of RDA terms for Content, Carrier, Media type Vocabularies

Related articles

025.431: The Dewey blog: The World Wide Web and Special-purpose computer systems

Catalogue & Index Blog: Catalogue & Index - call for papers

Three Catalogers Walk Into a Blog: orange-book1

First thus: Re: Harvard Technical Services layoffs

Catalogablog: Cute Catalog