Planet Cataloging

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Book covers and Piclens

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:31:20 +0000

The recent discussion of book covers as interface components on the ngc4lib list provides an opportunity to mention PicLens, a utility that is has been creating a lot of interest recently.

According to its creators, CoolIris, PicLens provides an "immersive full-screen experience for viewing photos and videos". It is available as a browser plugin, and there are also some other options. There are guidelines for webmasters who want their sites to be available for the PicLens experience.

I have used it for a while now and find it very convenient for moving quickly through groups of images. It has some nice other features, including a recently added 'discover' feature which allows you to search image sources on the web and display the results within the PicLens environment.

So, two notes about PicLens and book covers. First, I was interested to see this note from Mark Dahl a while ago:

Jeremy recently made a couple of our sites, Watzek New Additions and accessCeramics, PicLens compatible. The new additions browsing is pretty cool. It lets you scan through images of book jackets.

Basically, this requires search results to be in a format called media RSS. [synthesize-specialize-mobilize: PicLens]

Second, it is possible to search Amazon through the discover feature I mention above and the book covers are displayed as a result and again can be manipulated in the PicLens environment. Some details about each book are also visible.

Useful? I don't know ;-) The Barbara Pym covers are pretty nice though .....

Note: although it is possible to search Amazon from within PicLens, Amazon itself does not appear to be enabled for users who have the PicLens addon installed.

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025.431: The Dewey blog: Model railroading

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:09:36 +0000

Recently I spent a few days with my younger brother, Joe, an avid model railroader. Our Saturday morning entertainment consisted of a twelve-hour period, compressed—thanks to the use of a 4:1 fast clock—into three hours, operating On3 scale model trains; the setting was a 18’ x 27’ room in Dave Adams’ home, with his 1930s-era D&RGW (Denver & Rio Grande Western Railway) Durlin Branch layout. (Less formal version: We ran model electric trains around a big room with a bunch of other model railroaders, who are all really nice guys.). Since I can’t begin to describe how fun this was (and I was prepared to be bored), you should just see for yourself here (brother Joe is playing dispatcher in the next-to-last picture on the third row; nephew Joshua is servicing his engine at a water stop in the next-to-last picture of the first row,) and read for yourself here.

Comprehensive works on play with all types of model railroads and trains are classed in 790.133 Play with toys, where electric trains are mentioned specifically in an including note. However, the literature here is minimal—if you have to be told how to play with a model railroad, you might consider using your time some other way! Indeed, most uses of this number for railroads and trains are either for catalogs (e.g., Gilbert American Flyer Trains: Fun & thrills), multimedia (e.g., Trainz railroad simulator 2004), or the toys themselves (e.g., Stacking train; but note that these toy trains are not the electric variety!).

The “serious” literature on model railways and trains is classed in subdivisions of 625 Engineering of railroads. For example, The model locomotive from scratch is classed at 625.1961 Models of steam locomotives (built with 625.19 Model and miniature railroads and trains, plus 61 from 625.261 Steam locomotives, following instructions at 625.19); it should be noted that 625.19 is a displacement from 625[.100228]. Models and miniatures of a specific kind of special-purpose railroad are drawn off from 625.19 to 625.3-625.6; for example, Scale model electric tramways—and how to model them is classed in 625.60228 Models of surface rail and trolley systems (built with 625.6 Surface rail and trolley systems, plus T1—0228 Models and miniatures).

Outgoing: Identities timeline

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:55:29 +0000

I've spent a couple of days trying out the Simile project's Timeline JavaScript widget. This was partly inspired by looking at the Zoomii interface and being impressed with what can be done with JavaScript. The Timeline widget ingests a data file representing events and displays them on a time line which can be scrolled through horizontally. My first timeline is still a bit rough, but since I'm not sure how much further we will take it, I thought it was worth sharing.

The timeline shows the top 1,000 people in WorldCat Identities (by number of library holdings) plotted according to the first date that Identities has associated with each name. Sometimes that is a birth date, other times just the first publication date associated with them. It always seems to be the case that whenever you display information in a new way, anomalies in the data that were hidden now become apparent. I've noticed a few in the timeline, but will resist the urge to point them out here. Incorporating more of the information from the Virtual International Authority File would help, since it has more complete date information.

Simile Timeline is quite flexible. I was able to add a condensed scrollable view at the bottom of the page, as well as expand 1770-1980 to display by year while the rest of the timeline is by decade. I started out trying to use the code in the subversion repository, but since all the documentation is for older code, ended up using the older JavaScript code hosted at MIT.

Scaling this up to handling more than a thousand Identities looks difficult. Even at this size the scrolling is uneven on many workstations, and more names make the problem worse. My original hope was to have tens of thousands of names, but that doesn't seem practical right now.

--Th

Metadata Blog (ALCTS NRMIG): ALCTS CCS Catalog Management Discussion Group

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:49:48 +0000

Saturday, June 28, 1:30-3:00

The Single-Record Approach for E-books
Philip Young
Catalog Librarian, University Libraries at Virginia Tech
Link to presentation: http://presentations.ala.org/index.php?title=Image:singleRecord.ppt

Adding links to print records is often the practical course taken by libraries when batch records are unavailable and a large number of ebooks (either from vendors or locally digitized) must be cataloged. Such a project occurred at Virginia Tech for a set of ebooks in which links were globally added to print records, after careful consideration of the alternatives (no batch records were available).

He cited some cataloging rules which allow this practice. Institutions such as GPO, NLM, UC, Brown have been using the single record option. The advantages include that it's expedient, preferred by patrons and many librarians, improved access points on collection-level records. However, the disadvantages are that a mixed practice exists in the catalog with record loads, difficulty with standard # matching, and FRBR incompatibility.

He listed factors to be considered in decision-making, such as:
* Equivalent manifestations
* Same publisher
* No batches of MARC records available
* ILS capability (includes consortial considerations)
* Time of staff (if originals needed)

Impact of Vendor Records on the Catalog
Lai-Ying Hsiung
Head of Technical Services, University Library
University of California, Santa Cruz

The speaker started out the talk asking whether we feel in control with these record loads. She then went on to give a presentation dense with information (selected highlights follow).

Why do we load vendor records? To do more with less (due to shrinking budgets), provide timely access to patrons, avoid redundancy in catalog management, and the changing bib control landscape. With the advent of one stop shopping, many of these records might provide good-enough cataloging. The LCWG recommended we make use of bibliographic data earlier in the supply chain (e.g., publishers).

She then described some possible reasons for problems and quality issues of these records. They include incomplete or inaccurate data, lack of authority control, and different cataloging standards.

There is a current problem with duplicate records in OCLC as brief MARC is mixed with full, and also proliferation of multiple separate records for different platforms. All this slows down identification, hinders retrieval, and complicates copy cataloging workflow.

Waiting for another library to catalog or upgrade a title also slows down access and processing. Similarly, if a record upgrades locally, beneficial changes may not be reflected in Worldcat.

She covered ways that OCLC can help, such as by facilitating easier upgrading by member libraries and providing incentives to vendors to contribute full MARC records. Vendors can be helped by providing cataloging training and encouraging them to enrich their records with value-added services, such as table of contents. Finally, libraries can be helped by granting more of them enhance status and allowing re-loads of vendor records into OCLC.

Many record loads are problematic because they are not in Worldcat, and Worldcat Local only searches the holdings in Worldcat. The contract with many ebook vendors prevent libraries from loading their records in Worldcat. UCSC is planning to move to a network level and implement Worldcat Local.

Aggregator-neutral records have already been approved for serials, and most recently, for integrating resources. Discussions of aggregator-neutral ebooks are already occurring and will likely become a standard.

Temporary Employees: Managing Practicum, Internship and Volunteer Experiences in Technical Services Unit
Margaret Mauer
Associate Professor, Head, Catalog & Metadata
Kent State University Libraries and Media Services
Link to presentation: http://www.personal.kent.edu/~mbmaurer

Kent State has been hosting practicum, graduate student assistants, and volunteers for 10 years. National trends that support the use of students include diminishing financial support for libraries (and thus technical services), less "junior" cataloging positions, and decreasing availability of cataloging courses. The students' often enthusiastic presence does change the tone of the workplace.

It helps to think of them as very temporary employees. You have to consider how to maximize the benefit while minimizing the cost to your department. For example, even though the standard practicum only requires 100 hours, the Cataloging Department requires 150 hours to recover the investment in training. Also, they used to assign them special projects, but have found that works best is to separate the opportunities into 2 tracks: copy cataloging and original cataloging. They write job descriptions for each position. Training material is re-used from semester to semester. They also establish a limit of face-to-face training (for example, 25 hours for copy cat), since constantly answering questions can become a real time-sink. They've found it's best to have a standard workspace as well as a webpage of resources just for the students.

They conduct exit interviews with the students and also provide them with a survey to evaluate the program with 5 or 6 questions. This procedure has provided some valuable feedback that has been used to improve the program.

The benefits include opportunity to do quality control and freeing staff from repetitive work, as well as the additional manpower. In the long run, they are also helping the cataloging profession since some of the students have begun to make professional contributions.

Notes by Mary Aycock

Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog): Future of Cataloging

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:06:03 +0000

Part one. Part two is here.

On Sunday I participated in the ALA panel Creating the Future of the Catalog and Cataloging. My panel-mates were Diane Hillmann, Jennifer Bowen, Roy Tennant and Martha Yee. Robert Wolven moderated.

The whole panel was four hours long, with brief presentations by each of us and a lot of conversation. I recorded almost all of it, but the quality is very poor and I'd need everyone's permission—including the questioners—to put it up. I can, however, put up my presentation. I had do re-record the screencasting part, which therefore isn't click-perfect.

The second part is here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=hD2plk4vT3Y&feature=related.

Reading the Book. As usual, I neglected to underline just what all my evidence demonstrated, expecting the evidence to speak for itself. Thus my point in mentioning my wife's book's wrong LCSH's was to point out that, while expert training is certainly valuable, the untrained taggers on LibraryThing often exceed the trained expert in having actually read the book. I should add that I say this to emphasize one way in which tagging is good, not to attack catalogers who have insisted, quite rightly, that they don't have time to read the book, and aren't being lazy or slapdash.

As you can imagine, this observation of mine has got me into some hot water. But I think it deserves saying, particularly as, despite all the discussions of cataloging vs. tagging out there, I have never seen this point mentioned.

To press my luck a bit, I'd also like to note that it sets the professional classification-vs.-tagging argument apart from similar arguments in related fields, e.g., real journalists vs. citizen journalists, real dentists vs. your dad with some string and a doorknob, etc.

But there's an easy retort here too. Once cataloging is fully distributed—with librarians around the country able to take part—we can certainly imagine a future where, in addition to everyone else, at least one qualified, degreed library professional has also read the book and classified it. Wouldn't that be the best of both worlds?

If I get some time—in short supply after letting emails pile up for a week!—I'll blog about the panel in general. Despite its topic and length, it was very well attended—the police actually removed people from the room for overcrowding! And it spurred a lot of people to come by the LibraryThing booth to congratulate me or take me up on some point or another.

Incidentally, I forgot to name Jeremy Dibbell, who heads up Legacy Libraries now, and I referred to him as an archivist, not a librarian. I do my talks ad lib and make such mistakes. Mea Culpa!

Catalogablog: eXtensible Catalog & Koha

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:37:00 +0000

News from LibLime about Koha and the eXtensible Catalog.

LibLime, the leader in open-source solutions for libraries and the eXtensible Catalog (XC) project-- an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project currently underway at the University of Rochester's River Campus Libraries-- have announced a new partnership agreement to ensure future compatibility between the XC project and Koha, the first open-source integrated library system.
The XC/LibLime partnership will ensure that the open-source software being developed as part of the XC project and the Koha open-source integrated library system will be fully compatible with each other, enabling current and future users of Koha to take advantage of the added capabilities for managing and distributing metadata that XC will offer. These benefits include facilitating the ability to combine legacy metadata with emerging schemas, and delivering library content to web content management and learning management systems.

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Research Repository Systems

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:34:23 +0000

Chris Rusbridge writes about Research Repository Systems:

I promised to be more specific about what I would like to see in repositories that presented more value for less work overall, by offering facilities that allow it to become part of the researcher’s workflow. I’m going to refer to this as “the Research Repository System (RRS)” for convenience. [Digital Curation Blog]

He discusses seven facilities ...

web orientation
researcher identity management
authoring support
object disclosure control
data management support
persistent storage
full preservation archive, and
spinoffs
[Digital Curation Blog]

There is a summary picture.

I was interested to see Chris mention CRIS (Current Research Information System), something I have seen more mention of in Europe than in the US.

Related entries:

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Metadata Blog (ALCTS NRMIG): NRMIG Meeting at ALA Annual, Sunday June 28, 2008, 8-10 AM

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:28:04 +0000

The first half of the Networked Resources and Metadata Interest Group meeting was a discussion of competencies for metadata librarians, which was generated by Erin Stahlberg earlier in the year. The full discussion questions are listed here.

Leading the Discussion
Erin Stahlberg, Head of Metadata and Cataloging, North Carolina State University
Christopher Cronin, Head of Digital Resources and Cataloging at University of Colorado, Boulder
Elaine Westbrook,, Head of Metadata Services, Cornell University
MJ Han, Metadata Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Moderated by Louise Ratliff, Librarian, Cataloging and Metadata Center, University of Calafornia-Los Angeles

Christopher performed a demographic survey of the room:
• Almost all academic librarians, mostly with the title of metadata librarian, but also some catalogers and IT people
• One person from EBSCO publishing

Below are a list of questions that were asked in the course of discussion with answers from participants. If specific to an institution, the answer includes the name of that institution.

Question 1: What are the IT competencies for metadata librarians?
• Metadata librarians should know XML.
• Relational database design: may not have to be an Oracle programmer, but should understand the structure, and be able to form queries
• Be able to do data modeling
• Have traditional cataloging skills as well as database, XML, XSLT skills
• Maybe cannot do all of the computer programming, but should be able to read programs and know what they do. Basically, have the ability to speak the language.
• Perl scripting
• Cataloging background no longer as important, but need to help catalogers move from the MARC environment to the non-MARC environment

Question 2: Is it possible to find all of these things in a single person?
• Every institution has different needs: might need to hire a metadata librarian, a digital projects librarian and systems librarian.
• Have guidelines for competencies but having hard and fast rules would be too limiting.
• Metadata librarians have to specialized, but not insular. Having background in cataloging and description is very important, as well as understanding programming, but maybe not be hardcore programmers.
• Need to justify what a metadata librarian is, sometimes job descriptions are just changes of names, not really changes in position descriptions. Metadata librarian description seems to be more theoretical than tangible.
• At the same time, there’s an importance in name change from the administrative point of view. "Cataloging" may end up disappearing from department names. In terms of changing the organizational culture, changing a name may be the first step. Names have power.

Question 3: How do we teach IT competencies in library school?
• It’s hard to keep up with changing technologies so having people willing to learn becomes extremely important.
• Library schools don’t train people in cataloging competencies either.
• It’s not easy to find clear set of competencies, but determining them will push learning opportunities and skill sets to the forefront. There should be more opportunities to get such teaching into library school programs and give people more opportunities to learn and take advantages of their capabilities.
• Need to set up good practical applications and experiences, to give people some perspective.

Question 4: How do institutions handle this the need for technical support if they don’t have the luxury of programming in metadata services?
• Even if you have have tech support in your unit, it may not be enough. Have your programmer train people in specific programs: XSLT, Perl, take advantage of skills and spread them around.
• At Cornell: programmers originally in the Metadata Services unit went to the Digital Library Group. Now Metadata Services uses graduate students and interested undergraduate students for support. To keep these positions, they have written grants, but then are stuck in grant/soft money model. If grant money were to dry up, it would be a challenge to keep the position. Grants come from:
o Mellon Grant
o Also looking for NSF money, IMLS
• At another library, a project transforming metadata from DSpace to Voyager and OCLC hired computer science programmer to help modify the stylesheet and used MarcEdit toolkit to do the transformation. Understanding database foundations was beneficial to know how data works to be able to work with the programmer.
• Univ. of Minnesota: hidden source of soft IT support: the database team for the ILS. Able to talk to them about the large scale processes of scripting. They negotiate with central IT for some things, library IT for others.

Question 5: Should a metadata librarian be in tech services, special collections/archives, IT, digital projects, or somewhere else?
• Most discussion participants were in tech services.
• At Johns Hopkins, former metadata librarian lobbied to move metadata librarian position out of tech services, but failed in effort. However, the digital libraries program is hiring its own metadata librarian. Maybe there’s a feeling from the systems side that metadata librarians don’t know as much about systems because they are in tech services.
• At Brown: position is a half time music cataloger and half time metadata librarian. Metadata librarian is also part of Center for Digital Initiatives. A lot of programming is from other people in the Center for Digital Initiatives.
• Where to place metadata librarian probably depends on what the specific responsibilities are of that person. If the library wants to separate metadata from the catalog, maybe it's fine to separate metadata librarian.
• Clarmount Colleges Digital Library: duties are creating metadata for digital projects, but also creating MARC records to go into the catalog, so there is training within tech services to have more people to take on to metadata.
• If metadata is removed from cataloging, a lot of experience and expertise can be lost. Metadata work is an excellent opportunity to stretch catalogers with additional intellectual work.
• Metadata coordinators can be in any department as their job is to make sure that people are talking to each other.
• UC-Santa Barbara is hiring a new metadata library and is looking for a feral professional: someone who crosses all lines and can move across the structure of the library.
• UCLA: have Digital Library and Cataloging and Metadata Center. Digital library does programming, scopes the projects, writes the grants, catalogers will advise on kinds of metadata elements, so there is a lot of coordination between them.
• Cornell: politically it was important for metadata librarian to be located in Tech Services. Metadata Services has more opportunities for collaboration when in Tech Services. For example, the institutional repository was able to work with catalogers to learn how to harvest from the institutional repository.
• Univ. of Kansas: want to see metadata in Cataloging, and the more involvement across the libraries, the better. The libraries must rely on central campus IT for all technical support, and don’t have a single person to work with, so it's absolutely imperative that people in the libraries have technical skills.
• Administration has to support no matter where located, to know that its okay across boundaries.

Question 6: How do we avoid turning people off from the jobs, if they’re not comfortable with some of the terminology in the position description?
• Put things in the preferred qualifications that would be nice for candidates to have, but don't put them in the required to leave more flexibility.
• Maybe not require MLS to broaden the pool.
• "Demonstrated interest in" – keep the candidate pool broad by encouraging people with interest but not necessarily lots of experience to apply.

Notes by Kristin Martin

Metadata Blog (ALCTS NRMIG): Survey for Challenges and Changes in Technical Services Division (TSD)

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:07:19 +0000

Myung-Ja (MJ) Han, Metadata Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is working on a survey to learn about how other catalog departments are handling changes in their cataloging department and the responsibilities of metadata librarians. Before sending out the survey, she is soliciting feedback on the survey questions. The draft of the survey is available below, and suggestions can be emailed to mhan3@uiuc.edu.

1. In what institution do you work?
a. Academic library
b. School library
c. Public library
d. Museum
e. Archives
f. Other: _______________________

2. Which units are involved in digital library development and production? (Please choose all that apply.)
a. Cataloging Unit
b. Information Technology (IT) or Systems Department
c. Preservation Department
d. Collection Development
e. Other (Please list the units.)________________________________

3. If your library or institution has a separate unit for digital library development and production, please answer the following questions:
• When (what year) did the unit get established?
• What is its organizational affiliation?

Part of Technical Services Division
Part of IT/Systems
Other (please give details.)

• How many staff are in the unit?
• Please list the types of position.

4. If Cataloging Unit participates in digital library development, what are its mains tasks? (Please choose all that apply.)
a. Metadata creation and management
b. Policy making (including Best Practices)
c. Consultation
d. Training staff who create/maintain metadata
e. Other (Please list the tasks.)______________________________________

5. How many Metadata Librarians (including Metadata/Cataloging Librarians) do you have in your institution? If you have any, when was the position created with the current title?

6. Which units does the metadata librarian(s) belong to? (Please choose all that apply.)
a. Cataloging
b. Digital Library unit
c. Shared between Cataloging and Digital Library unit
d. Other (please give details.)________________________________________

7. What are the main tasks of the metadata librarian(s)? (Please choose all that apply.)
a. MARC record creation
b. Non-MARC record creation (Descriptive, Technical, Administrative, and Preservation metadata)
c. Training
d. Creating Best Practices
e. Consulting
f. Metadata management including normalization and augmentation using style sheets
g. Other (Please list the tasks.)_______________________________________

8. How many people are involved in metadata creation and management other than Metadata/Cataloging Librarian(s)?

9. Do you have any IT personnel in Cataloging Unit?
If so, how many of them are full time and how many of them are part time?

10. What are the main tasks for them in Cataloging Unit?

11. What are the three most difficult challenges your Cataloging Unit has faced thus far? (For example, developing new workflows, dealing with new formats of material, lack of resources and etc.)

12. Please specify some of the changes your institution made to meet those challenges in the last three years.

13. What do you think your organization, Cataloging Unit in particular, need the most to meet those challenges?
a. Skilled staff
b. Best Practices and workflow
c. Funding
d. Re-organization
e. Other

Thank you so much!
*Please contact MJ Han (mhan3@illinois.edu) for any feedback about this survey.

Terry's Worklog: Airline karma

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:11:29 +0000

I’d mentioned sometime back (http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/489) that I was planning on being one of the crazy Beaver fans that will be making the trip to Penn State this year to hopefully watch out team spank the Nitty Lions silly. At the time, I didn’t have football tickets, but was smart enough to make airline reservations and hotel reservations assuming I could get my football tickets sometime down the road. I figured at worst — we could always count on scalpers.

Well, last month, it all got worked out. My friend and I got word that we’d been given tickets to the game, so we were feeling quite smug about the fact that we were ready for the game, especially when friends that I knew had waited until they had football tickets in hand before trying to get airline/hotel reservations for game day weekend. Like the ant who admonished the grasshopper, we probably were having a little too much fun giving our friends a hard time over the premium prices that they were going to be paying to fly to Happy Valley since at this point, a single airline ticket to Penn State costs more than what we paid for two back in Dec.

Anyway, I think that maybe we’ve been having a bit too much fun because I get a call while I’m in Anaheim at ALA. My wife called to let me know that Delta had just called to let her know that the regional provider that was going to be taking us to Happy Valley from Cinny was no longer flying to that airport. Suddenly, I wasn’t quite so happy. Ugh.

With all the flights that are being dropped next year (and regional providers going out of business), this was actually something that I was a little concerned about. But I kind of figured that we’d weathered the storm when I didn’t hear from anyone the first week of June (plus, I forgot what airline I was flying on — so I wasn’t sure how worried I should have been). But, like many others, we got bit by the current airline insecurity — and for a brief moment, fell into Airline purgatory (you have to imagine and ominous echo here), a special place reserved for people that have paid for tickets, but now no longer have a seat on a plane. Certainly, this had to be payback for the fun we’d been having with our fellow travelers.

Fortunately, I say that this was brief stay in airline purgatory. While it took about 45 minutes to resolve, I have to say that when I called Delta’s customer service, they worked it out which was a bit of a feat considering how inflexible our schedule is due to game times, etc. Of course, our flight plan now looks more like a jigsaw puzzle than an itinerary and we are flying on a number of regional/partner airlines (which makes me a little nervous) — but they were able to get me on flights that have me arriving a little later than before in Happy Valley but getting home about at the same time. So, A-Plus to Delta for making this a lot less painful that it might of otherwise have been. They made the experience so good that I’m almost tempted to start feeling smug again. I just wish I could remember how the ant and the grasshopper story ended up…

–TR

Catalogablog: Changes to MARC Code List for Languages

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:51:00 +0000

As a result of a formal request from the National Libraries of Serbia and Croatia and those countries' national standards bodies to the ISO 639 Joint Advisory Committee, the MARC language codes for Serbian and Croatian will be changed as below from the ISO 639-2 bibliographic codes (ISO 639-2/B) to the ISO 639-2 terminology codes (ISO 639-2/T). This change also supports established usage in bibliographic databases in Croatia. Because the codes are obsolete, rather than deleted, they may still appear in bibliographic records created before the implementation of this change.

New Code	Language Name	Previously Coded
srp	Serbian	scc
hrv	Croatian	scr

Subscribers can anticipate receiving MARC records reflecting these changes in all distribution services not earlier than September 1, 2008.

Catalogablog: Martha Yee Articles

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:14:00 +0000

Some more articles by Martha Yee are now available.

Integration of Nonbook Materials in AACR2. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 1983; 3:1-18.

Attempts to Deal With the Crisis in Cataloging at the Library of Congress in the 1940's. Library Quarterly 1987 Jan; 57:1-31.

What is a Work? In: The Principles and Future of AACR: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, October 23-25, 1997. Ed., Jean Weihs. Ottawa: Canadian Library Association; Chicago: American Library Association, 1998: 62-104.

Editions: Brainstorming for AACR2000. In: The Future of the Descriptive Cataloging Rules: Papers from the ALCTS Preconference, AACR2000, American Library Association Annual Conference, Chicago, June 22, 1995. Ed., Brian E.C. Schottlaender. (ALCTS Papers on Library Technical Services and Collections, no. 6) Chicago: American Library Association, 1998: 40-65.

Viewpoints: One Catalog or No Catalog? ALCTS Newsletter 1999; 10:4:13-17.

Lubetzky's Work Principle. In: The Future of Cataloging: Insights from the Lubetzky Symposium, April 18, 1998, University of California, Los Angeles. Ed., Tschera Harkness Connell, Robert L. Maxwell. Chicago: American Library Association, 2000.

Terry's Worklog: ALA 2008 Report and Impressions

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:52:50 +0000

So another ALA annual has come and gone and it’s time to jot down my notes and impressions from my time here in Anaheim. Of all the events I attend during the year, ALA is the one that I have the most difficult time quantifying what I actually get from the organization. One the one hand, the Summer ALA meeting is different from Mid-Winter in that there are actual presentations, etc. that can be attended, but in general, it’s still very much a business meeting focused on the actual divisions, interest groups, etc. to do the business of keeping ALA and it’s many component parts going. It’s the latter, the business meeting component, that compels me to attend ALA. Like many, I have committee responsibilities that require my attendance — and like many, I try to fit other content around those responsibilities.

Actually, now that I think about, I didn’t mention the most prevalent aspect of the ALA annual conference — the every growing and encroaching vendor component of the conference (in the 5 years I’ve attended, it’s always had this component — but lately, it seems to be like an octopus, extending it’s reach into everything). ALA has always had a very robust exhibitor area for attendees looking to speak with vendors or find out some information about a particular set of vendors. And this is an important part of the conference (though, I’m finding it gets less important each year as vendors attend now attend so many conferences and have become so much easier to contact and research) — however, in recent years, vendors have started to put on more of their own product driven presentations. In fact, take away the ALA events related to ALA, I would guess that vendor presentation make up the lion’s share of today’s ALA conference, and that I think, is a little bit sad. So, it’s always with mixed feeling that I attend ALA’s annual meeting — torn between my responsibilities to the organization and my own aversion to presentations that feel more like Amway meetings. It’s with that backdrop that I write this review — because for the first time in years, I’ve made a conscious decision to forgo any presentations/events that were vendor driven save for my limited interactions with exhibitors in the exhibits area.

So how’d that turn out? Surprising nearly impossible to do. Before attending ALA, I had a handful of presentations that I wanted to attend, two being There’s no catalog like no catalog: the ultimate debate on the future of the catalog and Creating the future of the Catalog and Cataloging. These ended up being pretty representative of sessions that I attended where vendor representation was 1/2+ the makeup of the forums. Not a bad thing, just an observation. Another thing that I found about these two presentations is that they were mixed in that there was a lot of overly general comments (fluffy) and a few interesting nuggets. This was especially true of the future of the catalog forum. I’m not sure if this topic has just run it’s course (we all agree that library catalogs need to change) or what — but many of the observations are becoming tired. Libraries today have more options that ever before — open source, vended and quasi-vendor solutions (OCLC) available to them. At this point, choices are limited more by dollars (what you can spend), in-house expertise (what you can implement) and organizational philosophy. Either way, I think it might be time to stop talking so much about our dinosaur ILS systems.

Throughout it all, the one reoccurring theme that did emerge from many of the sessions is the need to move more and more information and workflow to the network level. On the ILS side, a case was made for leveraging a large master aggregation of records to provide local and more global record discovery side by side. While on the cataloging side, the idea of moving authorities verification up to the network level in the form of URIs to help facilitate the management of authorized headings struck a cord with many attending in the audience. I think that the library community is ready to forgo workflows that over-inflate the importance of localized content in favor of much more integrated workflows that allow them to instantaneously take advantage of work done by colleagues around the globe. I know that Code4Lib doesn’t necessarily try for themes when they set their conference schedule each year, but here’s hoping that the 2009 conference includes a robust component dedicated to programming and building services that work at the network (rather than local) level.

The RDA update was interesting. It’s nice to see that this work will be wrapping up soon. I still have no idea how it will be any more than an update to AACR2 (maybe we’ll call it AACR2 1/2) in terms of practical application to the library world, but I guess we will see in a year or two. From talking to a number of vendors (I won’t say who), I’ve been told by most that RDA could potentially represent a radical change or no change at all. When pushed for their opinion — all are betting on the latter, at least for the foreseeable future. I myself, am taking a wait and see approach. At some point, I’ll need to take a look at RDA and figure out how (if at all), it will affect how I develop MarcEdit into the future — for now — I’m just waiting for the fog to clear a little bit more. *grin*

So ALA for me was filled with a few sessions (I ended up attending 7), some committee work, some time down in the exhibitor area chatting with reps and browsing books for the kids and then catching up with colleagues who have moved on from OSU or that I haven’t seen in a while. I even found some time to go to Disneyland for a little while on Monday (I may even post a picture or two later) to scout out rides for a trip that we’ve been planning with the kids later this fall. So, all and all, I think that it was a good trip. I’ve certainly come away with a few more ideas related to the WorldCat Grid services tests I’ve been performing as well as a few odds and ends for both LibraryFind and MarcEdit development though maybe the value of this ALA annual conference isn’t something I will be able to really answer until some more time has past.

–TR

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: A 'shop window' to the National Library of Scotland

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:08:59 +0000

I enjoyed a visit to The National Library of Scotland (NLS) a while ago. The NLS has an area on YouTube, showing videos from the Scottish Screen Archive. Here is a link to an interesting video (embedding is disabled) which is rather more engaging than its description suggests ;-)

This short clip from the film "From Glasgow Green to Bendigo" (1961) shows an artist from the Templeton Carpet Factory in Glasgow, Scotland demonstrating, in a flamboyant style, how the pattern for a new carpet is designed and created. [YouTube - Carpet design at Templeton's in Glasgow, Scotland]

I wonder did he always work in a suit? One of the tags in the description is 'cheesy' (I think these are assigned by NLS staff?).

The Scottish Screen Archive has its own website:

The Scottish Screen Archive is Scotland's national moving images collection. It preserves over 100 years of Scottish history on film and video. [Scottish Screen Archive]

I was actually led to YouTube via this presentation I came across on SlideShare:

| View | Upload your own

It discusses some of the issues involved in making the videos available on YouTube. There is a nice picture of YouTube metadata on slide 8. And on slide 14 they suggest that "every website we upload a moving image to is a 'shop window' to the National Library of Scotland".

Finally, with Euro 2008 just finished, here is a clip from an earlier era with a goal by a Scottish footballing legend.

Update: Referring to the NLS presentation above, Seb Chan has an interesting post contrasting YouTube and Flickr. He attributes the presentation to Ann Cameron (who is listed as a contact in the presentation).

Update: There is a nice response to this post on the Blog of the digital library of Scotland. It gives credit for the presentation to Ann Cameron, Liam Paterson and Eilidh MacGlone. And it points to a writeup of the initiative by Eilidh MacGlone. An earlier entry on the blog provides provides some context for the Scottish Screen Archive.

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Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: QOTD: The cornerstone of the University

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:02:23 +0000

Consider the following quote .....

The role of the library in the university is being transformed. Information technology is shaping both the practice of scholarly inquiry and the daily routine of students and faculty, while library services are becoming more client-focused and more integrated into teaching, learning, and research activities. Demands for technology-related services, the digitisation of collections, and technology rich user environments are growing. Library professionals are increasingly directly involved in teaching students and developing their information literacy. These increasing demands occur at the same time as calls for accountability and for quantitative measures of the library contribution to research, teaching, and learning increasingly influence the allocation of institutional resources. The library must deal creatively with the tensions between, on the one hand, demands for free public access to data and outputs from publicly funded research, and, on the other, the protection of privacy and intellectual property rights.

Perhaps it is the opening paragraph of an article in Educause Review or Ariadne about the academic library today? Maybe it is the blurb attached to an academic library conference? Is it the explanatory text on ACRLog?

Nope .... it is from the job advert for the University Librarian at University College Dublin. The successful candidate will be one who "envisions UCD Library as the cornerstone of a leading international research University".

Often, in a document like this, there are vaguer references to vision and change management, to creating a library for the twenty-first century, and so on. It is interesting seeing here some suggestion of ways in which the library is seen to be changing, albeit in quite general terms.

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Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog): Congrats to Otis

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:54:13 +0000

Congratulations to Otis Chandler and his new wife Elizabeth Khuri-Yakub, co-founders of Goodreads. (NYT piece!)

Otis and I met at the O'Reilly TOC conference. He is both very smart and very nice. I wish them all the best.

Catalogablog: RDA News

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:23:00 +0000

News from RDA.

The Co-Publishers of RDA Online (the American Library Association, the Canadian Library Association, and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) have reached the conclusion that further time is required to complete the development of the new software that will be used for distributing the full draft of RDA for constituency review.

The full draft was originally scheduled for release on August 4, 2008. Instead, it will now be issued in October 2008. The three month time period allocated for comments on the full draft is unchanged, and in this new schedule will extend from October into January 2009. More specific dates for RDA's final release will be forthcoming shortly.

Members of the Committee of Principals (CoP) and the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC) agree that the importance of distributing RDA content in a well-developed and tested version of the new software is such that a two-month delay is justified. They concluded that this extension is worthwhile given the ultimate value of the exceptional effort that is going into RDA and feel that the review by constituencies will be enhanced as a result.

panlibus: El Commons is coming

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:27:57 +0000

The mind, especially in an early morning pre-caffeine state, often takes you off at unexpected tangents. Whilst reading this press release from Ex Libris (more of which in a moment) I met a reference to EL Commons. Immediately a vision of a dust covered spaghetti western bit-part player, complete with long moustache and sombrero, leapt in to my mind - he gets down from his horse and announces, in a bad Mexican accent "my name is El’Commons - you don’t mess with my library"

It took at least two cups of coffee before that image dissipated so I could read the rest of the press release with any seriousness.

The press release itself was about Ex Libris launching it’s Open-Platform Program, reaffirming its commitment to openness as a core company value.

Ex Libris has translated its open-platform strategy into a program spanning three major areas of activity:

Formalizing the process by which we design, implement, document, and publish our interfaces, to maintain consistency across all products and achieve comprehensiveness

Increasing our emphasis on service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles in our future product designs, ensuring that our solutions will provide services as core building blocks for applications developed by us or by other parties

Providing a platform that serves as a focal point for collaboration and as such, actively encourages and facilitates institutional and community initiatives to enhance our products or use them in ways we have not foreseen

Library 2.0 Gang member and Chief Strategy Officer at Ex Libris, Oren Beit-Arie, is quoted as saying "The open-platform strategy of Ex Libris is a different way of thinking, laying the foundation for a new business model in our industry"

The one thing that doesn’t feel quite right in what they say is "a platform that serves as a focal point for collaboration and as such, actively encourages and facilitates institutional and community initiatives" This to me indicates an ambition for the Ex Libris systems, to be at the centre of institutional integration. Firstly, in a loosely-coupled SOA architecture, is there such a thing as a centre; and secondly, in an institution are the library systems that centre? I believe that the answer to both of these questions is "It depends where you are standing when you view the situation - in the library, maybe; anywhere else, probably not".

Nevertheless, open world thinking is what we all need, libraries will not survive in splendid isolation. This is a theme that has pervaded several discussions I have been involved with recently - at the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems Study Consultation Event in London, I commented upon yesterday, and in the latest couple of Library 2.0 Gang conversations.

To help promote this new approach Ex Libris are going to be soon launching EL Commons -

"a collaborative Web-based platform hosting the Developer Zone, where community members can access documentation for the open interfaces, upload software components that they have written and want to share, and download components from other community members, adapting such components to their needs"

There is much to be lauded in this announcement, it’s a pity that this open community based approach to working with customers has taken so long to follow what we at Talis have been saying and doing for so long. It is a far greater pity that others in our community appear not to be even thinking about thinking this way.

Flickr photo by mharrsch.

Technorati Tags: Ex Libris, JISC, SCONUL, Library Systems, API, SOA, Talis

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Catalogablog: OCLC Terminology Services

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:03:00 +0000

Terminology Services, an Experimental Services for Controlled Vocabularies, a project of OCLC Research is now available.

Highlights

Vocabulary Resources include:

PALINET CAT: CONTENTdm Website Update

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:16:23 +0000

OCLC has updated and unified information about CONTENTdm in one location —the OCLC Web site: www.oclc.org/contentdm.

The OCLC site now includes the Featured Collections, news, articles and reviews, information about options and ordering, and other general product information. Regional sites will be localized and updated in the coming months.

To directly access the User Support Center, you will still use www.contentdm.com. By early July, the home page for www.contentdm.com will be redesigned to include OCLC branding and will serve as the primary location for the CONTENTdm User Support Center, with more direct access to log in.

PALINET CAT: Additional Options Available through OCLC’s Bib Snapshot

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:12:48 +0000

Introducing new options that are now available through OCLC’s Bibliographic Record Snapshot.

In addition to providing OCLC-MARC records and local data, Bibliographic Record Snapshot can now output Institution Record (IR) activity and SCIPIO activity.

For more information about Bibliographic Record Snapshot visit http://www.oclc.org/us/en/batchprocessing/options/database/default.htm

To order Bibliographic Record Snapshot use the online order form located at: http://bibsnap.oclc.org/bibsnap/

-OCLC

PALINET CAT: OCLC EDX/FTP New Password Requirements

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:08:37 +0000

The password requirements for libraries that use EDX/FTP to send and/or retrieve files using the ftp address edx.oclc.org have been changed.

The password minimum length has been increased from 4 to 6 characters. A minimum of at least one alphabetic or national character (A-Z, #, $ or @) and one numeric character (0-9) has been enforced.

All passwords are confidential to the library and are not tracked or maintained by OCLC. Some libraries have chosen to maintain their password manually while others use an automatic script to create a new password before the 90 day expiration period.

-OCLC

Catalogablog: New Union Catalog

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:05:00 +0000

The Avi Chai Foundation has announced a new tool for Judaica librarians — the Avi Chai Bookshelf Union Catalog. The union catalog, contains the MARC bibliographic holdings of 31 Jewish high school libraries in the United States and Canada that have been recipients of Avi Chai's Bookshelf grant. The Avi Chai Union Catalog runs on the OPALS (open source) library automation system.

Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Linking to Identities

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:04:07 +0000

Thom has a note about linking to Worldcat Identities. The current API has various aspects ..... here is a list with examples for the two simpler approaches. See Thom's post for fuller detail.

1. Direct linking using an LCCN.

Here is the link for Van Morrison: http://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n85-148183.

2. OpenURL

See Thom's post for the detail.

3. NameFinder

The name finder service gives back a list of candidate names with URI's, ranking information, a sample title and other information about the name. .... NameFinder looks at lots of possible variations in names, so almost always results in a list rather than a unique Identity record. [Outgoing: Linking to WorldCat Identities]

Here is Van again: http://worldcat.org/identities/find?fullName=Van+Morrison. Or http://worldcat.org/identities/find?fullName=george+ivan+morrison. (There is also a SOAP version.)

4. SRU searching

There is also full SRU searching and again Thom provides the detail.

And while we are talking about him, here is a VIAF entry for Van Morrison and here is his FAST subject tag cloud from Identities.

Finally, here is a list of his CDs in Worldcat.

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Thingology (LibraryThing's ideas blog): Jason Griffey on conferences, library blogging and the death of the library

noreply@blogger.com (Tim) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:33:16 +0000

I decided to do a quick 30-minute podcast with Jason Griffey (member: griffey), the Head of Library IT at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and one of my favorite Library 2.0 people.

Jason was the organizer of this year's BIGWIG Showcase, an innovative "camp"-style session at the American Library Associations conference in Anaheim. He is also the co-author of the recent Library Blogging, with Karen Coombs (who gets the first-author love).

It's my plan to talk with interesting people from all parts of the book "world." Casual blog readers should be aware, though, that this is a very library-focused talk.

We spent the first 14 minutes talking about BIGWIG and about library conference talks generally. Then we got into his book and I tried to stir things up a bit by challenging him on library blogging. We closed with the death of the library—and what can prevent it.

I may need to sit down with Library Podcasting to figure out the best way to make podcasts available. Until then, I'm just going to throw the file up as a MP3 here (here) and through this nifty flash plug-in.

Metadata Blog (ALCTS NRMIG): Creating the Future of the Catalog & Cataloging

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:15:03 +0000

[See Program Description for a brief summary of the topic covered and for the names and titles of the speakers, moderator and program chair.]

The future can’t be that bad with a session that opens with quotes from Tom Russell and Buffalo Springfield:

“You ain’t got no future Hank, I believe your future’s all used up.” (Tom Russell, Borderland)
“There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.” (Buffalo Springfield)

Thus was the discussion on the future of the catalog and cataloging introduced by the moderator, Robert Wolven, Associate University Librarian for Bibliographic Services and Collection Development, Columbia University. The point is knowing less about catalogs and cataloging and understanding more about what the future might be. “To create the future,” he says, “we have to have some ideas about it.” “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.”

Now, this 4-hr, 5-big-name-speaker program with a snappy moderator attracted an audience that overflowed into the aisles (est. 400+) which in turn attracted some utility men who had to interrupt the program to remind them librarians about building safety codes. I must confess, I don’t know how to organize my notes so what follows might be the longest blog post you’ll ever read or won’t read.

“Library Catalogs at the Network Level” - Roy Tennant, Senior Program Officer, RLG Programs, OCLC.

“This is me,” says Roy Tennant, pointing to a picture of him and then pointing to a picture of Sylvester Stallone, says “and this is Rambo.” He had to first point out the difference in case there was any undue expectations generated by Tim Spalding’s comment on Thingology about not “attacking OCLC as much as I otherwise might. Roy could disarm Rambo.”

Sorry, there was no fistfight or fireworks to report here. Instead, Tennant, as did all the other panel speakers, gave us mental exercises in looking to the past and looking to the future.

Then: users built workflows around libraries.
Now: libraries must build services around user workflows.
The Way It Was: Card distribution service by LC – bib records to local card catalog where catalogers (represented in Superman image) added value.
The Way It Became: Bib Utility – OCLC – bib records to local catalog – catalogers are still adding value to the local systems
The way it can be: Union catalog locally tailored and skinned – WorldCat – catalogers add bib records and value to this aggregated store.

And then he took us to where this user-centric workflows will be built: the network ecology, where two processes, concentration and diffusion, work together to help us mine data better and bring services to where people are found.

Concentration – scale matters – webscale presence – mobilize data
Diffusion – spread matters – syndication – disclosure of links

“eXtensible Cataloging: Opportunities Presented by the eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project” - Jennifer Bowen, Head of Cataloging, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester

Jennifer Bowen first shared her journey from starting as a specialist cataloger (music) to cataloging manager to RDA developer and now software development project leader with the eXtensible Catalog (XC) Project. Bowen’s slides are available online so I will not repeat it here. Pay attention to the diagram of the XC network in which metadata is taken out from closed environments and into the web. Metadata moves all over the place from diverse data sources to diverse interfaces but the comings and goings are controlled by a metadata hub. The XC is a set of tools that can empower catalogers and libraries to design local applications tailored to their needs but which can be shared at the network level.

After Bowen’s presentation, Wolven assumed his moderator role and asked the remaining speakers what can they say about the topics covered so far. This started a discussion about open data and what do we mean by “local.”

[Note: DH=Diane Hillmann, JB=Jennifer Bowen, MY=Martha Yee, RT=Roy Tennant, RW=Robert Wolven, TS=Tim Spalding.]

DH: data has be allowed to move freely
RT: OCLC a collective asset built in decades and by thousands of people – how to make that into the best advantage for member libraries.
MY: when mining data in OCLC you’re not mining just data – the intellectual aspect of data in OCLC came from catalogers.
RW: not all people want data to move around freely – what it means for data to move around freely.

RW: Notes on “local” – when users search, they find “about” an item, not the item itself. How much do I need to do to have my hands on what I’m trying to find? Movable framework.
RT: last mile – key issue – where the flow breaks down – what people go through to get something – how to get your hands on something – concentric circles – what’s in their region – different ways of presenting their options – Amazon option as well as ILL option – what’s the most effective way from the user’s perspective.
JB: need a specific facet – the “I only need what I want now” facet.
RW: still on “local user” – no local user – everybody’s on the web – designing for the local user.
JB: local user may not be the right word – particular discipline maybe – niches of information – e.g. opera
DH: local in a funky way – small historical societies – how about those who moved out of the local geographic location – who would be interested in the photographs and who can say something about them? Being able to focus people’s attention on specific niches of information – local in the sense of interest in the resources that you have – people who have interest in a niche of info can be all over the place.
TS: centralization has squashed localization - what the local cataloger can put to the catalog record that won’t hurt everybody else.
RW: product placement – the idea of institutional aggregation – is it a sensible way to aggregate data – is there something between the network and the local catalog.
RT: local catalog – inventory mgmt – where it breaks down is where we conflate inventory mgmt with access – institutional aggregation doesn’t provide all that’s available – can’t stop at the boundaries of an institution.
DH: piece of commonality that we are trying to handle and that we are trying to pass on to the user – most are in the wings – haven’t integrated a lot of stuff in our discovery systems yet – underestimated the problem of access to the diversity of resources – where is the access being managed from?
MY: elephant in the room – every library or museum has a backlog – not bec. catalogers are slow but bec. admin is acquiring more than can be processed – tying acquisition with processing resources. [applause]
DH: true, if you haven’t started changing your processing workflows – can’t all be done by humans – integrate machine processing – changing processing to deal with backlog.
RW: What’s in the World – found it on Google or Internet Archive – not in an institutional catalog or repository.

“What I Have Found Out from an Attempt to Build an RDF Model of FRBRized Cataloging Rules” - Martha Yee, Cataloging Supervisor, UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Starts by saying she is dead wood as the younger generation calls them. But what she wants to do is scale up what's good about the intellectual work of catalogers within the structures of the semantic web. Acknowledges that much of what catalogers currently do is at the clerical level.

Yee's presentation is organized into definitions (RDF; XML; RDFS; OWL; SKOS), the vision (instead of records, URIs for entities.), and the experiment (see her site). Yee's presentation is also available on her site.

Wolven to panel members: Any reaction to Martha's presentation?

DH: praise to MY for delving into this stuff. Diane’s problem: MY’s issues are strawmen issues. Are we going to do things as transcribed or as linked? Both. It’s a transition – jump into the pool. Who says what about what – instead of thinking in terms of records.

JB: credit to MY. Address one thing: distinction bet. granularity and complexity. What we need is interoperable granularity – granularity is not a problem, the problem is the confusion about what is granular from the user’s point of view.

The Future of Cataloging (as seen from LT) - Tim Spalding, Creator of LibraryThing

What is LT? (450K registered users, 25 million books...I couldn't copy as fast, I believe they will soon post their presentations on the ALA Wiki - but check LibraryThing for yourself )

The ladder of use (from personal cataloging comes social networking comes social cataloging which could either be implicit or explicit). Gives several examples of metadata creation in LT (novel by TS wife – Lisa Carey – LC record – cataloging not by someone who knew the book as compared to the LT record, Huckleberry Finn – how are the editions combined – by regular users – combining works everyday. Tag: e.g. cooking, cookery. Paranormal romance. Tagmash: france,wwii – some of the power of hierarchy.

Declaration: the tag war is over. Time to come out of the jungle…Finding things, not asserting ontological reality. The end of intellectual structures.

The physical basis of classification (A book has 3-6 subjects. Subjects are equally true. Subjects never change. Only librarians get to add subjects. There is only one answer. Someone wins. You don’t get a say in how books are classified.)

Cataloging can’t be done in underpants. Wookieguy72 can’t help you. But most librarians can’t help you, each other, themselves.

2 Futures
- the world ends – you are paid less, the programmers still get paid.
- you move up the stack – an IT-industry analogy – demand increasing – you move higher, get paid more.

Concluding tangent: a new shelf order
- replaces Dewey (free, modern, humble). Decided socially. Level by level. Tested against the world. Assignment is distributed. I write the code. You be Jimmy Wales.

“A Has-been Cataloger Looks at What Cataloging Will Be” - Diane Hillman, Director of Metadata Initiatives, Information Institute of Syracuse

[Copied from Diane's slides which should be available on the ALA wiki soon.]

Converging Trends
- more catalogers work at the support staff level than as professional librarians
- more cataloging records are selected by machines
- more catalog records are being captured from publisher data or other sources
- more updating of catalog records is done via batch processes
- libraries continue to de-emphasize processing of secondary research products in favor of unique primary materials.

What are our choices?
- behind door #1 – the extinction model
- behind door #2 - the retooling model

How It’s Done
- extinction
o keep cranking about how nobody appreciates us
o assert over and over that we’re already doing everything right – why should we change
o adopt a “chicken little” approach to envisioning the future
- retooling
o considers what catalogers already do
o look for support
o find a new job

[Image of Diane Hillmann's New York license plate - METADATA]

What catalogers do
-operate within the boundaries of detaileD standards
- items described one-at-a-time
- items intended to fit carefully within a specific application – the catalog
- ignore the rest of the world of information

What Metadata Librarians Do
- think about descriPtive data without prEconceptions around descriptive level, granulaRITY or descriptive vocabs
- consider the entirety of the discovery and access issues around a set or collection of materials
- consider users and uses beyond an individual service when making design decisions – not necessarily predetermined
- leap tall buildings in a single bound

The New Metadata Librarian
- aware of changing user needs
- understand the evolving info environment
- works collaboratively with technical staff
- familiar with all metadata formats and encoding metadata
- seeks out tall buildings – otherwise jumping skills will atrophy

The cataloger skill set
-AACR2, LC, ETC.

The metadata librarian skill set
- views data as collections, sets, streams
- approaches the task as designing data to “play well with others” – no matter

Characteristics of our new world
- no more ILS
- bib utilities are unlikely to be the central node for all data
- creation of metadata will become far more decentralized
- nobody knows how this will all shake out
- but: metadata librarians will be critical in forging solutions

More: Disintegrated Library Systems, Role of Bibliographic Utilities, New Models of Creation, New Models of Distribution, More on Open Data

Panel Reaction to DH's Presentation

RT: [to DH] so glad to hear your call to TS to give away his LT tags and metadata
TS: some paid; some free
MY: back in the 50s. free TV bec. of ads – things that are free are not really free.
JB: to TS and to DH – LT basically user-generated metadata – dealing with odd-ball things – with OAI-PMH – you know exactly where the metadata is coming from – not the end of the free world – we need to start thinking in a new context – if you know where it’s coming from then you can evaluate it.
TS: frbrized but binary model can’t handle everything acc to frbr model
DH: recognizing and characterizing point of view;
RW: point of view and identity – multiple identities
MY: people out there who know more than we do who can help in differentiating edtiiton from manifestation
RW: Kelly Freas – looked up in LT and Wikipedia – specific tag – Kelly Freas-related tag. Also in WC. The world is not as monolithic as we think.
TS: open data; what scares him about RDF – overengineered solutions. Importance of opening up data to the availability of programmers out there.
DH: semantic religionists
RW: a role or a niche environment – where catalogers fit into this
DH: is that a long-tail question – not spending our time on secondary products – more on primary sources
MY: economic aspects – good metadata is never going to be free – paying for the common good – not likely to be paid by a corporate – for profit.
TS: covers – becoming a non-economic good – publishers have an economic interest in it.
DH: different ways of paying for things – you don’t get paid directly for it. Exchange of values
RW: how we place value; inverse relationships bet cost and use. User-generated metadata brings cost and value together.
MY: archives community – serving the elite – important elites. Implications for democratic based funding – how to measure benefits.
DH: making decisions on incomplete info

Questions from Audience and Answers from Panelists

[Ok, I'll stop the stream here. I promise, I'll get this post summarized and organized soon. In the meantime, the rawness might serve those who want a post on this session now.]

panlibus: Ed Summers Talks with Talis

richard.wallis@talis.com — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:30:46 +0000

Ed Summers has recently been active in exposing Library of Congress Subject Heading data as Linked Data using Semantic Web technologies and RDF, through his experimental service at lcsh.info.

In this conversation we find out how Ed’s career, not always on a traditional library path, has led him to his work in the Library of Congress, his pragmatic interest in things Semantic Web, and why he has needed to experiment outside of the LoC.

In this conversation we reference:

This conversation was conducted as a Skype call on Thurday 26th June 2008, recorded with Ecamm Network’s Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband.

Technorati Tags: Ed Summers, Library of Congress, RDF, Semantic Web

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Ed Summers has recently been active in exposing Library of Congress Subject Heading data as Linked Data using Semantic Web technologies and RDF, through his experimental service at lcsh.info. In this conversation we find out how Ed's career, not always on a traditional library path, has led him to his work in the Library of Congress, his pragmatic interest in things Semantic Web, and why he has needed to experiment outside of the LoC. In this conversation we reference: code4lib#160; Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) Chronicling America The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative The BagIt File Package Format Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit (SWORD) Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) LCSH, SKOS and Linked Data lcsh.info Cool URIs for the Semantic Web How to Publish Linked Data on the Web Ed Summers' web site: Inkdroid This conversation was conducted as a Skype call on Thurday 26th June 2008, recorded with Ecamm Network's Call Recorder for Skype, and edited on a Mac with Garageband. Technorati Tags: Ed Summers, Library of Congress, RDF, Semantic Web