Resource Description and Access

Outcomes of the April 2007 meeting of the Joint Steering Committee
for Development of RDA have been mounted on the JSC Web site.

Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators

Lou Rosenfeld is the guest this week on Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators.

Jon Udell speaks with Lou Rosenfeld on this week's Interviews with Innovators. Fellow superpatron Edward Vielmetti put Jon in touch with Lou, with whom he shares an affection not only for Ann Arbor, Michigan, but also for a cluster of topics including information architecture, search analytics, print and online publishing, designing for usability, tagging, and microformats.

Microformats

John Allsopp, has just come out with the book, Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0. In the Five Pertinent Questions column he briefly discusses the importance of this mark-up.

Enhancing the Catalog

In Danbury Conn. the public library has added LibraryThing for Libraries to their catalog.

What is LibraryThing for Libraries?

• Give your patrons exciting new content, including recommendations and tag clouds.
• Let your patrons take part, with reviews, ratings and tags. Keep the control you want.
• Enhance your catalog with just a few lines of HTML. Works with any OPAC and requires no back-end integration. Really.
• Draw on the collective intelligence of your patrons and LibraryThing members.

Future of Bibliographic Control

Extensive notes, by Mark R. Lindner, on the 2nd meeting of the LoC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control are available on the Off the Mark weblog.

Genre/Form Authority Records

The draft of Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings H1913 is available of comment.

In working to define the guidelines for the creation and application of these headings, the Cataloging Policy and Support Office (CPSO) has drafted instruction sheet H 1913 for the Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings.... Note that this instruction sheet covers only the development and use of genre/form headings for motion pictures, television programs, and videos; however, the plan is to create similar instruction sheets for other areas where genre/form headings can be created and applied, such as music, radio, law, etc. Because this instruction sheet will serve as the model for these other subject areas, CPSO invites comments, suggestions for improvement, etc.

Vacation

I'll be in the Washington D.C. area June 11-15. Any suggestions? We are going to visit a brewery, Old Dominion. Maybe catach a play at the Folger Library. We have been to Glen Echo, any other dancing going on?

RSS Ping

RSS Ping looks like a useful combination of the RSS/Atom metadata and the Ping function. This work is in progress, so librarians could contribute to the development.

RSS Ping combines RSS item metadata with site update information. It enhances the current ping specification, adding information about exactly what has been updated or published, with the notification that something has been updated. RSS Ping reduces the need to revisit or work done by aggregators and search engines when revisiting the publisher site after being pinged, to provide truly real-time updates for information on the Web.

CDWA-Lite

A request for comments:

CDWA-Lite is a lightweight XML schema that describes core information for cultural materials and their visual surrogates....

The Advisory Committee for this standard is seeking broad community review of it from a technical viewpoint as well as for its value in collection cataloging and access/sharing. We encourage completion of the survey (or those parts of it you are comfortable with)

Fun Videos

The latest Tiki Bar is one of their best. Kevin Rose is a guest and very funny.

There has been lots of to-do about the code to crack HD-DVDs being available. The best or at least most amusing item is this episode of Geek Brief. Cali Lewis may be at the next Texas Library Association annual conference. She lives in Dallas and the conference is in Dallas. Could be fun.

MARC21 Updates

Update No. 7 (October 2006) to all five MARC 21 Formats (authority, bibliographic, classification, community information and holdings) is now available from the Library of Congress. This update includes changes made to the MARC 21 formats resulting from proposals which were considered by the ALA ALCTS/LITA/RUSA Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee (MARBI) at its 2006 meetings, the Canadian Committee on MARC (CCM) at its meetings in 2006 and by the Book Industry Communications/Bibliographic Standards Technical Subgroup (BIC/BSTS) at its 2006 meetings.

More information about this update may be found online at:

• Authority format
• Bibliographic format
• Classification format
• Community Information
• Holdings format

xISBN API

The api for xISBN that Xiaoming Liu previewed at the Code4Lib meeting is now officially launched and supported, and provisions for commercial use are now in place.

For those of you who missed it, in addition to "related" ISBN's, xISBN will now also return metadata such as title, edition, language and publication year that can be used to distinguish manifestations of a work. xISBN supports a RESTful API, as well as OpenURL and UNAPI, and can return results in a variety of formats.

xISBN is free for non-commercial, low volume use.

MODS to Simple DC

A new MODS 3.2 to simple Dublin Core stylesheet, based on the LC MODS to simple DC mapping, is now available.

MODS

MARC Advisory Committe

The cover sheets for the proposals and discussion papers presented at the 2007 Midwinter meetings of the MARC Advisory Committee have been updated with the results of the discussions. They are available at:

• Proposal No. 2007-01: Definition of subfields $b and $j in field 041 in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
• Proposal No. 2007-02: Incorporating invalid former headings in 4XX fields of the MARC 21 Authority Format
• Proposal No. 2007-03: Addition of subfield $5 in fields 533 and 538 in the MARC 21 bibliographic and holdings formats
• Discussion Paper No. 2007-DP01: Changes for the German and Austrian conversion to MARC 21
• Discussion Paper No. 2007-DP02: Use of field 520 for content advice statements
• Discussion Paper No. 2007-DP03: Recording the linking ISSN (ISSN-L) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic, Authority, and Holdings Formats
• Discussion Paper No. 2007-DP04: Definition of Field 004 in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

MARC21

MARC21 Update

The 2006 update to the MARC 21 formats (Update No. 7) is now available for free download as PDF from the CDS web site.

MARC

Future of Bibliographic Control

The registration form for the May 9 meeting of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control at ALA headquarters in Chicago is now online.

Cataloging

ALCTS Subject Analysis Committee

The ALCTS Subject Analysis Committee Midwinter 2007 meetings minutes are now available.

Subjects

Free Comic Book Day

May 5 is Free Comic Book Day. Is your library participating?

Comics

WorldCat Local

WorldCat Local is up and running at the University of Washington.

The search results include articles as well as more traditional catalog materials. It shows other local libraries with an item. It is possible to link to a search result. Facets along the left side to narrow the search. Lots of good things here.

Some drawbacks I see are that there is no option to view the MARC record. When I do reference I often find that useful. Maybe it is an option for the staff? There is a place for reviews but no place for tagging or a simple thumbs up/down. How about saving a search and getting an RSS feed or email when something that matches is added. Since there are articles there that would be a very useful way to keep up with a subject area. Cite this item is nice, but why can't I select the format I want and then only get that one. And why limit the options to only a few. How about the option to import it into Endnotes.

This is shown as a beta version. Maybe further developments will make this the system of the future, but not just yet.

WorldCat

Problems at LC

Back in January we received an invoice for our subscription to Classification Web. We paid it from our deposit account. Since then we have continued to receive invoices and no replies from LC. We have e-mailed them many times. We call, but the voice-mailbox is full. never does a person answer. Now they have cancelled my access, since we did not paid the bill. Only we did, months ago. What is going on at the Cataloging Distribution Service? Anyone have a secret to contacting them?

LC