VRA Core

The Visual Resources Association has announced that the release version of VRA Core 4.0 is now available.

VRA Core 4.0 is a data standard for the cultural heritage community that was developed by the Visual Resources Association's Data Standards Committee. It consists of a metadata element set (units of information such as title, location, date, etc.), as well as an initial blueprint for how those elements can be hierarchically structured. The element set provides a categorical organization for the description of works of visual culture as well as the images that document them.

Tagging

Order Is in the Eye of the Tagger by David Weinberger appears in the latest Wired. It is an excerpt from his recently published book Everything Is Miscellaneous

In the age of social tagging and folksonomies, where we all get to classify the things of the world into categories we make up on the spot, Linnaeus the Taxonomist seems quaint. But we shouldn't feel too smug. We are struggling against the same limitations as he did … and this time we don't have an excuse.

Access to Images

A new HP report Sharing, Discovering and Browsing Geotagged Pictures on the Web by Carlo Torniai, Steve Battle, and Steve Cayzer discusses access to images.

In recent years the availability of GPS devices and the development in web technologies has produced a considerable growth in geographical applications available on the web. In particular the growing popularity of digital photography and photo sharing services has opened the way to a myriad of possible applications related to geotagged pictures. In this work we present an overview of the creation, sharing and use of geotagged pictures. We propose an approach to providing a new browsing experience of photo collections based on location and heading information metadata.

Request for Comments: SKOS Use Cases and Requirements: Working Draft

This W3C working group is asking for comments on their work.

The Semantic Web Deployment Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of SKOS Use Cases and Requirements. Knowledge organization systems, such as taxonomies, thesauri or subject heading lists, play a fundamental role in information structuring and access. These use cases and fundamental or secondary requirements will be used to guide the design of SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System), a model for representing such vocabularies. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity. We would greatly appreciate your comments and feedback on this Working Draft, which should be submitted to the SWD mailing list.

MARC @ ALA

Announcement for a presentation at ALA that sounds very interesting.

Did you know that catalogers use only 10-20% of available MARC fields/subfields? Given evolving search behaviors and the amazoogle effects do our bibliographic records provide information users need?

The MARC Content Designation Utilization (MCDU) project team would like to invite you to "Informing the Future of MARC: An Empirical Approach", a panel presentation at the ALA 2007 Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. The session will take place on Saturday, June 23rd, 8am-10am.

This is an ALCTS sponsored event and will feature Dr. William E. Moen, Associate Professor and Dr. Shawne D. Miksa, Assistant Professor, from the School of Library and Information Sciences, University of North Texas and Sally H. McCallum, Chief, Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress.

This program presents findings from a major IMLS-funded research study on catalogers’ use of MARC and an opportunity to discuss future directions for MARC and cataloging practices in the context of FRBR, RDA, and XML. The results of this study provide a much needed empirical basis to better inform MARC’s future in the bibliographic control environment.

MARC RTP

A while back I posted that the MARC Record Translation Program (MARC RTP) had disappeared. Now it is back, though at a temporary home.

MARC RTP was especially developed so that catalogue data contained in MARC format files could be converted, and selectively imported, into databases built with general-purpose applications.

....

RTP allows you to select any part or parts of each MARC record, therefore you do not have to design a large unnecessarily complicated database. You need only include the data that is of interest to you. As an aid, RTP can produce a readable listing of all of the records from the MARC file, and information about which tags and fields exist in your MARC records.

Walt Crawford

Not since the Astros let Nolan Ryan go has such a poor management decision been made.

Ever thought you or one of the groups you work for or with could use a Walt Crawford?

Here’s your chance.

The RLG-OCLC transition will be complete in September. I’ve received a termination notice from OCLC, effective September 30, 2007.

I’m interested in exploring new possibilities. For now I’m trying not to narrow the options too much.

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