Podcasts

A nice tool for those listening to lots of podcasts or creating them is mpTrim. It fixes lots of errors, adjusts the volume and cuts off silence from the start and end of the file, thus making it a bit leaner. Free for a basic version. For longer podcasts or batch processing there is a paid version.

FOAF & DC

Dan Brickley has written the paper, FOAF and the draft DC Agents requirements, to investigate and assess feasibility of using Friend of a Friend for Dublin Core agent descriptions.

TEI Meeting Announcement

This announcement was received via e-mail, slightly edited for Web presentation.

TEI@20: 20 Years of Supporting the Digital Humanities

31st October - 3rd November 2007, University of Maryland

Pre-conference workshops: 31 October 2007
TEI conference: 1-2 November 2007
Business meeting: 3 November 2007

We invite you to come to the annual showcase of all things TEI.

The meeting includes:

• the launch of TEI P5
• a full programme of invited speakers, panels, roundtable discussion
• special interest group sessions
• TEI business meeting and elections

There will also be a day of pre-meeting training workshops.

Conference papers will be published by LLC: The Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.

The meeting will be held at the University of Maryland Libraries, University of Maryland, College Park, just outside Washington, D.C.

The event is open to all and free of charge for TEI Consortium institutional members, subscribers and invited guests. Others will be charged $75, which entitles you to conference admission and subscriber benefits for the remainder of the calendar year.

For program details , registration, hotel, and travel information, please visit the conference website.

Meeting of Experts for an International Cataloguing Code

The website is now available for the 5th IFLA Meeting of Experts for an International Cataloguing Code. Lots of papers available.

Resource Description and Access

There is a survey about the print version of RDA on the website. There is another for educators. Look for both in the left sidebar. Make your opinion count.

Structure and Form of Folksonomy Tags

Structure and form of folksonomy tags: The road to the public library catalogue by Louise Spiteri appears in Webology 4(2).

Folksonomies have the potential to add much value to public library catalogues by enabling clients to: store, maintain, and organize items of interest in the catalogue using their own tags. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the tags that constitute folksonomies are structured. Tags were acquired over a thirty-day period from the daily tag logs of three folksonomy sites, Del.icio.us, Furl, and Technorati. The tags were evaluated against section 6 (choice and form of terms) of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) guidelines for the construction of controlled vocabularies.

Another paper on tagging is @toread and Cool: Tagging for Time, Task and Emotion by Margaret E.I. Kipp in Proceedings 8th Information Architecture Summit, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

This paper examines the use of non subject related tags in three social bookmarking tools (Del.icio.us, Connotea and Citeulike). Previous studies of Del.icio.us and Citeulike determined that many common tags are not directly subject related but are in fact affective tags dwelling on a user's emotional response to a document or are time and task related tags related to a users current projects or activities. A set of non subject tags from the previous studies was used to collect posts with non subject tags from the three listed social bookmarking tools. These tags have been analysed to examine their role in the tagging process.

Digitization Tool

A tool from the Carnegie Mellon may help speed digitization of texts.

Carnegie Mellon researchers have launched a new service that will not only protect e-mail addresses on the web from spambots, but also help digitize a backlog of old books, magazines, and newspapers so that they can eventually be computer searchable. The service, called reCAPTCHA, hopes to use the eyeballs of millions of Internet users to identify thousands of words for the Internet Archive.

Naval Observatory Library

I've just returned from a visit at the U.S. Naval Observatory Library. The largest astronomy library in the country, with 80,000 volumes. The main reading room is beautiful. The grounds are beautiful . The view from the roof is breath-taking. Greg and Sally were good hosts. The folks who visit next week during ALA are in for a special treat

The Future of Bibliographic Control Meeting

Economics and Organization of Bibliographic Data Background Paper for the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control sets the stage for the third meeting.

The purpose of the third public meeting is to better understand the economic and organizational needs and challenges facing stakeholders currently, in the near future, and in the more distant future in regard to creating, maintaining, sharing, and supporting the metadata, structures, and standards of bibliographic control. In this context, the term “economic” refers to the human, technological, and monetary costs of bibliographic control, from both the narrow micro- and broad macro-economic perspectives.

Linux ILS

Any suggestions for a Linux based ILS? I know of Koha and Evergreen. Are there any commercial products? We are looking for something inexpensive. We may have some funds next fiscal year.

AIPs and Mashups

APIs and Mashups For The Rest Of Us by Gareth Rushgrove appears in the latest Digital Web Magazine.

This article, the first in a series of two, aims to lift the lid on all things API; the second article will give you some hands-on tools and tips to get you started. For now, it’s all about how we managed to get here--and where here actually is.

Why should we even care about this? Well, with an API our users could create mash-ups of our OPACs making them more useful and user-friendly.

Browsing the Catalog

Browsing Library Collections: From the Shelf to the Online Catalog by Robert Kieft appeared in EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 3 (May/June 2006): 12–13. It discusses a project to add TOC to bib records.

More info at ALCTS' Technical Services Directors of Large Research Libraries Discussion Group, on Friday morning, 6/22/07.

DCMI Abstract Model

A revised version of the DCMI Abstract Model has been has been approved as a DCMI Recommendation.

This document specifies an abstract model for Dublin Core metadata. The primary purpose of this document is to specify the components and constructs used in Dublin Core metadata. It defines the nature of the components used and describes how those components are combined to create information structures. It provides an information model which is independent of any particular encoding syntax. Such an information model allows us to gain a better understanding of the kinds of descriptions that we are encoding and facilitates the development of better mappings and cross-syntax translations.

Phoenix Catalog

Phoenix Public Library has just started using a faceted approach to the catalog. Personally, I think the multiple access points clustered in a sidebar in a very useful and intuitive approach.

Another innovation is that they are using the BISAC Subject Headings. Look at field 695. Another access point. I hope they used a program to grab them from ONIX records. I'd like to know the details. There are problems with multiple thesauri in one catalog. Ask anyone who has both LCSH and MeSH. The facet approach may limit those problems. Interesting experiment.

Google in Cataloging

"Have You Searched Google Yet?" Using Google as a Discovery Tool for Cataloging Jennifer Lang by appears in the latest issue of Library Philosophy and Practice.

This paper demonstrates how some of Google's search functionalities can be used to locate information to assist in the cataloging process. In addition, the results of an informal survey of catalogers shows that while some respondents never considered using Google or prefer different methods for finding information, others find Google to be a good supplement to "traditional" cataloging tools.

One use not mentioned is finding an e-version of the item being cataloged. Happens fairly often with the materials I work with.

Skype

I now have a Skype phone. User name dbigwood. 713-893-5164. Review when I have used a bit.

Now We Have Our Own Planet!

Planet Cataloging is an automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata designed and maintained by Jennifer Lang and Kevin S. Clarke.

Thanks for putting it together. Added to my reader.

Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control Report

Brief Meeting Summary: May 9, 2007, Structures and Standards for Bibliographic Data (Chicago, IL) by Nancy J. Fallgren

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.