2007 Annual Meetings of the MARC Advisory Committee

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

• Proposal No. 2007-04: Use of field 520 for content advice statements in the MARC 21 bibliographic format
• Proposal No. 2007-05: Definition of 022 subfields for recording the linking ISSN (ISSN-L) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic, Authority, and Holdings Formats
• Proposal No. 2007-06: Changes for the German and Austrian conversion to MARC 21
• Discussion Paper No. 2007-DP05: Data elements needed to ascertain copyright facts
• Discussion Paper No. 2007-DP06: Representation of the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system in the MARC 21 formats

PURL 2.0 Coming Soon

OCLC has announced an update to the PURL service.

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. and Zepheira, LLC announced today that they will work together to rearchitect OCLC's Persistent URL (PURL) service to more effectively support the management of a "Web of data."

The software developed will be released under an Open Source Software license allowing PURLs and the PURL infrastructure to be used in various applications for public or proprietary use. OCLC and Zepheira are collaborating to extend the open and inclusive community of PURL users.

Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control

This message was sent to SLA members. Applies to everybody.

Following the third successful public hearing of the Library of Congress’ Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control on 9 July, the Working Group has extended the final date for comments or testimonies to be submitted to the group to 31 July. For information about how to submit written commentary see the website. Although the working group’s report will be sent out for comments in October before submitting the report to the Library of Congress in November, members are encouraged to send comments, however short, in order to make an impact on this important report. For more information please see the Working Group Web site.

Journal of Internet Cataloging => Journal of Library Metadata

Call for Papers

The Journal of Library Metadata (JLM) is a peer-reviewed journal publishing articles on all aspects of metadata applications in libraries. The journal is published quarterly by The Haworth Press, Inc.

Previously titled the Journal of Internet Cataloging, after a change in title and editorship, JLM will now focus on metadata, an exciting, timely subject of importance to all libraries. The journal will publish three categories of articles: standard, peer-reviewed articles; shorter, scholarly, non-peer reviewed articles; and short viewpoint articles.

These articles will cover all aspects of metadata applications in libraries, including:

Application profiles
Best practices
Controlled vocabularies
Crosswalking of metadata and interoperability
Digital libraries and metadata
Display of search results
Federated repositories
Federated searching
Folksonomies
Individual metadata schemes
Institutional repository metadata
Metadata content standards
Metadata harvesting
Ontologies
Preservation metadata
Resource Description Framework
Resource discovery and metadata
Search engines and metadata
SKOS
Stochastic vs. deterministic searching
Tagging and tag clouds
Topic maps
Visual image and moving image metadata

Categories of Articles
Please consider writing and submitting an article that falls into one of the following three categories:

• Peer-reviewed articles (original research, scholarly manuscripts), which should be 10-50 typed pages, double-spaced.
• Short, scholarly, non-peer-reviewed articles, often practical in nature (for example, describing a particular library metadata implementation). These should range from 500-2,000 words, with limited citations to other resources.
• Upbeat Viewpoint articles giving the author’s opinion on a timely topic related to library metadata applications. These should range from 500-2,000 words and may or may not contain citations. Focus should be on improvements or solutions instead of negative aspects of an existing system, standard, or service.

For more information please visit the Journal of Library Metadata web site.

The Future of Bibliographic Control Meeting

The Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control 3rd meeting is available as a Real media video. Wish they had made an MP3 version also.

Library PR

Getting the word out to other groups about libraries is something I feel strongly about. I've presented at music teacher conferences and the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. Now my suggestion for a story has been picked up by CommandN. It was about LibraryThing and the hook was the $1000.00 worth of books they are offering to referrals for new employees. One small bit of PR but I'm feeling good about it.

SCATNews

The latest issue of SCATNews is now available on the IFLA website.

ONIX Directory

ON AUTOCAT there was some discussion recently about vendor supplied records, so I asked about ONIX records. A helpful person pointed me to this list of Companies Sending ONIX Files. The file doesn't seem to link back to the files, but it does give a nice listing of who is creating and distributing these files.

MarcEdit will convert ONIX into MARC21XML which can then be turned into MARC21 records.

Revised DCMI Namespace Policy Published

News from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative

Following a public comment period earlier this year, a revised DCMI Namespace Policy has been published. The revision documents the creation of a new namespace for entities of the DCMI Abstract Model and updates the terminology used.

Subject Authority Records

News from LC.

CPSO has begun a project to create subject authority records for every subject string appearing in bibliographic records to aid Library of Congress catalogers, and external users in the validation of LCSH subject heading strings. Effective immediately subject authority records are being created for valid subject strings obtained from bibliographic records. Formerly, these subject strings did not prompt the creation of subject authority records, because they contained free-floating subdivision[s].

Some of these records are being created manually by the Cataloging Policy and Support Office staff, and some will be generated by machine, but all of them will be reviewed before distribution occurs. We anticipate at least 200 records per month at the start of this project. These records will not be printed in the annual editions of LCSH (the "red books"). The records can be identified by the legend "[proposed validation record]" appearing at the end of the 1xx string. This legend will be removed once the records have been approved and distributed. Additionally each record will contain a 667 field with this data: "Record generated for validation purposes."

RDA Drafts

An announcement about Resource Description and Access.

Revised draft of Chapter 6-7

The Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC) is pleased to announce that a revised draft of RDA part A, chapters 6-7 has been made available for comment. Please see the following Web page for the draft and details on making comments:

Revised RDA scope document

For information, the RDA Scope and structure document has been revised and now has two accompanying documents, an RDA element analysis and an RDA to FRBR mapping.

The JSC is committed to ensuring that the metadata produced using RDA will be well-formed, i.e., instructions are provided on how to record the values of elements, controlled vocabularies are used where appropriate, and the overall structure is governed by a formal model.

These documents have been issued for the JSC and Editor to refer to, in the process of developing RDA, to ensure this aim is met. In addition, we hope that these documents will be useful to the metadata and semantic web communities and in our ongoing discussions with these communities.

Union Bugs

At the John Edwards rally last night I noticed the sign had a union bug in the lower corner. We might consider adding information about and from these bugs to the bibliographic record. Proposal for Inclusion of Union Label Description In Bibliographic and Archival Cataloging Guidelines is a paper on the topic.

Data are like drops of water. Individually, they are usually quite meaningless. Only once they are organized, with purpose, do they take on significance. This proposal seeks to rectify the oversight by catalogers to include information about a small but important item of published data - the union label, or "bug".

Dublin Core Survey

Resoum Kidane of Bibliographic Services at King’s College London is conducting a survey on DC use.

I am currently conducting a survey concerning the use of Dublin Core (DC) and MARC amongst cataloguers and other information professionals. The main aim of this research is to obtain a perception from cataloguers and other information professionals, concerning the future trends of cataloguing. As the future of MARC becomes the subject of debate amongst information professionals, there is a possibility that DC will replace MARC for cataloguing both digital and print documents.

FRBR/CIDOC CRM Harmonization

The Working Group on FRBR/CIDOC CRM Harmonization now has its Web page on IFLANET. The current draft of the object-oriented version of FRBR, nicknamed "FRBRoo", and consolidated minutes of the WG's meetings are also available there.

Tasks: in cooperation with the CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group, prepare an object-oriented formulation of FRBR (FRBRoo) that is a compatible extension of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM).

....

CIDOC CRM is the conceptual reference model for museum information, expressed in object-oriented formalism. Originally developed by the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM CIDOC), it has now become an ISO standard (ISO 21127:2006).

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.