Family

This post is personal, but it will get the word out to lots of friends and family quickly. Next Tuesday, Sept. 25. our family will grow by 3, two girls (12 & 13) and a young man (14). We will be their home for a while. They do have a much older sister in Panama, who may take custody at some point in time, or not. We expect them to be part of our family for a few to several years. Pictures on Flickr as they become available.

Genre/Form Authority Records

Library of Congress Subject Headings Weekly List 35 (August 29, 2007) contains the start of authority records for the TV and movie genres. Most have yet to make it into the LC authority datanbse.

Skype & MS Office

Skype has a new toolbar for MS Office. Works with Office 2007. Things you can do with Skype Office Toolbar

• Start calls to Skype Names and phone numbers written within MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents
• See when the author of a document is online and communicate with them
• Send the file you are currently working on to Skype Contacts
• Turn phone numbers into links within your document

I'll have to give this a try.

Additions to the MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description

The code listed below has been recently approved for use in MARC 21 records. The code will be added to the online MARC Code Lists for Relators, Sources, Description Conventions.

The code should not be used in exchange records until after November 13, 2007. This 60-day waiting period is required to provide MARC 21 implementers time to include newly defined codes in any validation tables they may apply to the MARC fields where the codes are used. (Description Conventions)

The following code is for use in subfield $2 in field 040 in Bibliographic and Authority records (Description Conventions).

Addition:

enol

Ekspertiza i nauchno-tekhnicheskaia obrabotka lichnykh arkhivnykh fondov: metodicheskiie rekomendatsii (Moskva: 1990) [use only after November 13, 2007]

W3C Completes Bridge Between HTML/Microformats and Semantic Web

Big news from the W3C, GRDDL.

Today, the World Wide Web Consortium completed an important link between Semantic Web and microformats communities. With "Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages", or GRDDL (pronounced "griddle"), software can automatically extract information from structured Web pages to make it part of the Semantic Web. Those accustomed to expressing structured data with microformats in XHTML can thus increase the value of their existing data by porting it to the Semantic Web, at very low cost.

"Sometimes one line of code can make a world of difference," said Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director. "Just as stylesheets make Web pages more readable to people, GRDDL makes Web pages, microformat tags, XML documents, and data more readable to Semantic Web applications, opening more data to new possibilities and creative reuse."

Library Card Sign-up Month

September is Library Card Sign-up Month. It is also library card renewal month at MPOW, the Lunar and Planetary Institute. In my latest podcast I used the 10 second clip from ALA to reinforce the renewal message. (I felt like a sound engineer getting it the right volume and speed.) They have other lengths that might meet your needs better. Thanks ALA.

Web Ontology Language (OWL)

HP labs has a new report on OWL, Comparing OWL Semantics Turner, David; Carroll, Jeremy J. HPL-2007-146

The OWL Web Ontology Language is endowed with two model theories, reflecting its origins as a compromise between two different communities. By design these model theories give rise to very similar semantics, and a precise statement of the correspondence between the model theories is conjectured with a sketch proof at the end of the OWL semantics specification document. We have filled in the details of this sketch proof using the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant, and developed machinery for further study of the formal semantics of OWL. Our study was sufficiently detailed to find a handful of minor errors in the specification of the semantics of OWL that previous work had overlooked. We also sought a stronger result by showing a partial converse to the known correspondence, but it proved impossible to achieve this within our time constraints; instead we conjecture a possible method for strengthening the correspondence.

OK Training

We invite you to participate in Mars In and Out. A free NASA-supported workshop designed to bring earth and space science into your library and after-school children’s and community programs November 8 and 9, 2007.

The Office of Library Development
Oklahoma Department of Libraries
200 NE 18th Street
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73105

Mars Inside and Out! will acquaint you with everything you need to know about the mysterious red planet to bring exciting programs to your community. You will learn about how the Martian environment has changed through time, the possibility for life on Mars, past, present, and future NASA missions to Mars, and plans and challenges for having humans living and working on Mars.

Scientists and educators from the Lunar and Planetary Institute will share space science information, resources, hands-on activities, and demonstrations developed specifically for librarians and after-school program providers to infuse into their programs with children ages 8 to 13 and their families.

During the workshop you will:

• Meet NASA scientists and engineers involved in Mars exploration
• Learn about Mars science, missions, and future exploration
• Receive training in related hands-on science inquiry activities, designed for children ages 8 to 13
• Receive related resources and materials that you can use in your programs
• Explore ideas for presenting space science programs to young audiences and to other colleagues
• Collaborate with other after-school program providers and children’s and youth librarians in Oklahoma and become part of the growing Explore! community
• Receive a $100 stipend for attending!

The workshop is free. You will receive Mars Inside and Out! presentations, activities, and resources (posters, book lists, suggested Web sites), and the first 25 participants to register will receive a $100 stipend for completing the workshop. The materials are ready to be incorporated into your existing children’s and youth programs.

But wait — there’s more! You will also receive materials for ten additional Explore! space science topics (rockets, space stations, space colonies, egg-stronauts, solar system, shaping the planets, comets, staying healthy in space, and the Sun-Earth connection). Each of these topics has complementary hands-on activities and resources that can be found on the Explore! website.

The workshop begins at 9:00 am on Thursday, November 8, and continues until the close of the day, 5:00 pm, on Friday, November 9. Light breakfasts, lunches, and afternoon snacks will be provided and, of course, chocolate will be available, too! Participants are responsible for travel, housing, and dinner costs, and all logistical arrangements.

Space is limited; please register by 5 October to reserve your place in the workshop. Come join us for a fun-filled and learning-filled two days. We look forward to exploring Mars Inside and Out! with you. Drop me a request for a registration form.

Scriblio in Use

Lamson Library at Plymouth State University is now using the Scriblio library catalog. Casey Bisson provides more info in his weblog maisonbisson.

DC Papers

The papers from the Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications are now available. Lots of good reading here.

Houston Area

District 8 of the Texas Library Association has announced that registration is open for those who wish to register for the Fall Meeting.

I personally like this meeting very much. I think it is the size of some state conferences, it gets about 1,000 attendees I guess. But, compared to TLA it is much more intimate. It is large enough to have a session or two I like, small enough to sit down and chat with folks I've not seen in too long.

Tagging and Controlled Vocabalaries

EntityDescriber is an add-on tool for Connotea that allows taggers to select terms from a controlled vocabalary.

E.D. is a mechanism for intersecting the Semantic Web with the normal Web. It lets Connotea users (though we may extend it to other systems such as Del.icio.us) annotate (tag) resources on the Web with terms from existing controlled vocabularies such as MeSH, the Gene Ontology, the Atom ontology, and the Person ontology. For more thoughts on and progress with ED, see blog posts about ED.

You might enjoy using ED if any of the following apply to you:

• You would like to organize your tags more effectively
• You are using Connotea to create a reference system - for example for a class
• You are a member of a group of people that would like to use a common set of tags - possibly with the aim of creating a nice reference library
• You like the idea that every time you tag something you are contributing to the semantic web
• You would like to utilize queries over your collection and others that take advantage of the structure of ontologies. For example, queries for "brain", that return resources tagged with "hippocampus", "cortex", "cerebellum", etc...
• You would like to help an aging graduate student add one more chapter to his thesis...

Telescope Metadata

More and more people are getting into the metadata game. Here is a proposed XML metadata schema for telescopes.

Earlier I described my idea for an RSS-like XML feed for telescopes. The idea was to allow anyone to keep up with what particular telescopes were doing. In this post I will try to describe my current idea.

He is looking for comments.

PERSNAME-L

PERSNAME-L, exists for the purpose of dealing with issues about personal names. To subscribe to PERSNAME-L, follow this link and click on "Join or leave the list (or change settings)". Or send a message to LISTSERV@LISTS.OU.EDU with the words SUBSCRIBE PERSNAME-L followed by a forename and surname. I've found this to be a very useful group.

BookTour

Here is a very useful website for book-lovers, BookTour. Shows what authors are speaking in an area.

We're a free online service that connects authors and potential audiences of all sorts, from book groups to civic organizations, from bookstores to corporate events. Authors create their own page (biography, books, tour dates and availability) and any group looking for speakers can find them and contact them directly to arrange for an appearance. Relevant information for both authors and venues can be added in minutes through a simple fill-in-the-blanks interface. Connecting authors with potential audiences then becomes as easy as searching (by geography, book titles, subject, dates of availability) and sending an email.

There is an interview with the site's creators, Kevin Smokler and Adam Goldstein, on IT Conversations.

Text Encoding Initiative

TEI@20: 20 Years of Supporting the Digital Humanities.

• Pre-Conference Workshops: 31 October 2007
• Conference: 1-2 November 2007
• Members Meeting: 3 November 2007

McKeldin Library, University of Maryland College Park

Zotero Has an New Version

Zotero, the open source citation manager, has added some new features.

• Zotero now offers full-text indexing of PDFs, adding your archived PDFs to the searchable text in your collection.
• Zotero’s integration with word processing tools has been greatly improved. The MS Word plugin works much more seamlessly and we now support OpenOffice on Windows, Mac (in the form of NeoOffice), and Linux.
• Zotero is also now better integrated with the desktop. Users can drag files from their desktop into their Zotero collection and can also drag attachments out of their Zotero collection onto their desktop.
• We have begun to add tools to browse and visualize Zotero collections in new ways. Using MIT’s SIMILE Timeline widget, Zotero can now generate timelines from any collection or selected items.

Here is their description:

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

Social Software in Libraries

One of the books I'm currently reading is Social software in libraries : building collaboration, communication, and community Online by Meredith G Farkas (Amazon). It is a very readable, and seems to me reasonable treatment of the topic. Finding a mention of Catalogablog was a nice surprise.

Revised Dublin Core

Revised Dublin Core has been published as RFC 5013. This replaces the old version, RFC 2413.

Scriblio Download Now Available

Scriblio, the Mellon Award winning front end for the catalog, is now available for free download. It is based on WordPress, the popular blogging tool.

Scriblio (formerly WPopac) is an award winning, free, open source CMS and OPAC with faceted searching and browsing features based on WordPress. Scriblio is a project of Plymouth State University, supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

• Free and open source
• Represents bibliographic collections — library catalogs and such — in an easily searchable, highly remixable web-based format
• Leverages WordPress to offer rich content management features for all a library’s content
• Free and open source