Image via WikipediaAs the result of the split of Republic of the Sudan (or conventional short form: Sudan) into Sudan and South Sudan in July 2011, new country and geographic area codes are being defined for use in MARC records.
Image via WikipediaLC has announced that new vocabulary data has been added to the LC Authorities and Vocabularies Service.The Library of Congress is pleased to make available additional vocabularies from its Authorities and Vocabularies web service (ID.LOC.GOV), which provides access to Library of Congress standards and vocabularies as Linked Data. The new dataset is:
In addition, the service has been enhanced to provide separate access to the following datasets which have been a part of the LCSH dataset access:
- Library of Congress Name Authority File (LC/NAF)
The LC/NAF data are published in RDF using the MADS/RDF and SKOS/RDF vocabularies, as are the other datasets. Individual concepts are accessible at the ID.LOC.GOV web service via a web browser interface or programmatically via content-negotiation. The vocabulary data are available for bulk download in MADS and SKOS RDF (the Name file and main LCSH file will be available by Friday, August 12).
- Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms
- Library of Congress Children's Headings
Please explore it for yourself at http://id.loc.gov.
The Library of Congress is making its controlled vocabularies and classification system freely accessible on the Web. This presentation describes our services related to two of those controlled vocabularies and classification schemes: the Library of Congress Subject Headings and Library of Congress Classification. It also describes the work to link various language versions of LCSH together.Thanks to Gary Price for bringing this to my attention.
The initial structure for this service uses SKOS, Simple Knowledge Organization System, which “Provides a model for expressing the basic structure and content of concept schemes such as thesauri, classification schemes, subject heading lists, taxonomies, folksonomies, and other similar types of controlled vocabulary.
Additionally we are exploring RDF XML as another structure to use for presenting this data. The service can be found at http://id.loc.gov and the LCSH/SKOS is at http://id.loc.gov/authorities.
Image via WikipediaOCLC's Technical Bulletin 260, “OCLC-MARC Format Update 2011,” is now available.This Technical Bulletin covers all of the Library of Congress’s MARC 21 Bibliographic, Authority, and Holdings Formats Update No. 12, dated October 2010, elements from other recent MARC 21 Updates whose implementations had been postponed, code list additions and changes published chiefly since May 2010, and other suggestions from WorldCat users and OCLC staff. Many of these elements, including those from MARC 21 Update No. 12, are related to Resource Description and Access (RDA).
Image via WikipediaVarious reports have been posted on the IFLA web site.
The cover sheets for the proposals and discussion paper presented at the 2011 Annual meetings of the MARC Advisory Committee have been updated with the results of the discussions. They are available at:
Proposal 2011-02: RDA Production, Publication, Distribution and Manufacture Statements in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-02.html)
Proposal 2011-03: Encoding Date of Copyright Notice in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-03.html)
Proposal 2011-04: Adapting Field 377 (Associated Language) for Language of Expression in the Authority and Bibliographic Format
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-04.html)
Proposal 2011-05: Broadening field 373 (Affiliation) for Associated institutions in the MARC 21 Authority Format
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-05.html)
Proposal 2011-06: RDA Fuller Form of Personal Name Attribute in the MARC 21 Authority Format
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-06.html)
Proposal 2011-07: Additional Corporate Body Attributes for RDA in the MARC 21 Authority Format
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-07.html)
Proposal 2011-08: Treatment of Controlled Lists of Terms for Carrier Characteristics in RDA in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-08.html)
Proposal 2011-09: Identifying the Source of Thematic Index Numbers in Field 383 in the MARC 21 Authority and Bibliographic Formats
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-09.html)
Proposal 2011-10: Geographic Codes in Classification Records
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-10.html)
Proposal 2011-11: Addition of 1st Indicator Value 7 (Other edition specified in $2) in DDC Number Fields in the MARC 21 Bibliographic, Authority and Community Information Formats
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-11.html)
Discussion Paper 2011-DP05: Additional Means of Identifying Medium of Performance in the MARC21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats
(http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-dp05.html)
The Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC), the DCMI/RDA Task Group (http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/), and ALA Publishing (on behalf of the co-publishers of RDA) are pleased to announce that the first group of RDA controlled vocabularies have been reviewed, approved, and their status in the Open Metadata Registry (OMR) changed to ‘published.’
This status change, from ‘new-proposed’ to ‘published’ signals that the final steps have begun in reviewing the work of the DCMI/RDA Task Group and ensuring that the RDA vocabularies (both elements and controlled vocabularies/concepts) are available in a stable form for the builders of applications. Additional reviews of the controlled vocabularies are in progress, with the parties involved expecting to finalize that group before starting on the element vocabularies. Both groups of vocabularies should be complete by the end of 2011, but developers and others should expect to see rolling announcements as reviews are completed.
Alan Danskin, Chair of the Joint Steering Committee, noted, “The RDA vocabularies are a fundamental component of RDA, promoting consistent description and discovery of bibliographic resources. The Committee is committed to publishing and maintaining the content of the RDA vocabularies, synchronized with the text of RDA, in order to support their use by the resource description community and by developers of Semantic Web applications.” JSC is grateful to the Task Group members and to the Open Metadata Registry for making possible the publication of RDA vocabularies as linked open data.
Gordon Dunsire, co-Chair of the DCMI/RDA Task Group, said: “This achievement is a significant waypoint on the collaborative journey initiated by the London meeting in 2007 between representatives of RDA and Semantic Web communities developing and maintaining metadata models covering bibliographic resources. We have learned much about each other along the way, and look forward to continuing to provide a bridge which supports our mutual interests to the benefit of all users of information. The RDA vocabularies represent many decades of library experience and practice which is now shared with the rest of the world.”
Troy Linker, Publisher, ALA Digital Reference, said: "The publishing of the RDA vocabularies in an open registry is an important step forward in making RDA accessible to the international library community and system vendors, and, significantly, beyond the library community to the rest of the Semantic Web. Working with the JSC, the Co-Publishers for RDA are committed to ensuring synchronicity between RDA Toolkit and the registry".
The finished vocabularies can be viewed using the links below. (The links lead to the description of the vocabulary itself, the specific terms can be viewed under the tab for ‘concepts’).
All the RDA vocabularies can be viewed in the OMR by using this page: http://metadataregistry.org/rdabrowse.htm. Those interested in following the work of review and publication of the vocabularies can subscribe to the Registry RSS feeds linked from that page. Questions on the OMR can be conveyed using the ‘Feedback’ link on each Registry page.
- RDA Aspect Ratio (http://RDVocab.info/termLIst/AspectRatio)
- RDA Form of Musical Notation (http://RDVocab.info/termList/MusNotation)
- RDA Form of Notated Music (http://RDVocab.info/termList/FormatNoteMus)
- RDA Layout of Cartographic Images (http://RDVocab.info/termList/layoutCartoImage)
- RDA Mode of Issuance (http://RDVocab.info/termLIst/ModeIssue)
- RDA Other Distinguishing Characteristic of the Expression of a Legal Work
(http://RDVocab.info/termList/OtherCharExpLegal)
- RDA Production Method for Tactile Resource (http://RDVocab.info/termList/prodTactile)
- RDA Reduction Ratio (http://RDVocab.info/termLIst/RDAReductionRatio)
- RDA Scale (http://RDVocab.info/termList/scale)
- RDA Sound Content (http://RDVocab.info/termList/soundCont)
- RDA Status of Identification (http://RDVocab.info/termList/statIdentification)
Image via WikipediaThe heading Star War films, and all other headings dealing with a series or character might be removed from the lcgft.The recent separation of the genre/form thesaurus from LCSH provides an opportunity to reexamine the genre/form terms approved during the moving image experiment in order to determine whether they fit into the overall thesaurus, given the trajectory of development.
One ongoing issue has been what may be loosely referred to as “character- and franchise-based terms.” These are authorized terms that include either a character name or the title of a film or television program (e.g., Die Hard films; Dracula television programs; Scooby-Doo television programs; Star Wars films). PSD proposes cancelling all of these terms from the genre/form thesaurus, and has posted a discussion paper explaining the rationale on the Library of Congress’ genre/form web page, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/genreformgeneral.html. The direct URL for the paper is http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/character_franchise_disposition.pdf. PSD requests input from interested parties before making a final decision.
I think it's important to convert this level of interest into action. The question is, what can be done now to get closer to the vision of ubiquitous interoperable data? My last three posts have explored what libraries might do to better position their presence in search engines and in social networks using schema.org vocabulary and Open Graph Protocol. In these applications, library data enables users to do very specific things on the web- find a library page in a search engine or "Like" a library page in a Facebook. But there's so much more that could be done with the data.
This paper addresses the name matching (duplicate detection) problem in the US patent dataset. It contains more then 400K unique company names spellings. In order to solve the matching problem we choose appropriate string similarity measure and clustering approach and estimate their parameters. Finally we apply them to the whole dataset and estimate the positives and negatives rates.
The RDA/MARC Working Group had discussions of the many points that were brought out in the MARBI discussion of 2011-DP03, Identifying Work, Expression, and Manifestation records in the MARC 21 Bibliographic, Authority, and Holdings formats. They found that while there was some sentiment for defining such a field, there was disagreement in the group and in the community about how the values in the field should be defined. It was pointed out in the discussion that there were various reasons for establishing this marker: to be able to validate that a record for a certain level contained the appropriate fields for that level; to correctly organize displays; and for applications that do not yet exist.
