From Cataloging Futures: 

 

"Martha Yee has a new article available at the UC eScholarship repository, Cataloging, Compared to Descriptive Bibliography, Abstracting and Indexing Services and Metadata."

Providing Access to Uncataloged Special Collections with In - Process Records, by Lundy, M. W .

From RLG:

"I am pleased to announce that the RLG Partner Copyright Investigation Summary Report is now available. This report summarizes interviews conducted between August and September 2007 with staff from eight partner institutions. Interviewees shared information about how and why institutions investigate and collect copyright evidence, both for mass digitization projects and for items in special collections. This report is one of the deliverables of the Contribute to the Development of a Registry of Copyright Evidence Project that is part of our Create New Structures and Service Areas work agenda program."

"..interesting article on automated metadata crosswalking from the new Code4lib issue:
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/54

It details a web service that OCLC is providing for metadata conversion ("Crosswalk Web Service"); ... it gives a thorough and well-written look at the technical details of generalizing data conversion."

"The DLF Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI) Phase 2 Steering Group has been investigating interoperability between integrated library system acquisition modules and electronic resource management systems for the last 18 months. In January 2007 the ERMI2 subcommittee charged with this work released a draft report for comment.

The subcommittee is now pleased to make available the final report of this investigation, available from . The release will also be announced this week at the 2008 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia."

Toward a Code of Ethics for Cataloging
Sheila Bair - Technical Services Quarterly, 2005

Cataloging is the foundation of librarianship, and catalogers are professionals with special skills that set them apart from the profession in general and give them unique ethical responsibilities.

"Social tagging, which is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, and social indexing, allows ordinary users to assign keywords, or tags, to items. Typically these items are Web-based resources and the tags become immediately available for others to see and use. Unlike traditional classification, social tagging keywords are typically freely chosen instead of using a controlled vocabulary. Social tagging is of interest to researchers because it is possible that with a sufficiently large number of tags, useful folksonomies will emerge that can either augment or even replace traditional ontologies. As a result, social tagging has created a renewed level of interest in manual indexing [1]. In order for researchers to understand the benefits and limitations of using user-generated tags for indexing and retrieval purposes, it is important to investigate to what extent community influences tagging behaviour, characteristic effects on tag datasets, and whether this influence helps or hinders search and retrieval."

"PALINET's Senior Technology Consultant, John Houser, explores the benefits of implementing open source solutions in libraries in his article, "Why Look at Open Source Now?" This article is available to view on the PALINET Leadership Network (PLN). An excerpt:

"The open source development model promises freedom to its participants: the freedom to download, test, modify, and put into production software without paying licensing fees."

"Columbia University Libraries' Robert Wolven reflects on what's next for cooperative cataloging"

Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)response to the LC Working Group

"Facet-based interfaces demonstrate some limitations of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which were designed to deal with constraints that do not exist in the current computerized environment. This paper discusses some challenges for using LCSH for faceted browsing and navigation in library catalogs. Ideas are provided for improving results through system design, changes to LCSH practice, and LCSH structure."

Final report of the WG was released on Jan. 10, 2008

AALL's official response to the report of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control

OCLC's response (written by Karen Calhoun) to the draft report of the LC Working Group on the Future of 
Bibliographic Control

"The goal of the terminologies services meeting was to determine which components of a terminologies service the participants (drawn from the RLG Programs partnership and representing a wide range of different communities and roles) find the most compelling. Desired meeting outcomes included a list of the most important features and use-cases in order to help prioritize efforts of RLG Programs and OCLC Research in this area of work."

"We just issued the results of the RLG Programs Descriptive Metadata Practices survey.

We conducted this survey in July and August 2007 among 18 RLG partners in the United States and the United Kingdom, selected because they had "multiple metadata creation centers" on campus that included libraries, archives, and museums and had some interaction among them. (Ten of these partners are also represented on this focus group.) Our objective was to gain a baseline understanding of current descriptive metadata practices and dependencies, the first project in our program to change metadata creation processes."

Web page now has links to both the webcast and PP slides from the event

From Peter Brantley's blog

"ACRL has issued a new white paper, "Establishing a Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication: A Call for Community Engagement," resulting from a one-day invitational meeting to collectively brainstorm the evidence needed to manage and influence the changing system of scholarly communication."

From catalogablog: 

Smith, Tiffany (2007) Cataloging and You: Measuring the Efficacy of a Folksonomy for Subject Analysis. In Lussky, Joan, Eds. Proceedings 18th Workshop of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Special Interest Group in Classification Research, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Abstract
The Google Books Project has drawn a great deal of attention, offering the prospect of the library of the future and rendering many other library and digitizing projects apparently superfluous. To grasp the value of Google's endeavor, we need among other things, to assess its quality. On such a vast and undocumented project, the task is challenging. In this essay, I attempt an initial assessment in two steps. First, I argue that most quality assurance on the Web is provided either through innovation or through "inheritance." In the later case, Web sites rely heavily on institutional authority and quality assurance techniques that antedate the Web, assuming that they will carry across unproblematically into the digital world. I suggest that quality assurance in the Google's Book Search and Google Books Library Project primarily comes through inheritance, drawing on the reputation of the libraries, and before them publishers involved. Then I chose one book to sample the Google's Project, Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. This book proved a difficult challenge for Project Gutenberg, but more surprisingly, it evidently challenged Google's approach, suggesting that quality is not automatically inherited. In conclusion, I suggest that a strain of romanticism may limit Google's ability to deal with that very awkward object, the book.

from NGC4LIB

"Dan Chudnov has done a lot of thinking on how itunes and zeroconf could fit into libraries, collected here:

http://onebiglibrary.net/taxonomy/term/39

And a good starting point is here:

http://onebiglibrary.net/story/zeroconf-meta-opensearch-part-one

In fact, I think Dan answers the question brilliantly by posing another question: "shouldn't our whole libraries be as easy to connect and share as iTunes?" Sounds like a good candidate for a NGC to me."

Special Collections in ARL Libraries: Results of the 1998 Survey Sponsored by the ARL Research Collections Committee
by Judith M. Panitch, 2001

"Metadata is often called "data about data." It has been used by various communities creating geospatial data, social and scientific data sets, enterprise applications, data warehouses, educational resources, and bibliographic data. In the traditional library world, catalog records are metadata, as they contain information about the library's collection of "data," i.e., the books and journals that make up its collections. Increasingly, libraries have been adopting emerging metadata standards such as Dublin Core, EAD, MODS, and TEI to describe, discover, preserve, manage, and provide access to electronic resources and digital objects.

This SPEC survey investigated how metadata is implemented in ARL member libraries: which staff are creating metadata and for what kinds of digital objects, what schemas and tools they use to create and manage metadata, what skills metadata staff need and how they acquire them, and the organizational changes and challenges that metadata has brought to libraries."

"The Indiana University Veriations2 and Variations3 projects use a work-based metadata model for discovery of musical sound recordings, scanned score images, and encoded score notation files. This model has been described as ³FRBR-like² and is mentioned in various discussions of FRBR-based systems, but it is not technically a FRBR implementation.

As the project team investigates long-term sustainability issues for the Variations3 software, we have begun thinking about what a truly FRBR-ized version of the metadata model would look like, and if changing to this type of model would make our system more sustainable and interoperable. As a first step towards answering these questions, members of the Variations3 project team have released a report outlining the potential application of FRBR to a system designed to deliver musical content in a library environment."

Will The Response Of The Library Profession To The Internet Be Self-Immolation?
by Martha M. Yee, with a great deal of help from Michael Gorman

User tagging of library resources: Toward a framework for system evaluation
JONATHAN FURNER (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)

 Presented at IFLA 2007

 

Entire issue is devoted to hidden collections - papers from the Sept. 2003 conference

Discusses "U of Chicago initiatives related to "uncovering hidden collections," leveraging cooperative collection development and faculty partnerships"

"The PACSCL survey includes ratings for physical condition, physical access, quality of housing, intellectual access, and research value. This information will be used to prioritize action for joint projects involving PACSCL backlogs. "

Creating Access to Invisible Special Collections: Using Participatory Management to Reduce a Backlog
MW Lundy, DR Hollis - The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 2004 - Elsevier

Special Collections Cataloging at a Crossroads: A Survey of ARL Libraries
BM Russell - The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 2004 - Elsevier

"This session explored how libraries are using emerging standards to manage and provide navigation for digital library objects. A panel of speakers reviewed their digital library implementations involving METS, MODS, PREMIS and MIX, while also providing an introduction with background information on these standards.

The aim of the program was to demonstrate how institutions can provide new methods for display, use and management of digital objects on their websites and in their repositories, using widely available open source XML tools."

June 25, 2007

"The Digital Library Federation Aquifer Metadata Working Group is proud to announce the release of the DLF Aquifer MODS Guidelines Levels of Adoption.

The Levels of Adoption document is intended to supplement the Digital Library Federation / Aquifer Implementation Guidelines for Shareable MODS Records, released in November 2006 under the auspices of the DLF Aquifer initiative. The Shareable MODS Guidelines represent a record-centric view of Aquifer's goals, whereas it is often helpful to set priorities for metadata creation with a user- and use-centric view. The newly-released Levels of Adoption document describes five general categories of user functionality that are likely to be supported by following specific recommendations from the Guidelines. It attempts to provide additional guidance to MODS implementers in the planning process by documenting what sorts of functionality is possible when certain elements of the Guidelines are
followed."

Blob notes on the 3rd meeting

Basic Values and the Future of Cataloging
presentations from an ALCTS/CCS Forum, Jan. 21, 2007 from 8 to 10 am at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, Washington

"Louise F. Spiteri writes: "Folksonomies have the potential to add much value to public library catalogs by enabling clients to store, maintain, and organize items of interest in the catalog using their own tags. Tags were acquired over a 30-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 guidelines for the construction of controlled vocabularies."...

The University of Windsor has released a background document intended as a first step in evaluating the current environment with respect to Integrated Library Systems.

Blog entry on the 2nd mtg.

LJ article (Roy Tennant) on the 1st mtg

Karen Coyle's summary of the 1st mtg.

Andrew Pace's blog on the 1st mtg

Blog entry about the 2nd meeting

Blog entry with various links about the 1st meeting

Blog on the 2nd meeting

Blog on the 2nd meeting

"In May 2006, the University of Washington Libraries began integrating their digital collections into the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Why? Students often start their research outside of the library's Web site, so it made sense to put links in one of the top Web reference resources to lead students back to resources available to them in the library."

SUMMARY: This paper proposes encoding information that would be needed in a MARC 21 record to be able to ascertain facts concerning copyright status. This would facilitate the user to make a reasonable judgment about what use is allowed of the resource, and is particularly important in the digital world, where resources are accessed outside the context of the originating archive. It suggests using a single field to contain all copyright information, even if repeating other data somewhere else in the record, because of the complications.

Two meanings of identifier = Two Functions of ‘Identifiers' => Fulfilled with only one mechanism in traditional anglo-american cataloging.

And the harm this causes.

Co-authors David Miller and Patrick Le Boeuf have received an award from Cataloging & Classification Quarterly for the best article published in volume 39.

The award panel state, "This captivatingly crafted article brings a panoply of historiography and knowledge organization to bear on the problem of how to define and describe the records of evanescence: that is, performances. The dream metaphor, which is all mixed up with the show-biz metaphor, which reaches back to Shakespeare's Tempest is all too apt for the nature of performances, and especially for their treatment with FRBR. The paper is timely, original, innovative, extremely well-documented, and of enduring
value. It has appeared at a critical juncture for the application of the FRBR model in the bibliographic control of performances. We applaud the authors. Bravo!"

The IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records is pleased to announce that a 2nd draft of "Functional Requirements for Authority Data" (previously titled "Functional Requirements for Authority Records") is now available for worldwide review. This draft, updated in response to comments received during the previous review, is on the IFLA web site at http://www.ifla.org/VII/d4/wg-franar.htm .

Comments should be sent by July 15, 2007 to:
Glenn Patton
Email: pattong@oclc.org

ABSTRACT: Moving to a fully faceted syntax would resolve three problems facing Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): 1. Inconsistent syntax rules; 2. Inability to create headings that are coextensive with the topic of a work; and 3. Lack of effective displays for long lists of subdivisions under a single subject heading in OPACs and similar electronic displays. The authors advocate a fully faceted syntax using the facets of a modern faceted library classification (The Bliss Bibliographic Classification, 2d ed.). They demonstrate how this might be accomplished so as to integrate the new syntax with existing headings.

"In Google's Broad Wake: Taking Responsibility for Shaping the Global Digital Library," by Richard K. Johnson, brings together a number of articulations of core library interests in digitization partnerships, identifies six key interests against which potential agreements should be evaluated, and urges libraries and their institutions to "make full use of whatever leverage they have to ensure the global digital library is open and dynamic."

Title: A Model for Academic Libraries 2005 to 2025
Authors: Lewis, David W.

Issue Date: 12-Jan-2007
Abstract: The paper presents a model for academic libraries for the next 20 years. The parts of the model are: 1.) Complete the migration from print to electronic collections; 2.) Retire legacy print collections; 3.) Redevelop the library space; 4.) Reposition library and information tools, resources, and expertise, and 5.) Migrate the focus of collections from purchasing materials to curating content. The interactions of the parts of the model and organizational issues for implementation are explored.
Description: Paper presented at "Visions of Change," California State University at Sacramento, January 26, 2007.

Bibliography on the Futurelib wiki - this is the wiki of the next gen catalog group

"The Library of Congress, as part of the PREMIS maintenance activity, commissioned Karen Coyle to provide this study to assist the newly established PREMIS Editorial Committee, in consultation with the PREMIS Implementers Group, with its first revision of the data dictionary and schemas.  The intention is to improve the specification so that institutions trying to assess their rights to preserve materials in digital formats will be able to provide enough information in their digital repositories to make such assessments about their materials over time. In this study Karen Coyle reviews the landscape of digital rights, analyzes various preservation rights scenarios and the sorts of preservation actions that digital repositories might take, relates copyright law to preservation actions, and provides recommendations for revision where the data dictionary needs expansion."

Free to download.   Friefox extension.   Need to read to see if we might use for catalog link-checking

A Columbia Librarian posted a long article about tagging systems and their use in libraries. Interesting reading.

from publisher...

What is the magic formula for turning a place into a high-tech capital? How can a city or region become a high-tech powerhouse like Silicon Valley? For over half a century, through boom times and bust, business leaders and politicians have tried to become "the next Silicon Valley," but few have succeeded. This book examines why high-tech development became so economically important late in the twentieth century, and why its magic formula of people, jobs, capital, and institutions has been so difficult to replicate. Margaret O'Mara shows that high-tech regions are not simply accidental market creations but "cities of knowledge"--planned communities of scientific production that were shaped and subsidized by the original venture capitalist, the Cold War defense complex.

At the heart of the story is the American research university, an institution enriched by Cold War spending and actively engaged in economic development. The story of the city of knowledge broadens our understanding of postwar urban history and of the relationship between civil society and the state in late twentieth-century America. It leads us to further redefine the American suburb as being much more than formless "sprawl," and shows how it is in fact the ultimate post-industrial city. Understanding this history and geography is essential to planning for the future of the high-tech economy, and this book is must reading for anyone interested in building the next Silicon Valley.

Margaret Pugh O'Mara teaches history at Stanford University. The dissertation this book is based upon won the Urban History Association's award for Best Dissertation in Urban History completed in 2002.

From EDUCAT:

Taylor, Arlene G. "Teaching Authority Control." Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 38, no. 3/4 (2004): 43-57.  Also published in _Authority Control in Organizing and Accessing Information: Definition and International Experience_. Arlene G. Taylor and Barbara B. Tillett, eds. New York: The Haworth Information Press, 2004), pp. 43-57.

It contains several suggestions from people on this list [EDUCAT] as to ways to teach authority control (and also substantiates the very difficult task that it seems to be for all of us to get the point across).

"To raise awareness about metadata and encourage its adoption, the Stock Artists Alliance is releasing its Metadata Manifesto. The Manifesto provides guiding principles and practices for anyone who creates, uses, or manages electronic images, as well as those developing digital hardware and software. Highlighting the efforts of international standards bodies and industry groups (such as IPTC and PLUS), the Manifesto stresses the urgency for industry-wide metadata adoption."