Full ISBD Examples

IFLA has just published to their website full ISBD examples.

ISBD Review Group

Full ISBD Examples, a collection of full bibliographic descriptions demonstrating ISBD guidelines in a variety of language, was published in October 2009.

OCLC and RDA: Webinar

I was able to attend the recent OCLC webinar. There were four presenters: Karen Calhoun, Jean Godby, Ted Fons, and Glenn Patton. Lasting just a little bit over an hour, there was enough time for presenters and questions. The topics covered were a general overview of our diverse universe and the role of RDA in that universe. How OCLC wants to go beyond MARC21 and in particular its current projects on crosswalking metadata schemas. Then there was more information about how OCLC plans to set aside a working space for the libraries testing RDA.

In general, I found the presentations good but mostly a rehash of information already available on OCLC and RDA. The webinar seemed a good opportunity for OCLC to get the pulse of the community in regards to RDA and OCLC’s role with RDA. This was achieved through the use of user polling.

The first poll was about RDA’s objective. The leading response was that: “RDA will be more responsive to users’ finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining wanted information from library catalogs and similar tools”.

The second poll was about how people are preparing for RDA or not. The leading response was that people were using a combination of methods to prepare for RDA including revamping cataloging policies, taking webinars, reading about new developments, or attending workshops.

If you were not able to sign up for the webinar, OCLC has a recording the information. You can also view the PPT slides.

New Version of Cataloger’s Desktop

Cataloger’s Desktop 3.0 is now available. It is a major modernization of the popular web-based subscription service. Desktop is the Library of Congress’s integrated, online documentation service with the most important cataloging and metadata resources. The re-systemization of the service features a significantly enhanced bibliographic web-based toolbox.

 

Desktop 3.0 now operates with FAST Search & Transfer’s ESP platform, greatly expanding the search and information discovery techniques available. InfoSolutions, the Crestview Hills, Kentucky web product developer that has supported Cataloger’s Desktop for the past 6 years, worked with LC staff on the re-systemization.

 

Updated quarterly by the Policy and Standards Division and available to users 24-7 through the Cataloging Distribution Service, Desktop provides access to more than 280 electronic manuals, cataloging and classification standards, procedures, and metadata resources. Desktop 3.0 now adds more new operational enhancements to the service than ever before.

 

Major Enhancements

Desktop 3.0 incorporates the most up-to-date searching and navigation,

including: fuzzy matching, finding/excluding similar resources, dynamic drill-downs, contextual analysis, search relevancy, remembering search histories, query federation, facetted search drill-downs, and a search engine that adapts to a user’s search behavior. “Desktop 3.0 takes advantage of state-of-the-art search and navigation techniques which help users find exactly what they need faster and easier than ever before,” said Bruce Johnson, Cataloger’s Desktop product manager.

 

New work environment and interface enhancements include a subscriber-customizable interface, intuitive resource organization, visual clues and icons to help users conceptualize the nature of a resource and see how it interrelates with other resources, RSS feeds from the Library of Congress and other sources, drag-and-drop shortcuts, pages built on-the-fly based on result sets, and automatic alerts to changes in Desktop’s resources.

 

“Cataloger’s Desktop 3.0,” said Beecher Wiggins, director of the Library of Congress’s Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate, “is a good example of the Library’s continuing commitment to catalogers everywhere.” To that end, catalogers will soon have ample opportunity to see Desktop 3.0 for themselves.

“Cataloger’s Desktop 3.0 will be demonstrated continually in the Library of Congress exhibit booth at the ALA midwinter meeting in Boston in January 2010,” announced Dr. Barbara Tillett, chief of the Library of Congress’s Policy and Standards Division. “To help users make the most of the new product enhancements,” she added, “Library of Congress staff have been busy creating an array of helpful documentation.”

 

To help users optimize their use of Cataloger’s Desktop 3.0, a battery of learning aids and practical tips are now being developed and will be accessible online shortly. These include a series in webinars in both English and Spanish, free online training files, PowerPoint presentations, and “at-a-glance” how-to handouts.

 

For more technical details visit www.loc.gov/cds/notices/desktop09.pdf

.

Visit the Cataloger’s Desktop website at www.loc.gov/cds/desktop .

 

NGC4lib on WEMI and Identifiers

The listserv, the Next Generation Catalog for Libraries has been extremely busy this last month. Three discussions really stand out: FRBR’s Group 1 entities and what type of identifiers are associated with them, in particular works, expressions and manifestations ; Tim Berners Lee and the Semantic Web ; FRBR’s user tasks and their continued relevance.

Unlike some listservs, these threads can be read in their entirety online. William Denton’s FRBR blog as well as some others have already advertised this to the community. I would like to re-advertise these discussions because of their importance in understanding FRBR and RDA among other things. In doing so, I would like to highlight some points from these threads. I will do this in a series of 3 blogs one on identifiers, a second on user tasks, and then end with the thread on Tim Berners Lee, which is still very active on NGC4LIB.

FRBR has 3 entity groups. Group 1 is comprised of the WEMI or work, expression, manifestation, and item. Barbara Tillett has some excellent presentations out on the web on FRBR and RDA. She recently presented at the NISO webinar, Bibliographic Control Alphabet Soup. Under “agenda”, there is the possibility to download the slides from this event. Also, Barbara mentioned on the NGC4LIB listserv that she will be publishing another article on RDA.

In general, Group 1 are things either physical and concrete (manifestation and item) or abstract (work and expression). In RDA, attributes are used to describe and characterize these Group 1 entities. And relationships play a huge role in RDA to link works to other works, expressions or manifestations and so forth.

In the thread from NGC4LIB, it was asked whether any in the group 1 had any inherent identifiers. The example of authority records and their identifier or ISBNs for books was given. This question prompted a discussion on not only the differences between work, expression, and manifestation but how it was possible to conceive of them with a unique identifier.

Here are some highlighted points:

• Can an OCLC numbers be considered an identifier for manifestations?
  • One of the problems raised about using OCLC numbers as identifiers was that not all resources have an OCLC number. Consider as an example many records sold by vendors that state specifically that they cannot be entered into OCLC but only be accessed under the terms of agreement reached by the institution and vendor.
  • Another issue was that in many OCLC records, one OCLC number refers to different ISBNs -perhaps the hardcover and the paperback editiions. In this sense, one OCLC number is used for 2 distinct manifestations.
• Can the International Standard Text Code be used as an identifier for works? Or can the ISTC be used as an identifier for expressions?
  • The issue is clear with these two questions. Is the ISTC number about “Moby Dick” and not the version, edition of a particular Moby Dick as Karen Coyle pointed out? In this way, the ISTC would not be an identifier for manifestations. Then, the ISTC identifier is perhaps used for expressions; some supported this suggestion in the thread. Yet, Karen Coyle highlighted that if several expressions could be linked together, this would create a work that could have a ISTC number for that grouping. Another similar example was that the text could receive a ISTC number and then there would be versions of it, such as the 3rd ed. with an introduction from a well-known scholar and a new completed timeline with different identifiers -perhaps a ISBN. The question is whether a ISTC number could be used for expressions or works.

What I found fascinating about this thread was of course the discussion between well versed and very knowledgeable people on FRBR. More than that, I was intrigued in how people were trying to use what is currently available, in this case ISTC identifiers, in order to help the library world sort out how to identify works, expressions, and manifestations. The reason this is so important is that RDA forces catalogers to think about and rethink how all the Group 1, 2, and 3 entities relate to one another as well as to the larger context of scholarly knowledge. In particular on the Internet, the way to create these relationships is by linking data. For this to happen, it is necessary to have a unique and permanent identifier so that one thing can point to another. This is the type of work currently being done by the Metadata Registry and their vocabularies as well as the SKOS project at the Library of Congress for their authorities and vocabularies.

If you have time, definitely take a detour to read this thread. It is short but very informative.

ARL Workshop on METS

ARL has just announced a new workshop on METS, called METS Beyond the Basics. You can see the Library of Congress’ website to get more information on this transmission standard typically used in Digital Libraries at: http://www.loc.gov/standards/mets/.

Here is the information on the workshop:

January 18–22, 2010
Boston, Massachusetts
ALA Hotel TBD and 90 Mt. Auburn, Harvard University

Register here

The Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) is a data encoding and transmission specification, expressed in XML, that provides a means for conveying the structural, descriptive, and administrative metadata necessary for both the management of digital objects within a repository and the exchange of such objects between repositories (or between repositories and their users). This common digital object format was designed to facilitate both the exchange of digital materials among institutions and vendors, and the shared development of supporting tools. METS is currently used by libraries and cultural heritage institutions worldwide including the Library of Congress, the British Library, the German National Library, the Ministry of Culture Spain, the National Diet Library Japan, the National Library of Finland, the National Library of Portugal, the National Library of Wales and numerous research libraries across the globe.

Although continuous, this hands-on workshop consists of three modules, any of which may be taken independently.

* Module 1: An Overview of METS – offers a thorough introduction to METS including an overview of all of its high level features. (Duration: one day).
* Module 2: Strategies for encoding various content types – delves deeply into the heart of METS: the flexible mechanisms it provides for encoding, organizing and representing digital content of various kinds and for different purposes. (Duration: two days).
* Module 3: Strategies for implementing METS in a production environment – explores strategies for implementing METS in a production environment, and reviews existing tools that can facilitate implementation. (Duration: two days).

For further details on the modules including outcome goals, intended audience, and hardware and software suggestions, please see this PDF document.
Academy Instructors
Nancy J. Hoebelheinrich

Nancy J. Hoebelheinrich, Metadata Specialist / Digital Library Consultant. Nancy J. Hoebelheinrich is a digital library consultant specializing in Metadata and Content Management. She has worked as metadata coordinator for Stanford University Libraries / Academic Information Resources for 10 years, focusing upon digitization, preservation and retrieval of cultural heritage resources, government documents, geospatial, and teaching and learning resources. Nancy has been active in a number of information and educational technology specification efforts including that of PREMIS (for preservation metadata), IMS Global specifications related to packaging, repository and resource list interoperability, digital rights expression and management, and the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee’s RAMLET project. She has been a member of the METS Editorial Board since 2002 and has served as its administrative co-chair since 2005. In this capacity she co-authored the METS Primer and Reference Manual.
Rick Beaubien

Rick Beaubien, Software Engineer/Digital Library Consultant. Rick Beaubien has been involved in library automation at the University of California, Berkeley since 1979. In 1997, he became a technical lead and principal programmer in the U.C. Berkeley Library’s standards based digital library initiatives. In this capacity, he participated continuously in the development of METS from its origins in the Making of America II project, for which the U.C. Berkeley General Library was the lead institution. Rick has been a member of the METS Editorial Board since its inception and currently is the technical chair of the board. In his METS Board capacity, he co-authored the METS Primer and Reference Manual, has participated in the implementation of new digital library standards such as the VRA core and has assisted other institutions such as the Yale University Library with their implementations of METS.
Who Should Attend

The first module assumes some familiarity with XML, but no prior experience with METS. The second module and third modules build on and deepen a basic understanding of METS.
Date/Location

On Monday, January 18, 2010, Module 1 will be held at an ALA hotel to be determined. Tuesday through Thursday, Jan. 19-22, Modules 2 & 3 will be held at 90 Mt. Auburn, Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts.
Fee

The participation fee depends on how many of the modules you wish to attend. There are six different options: you may register for any one of the three modules or any one of three combinations of the modules. Please choose only one:

* Option A: Module 1- $300 (January 18th) “An Overview of METS” – Location: ALA hotel
* Option B: Module 2 – $600 (January 19-20th) “Strategies for encoding various content types” – Location: 90 Mt. Auburn, Harvard University, Room 021
* Option C: Module 3 – $600 (January 21-2nd) “Strategies for implementing METS in a production environment” – Location: 90 Mt. Auburn, Harvard University, Room 007 (Thursday) & Room 021 (Friday)
* Option D: Module 1 & 2 – $750
* Option E: Module 2 & 3 – $1,050
* Option F: All Modules – $1,275

Beverages, coffee, and snacks provided for morning and afternoon breaks. Lunches will be on your own.
More Information

For further details, including expanded module descriptions, instructor bios, and information on lodging, please see this PDF document.
Register

Click here to register
Contact Information

David Green
Library Relations Coordinator
Association of Research Libraries
Statistics and Assessment Program
21 Dupont Circle, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036-1543
202-296-2296 x136
david@arl.org

Cancellation Policy
ARL reserves the right to cancel any event up to (and including) December 18, 2009. An e-mail announcement will be sent to registrants in the event of a cancellation. Registrants will receive a full refund.

Participant Cancellations
Written requests for cancellation will be honored until (and including) December 18, 2009, with a $150 cancellation fee. After that date, no refund will be given. Registration and payment may be transferred to another individual at your institution. If you wish to cancel or transfer, please send an e-mail with your request to Yolanda Glass at yolanda@arl.org.

Training Catalogers for RDA

In the latest issue of the Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, there were two articles on RDA.

• Hitchens, Alison and Symons, Ellen. (2009). Preparing catalogers for RDA training. Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, 47(8), 691-707.
• Seikel, Michele. (2009). No more romanizing : The attempt to be less Anglocentric in RDA. Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, 47(8), 741-748.

The first article presented some good ideas in terms of preparing catalogers for RDA. Some of the points highlighted:

• Compare RDA to AACR2
• Give concrete examples of how RDA and AACR2 are different and similar
• Provide links to listservs, blogs, and other sources of good information
• Make sure that people understand the new vocabulary of RDA
• Update or create new manuals
• Provide step by step concrete examples that help people learn how to use RDA to do their work

All of these points are very good to remember, especially the concrete examples. The second article is less about training but informative all the same. It adds more context to RDA because it explains how RDA hopes to be more international in scope. This orientation helps to understand the reason for some instructions. As a result, it is possible to better understand some instructions in RDA. For example, I found this article helpful when reading about transcribing notes in the language or script of the resource. Above all, I found that the advice listed in the first article good not just if you need to get a department ready for RDA. Hitchens and Symons’ advice could be adapted to any new task or change for which catalogers need to be trained. I would definitely recommend reading these articles.

NISO Conference

A new webinar from NISO. Remember that there is a fee. However, with registration, you also have access to their archives for a year.

Join NISO for our November webinar Data, Data Everywhere featuring Migration
and System Population Practices.

When:
November 11, 2009
1:00 – 2:30 p.m. (Eastern Time)

About the Webinar:
The scope and scale of metadata repositories continues to grow, with
increasingly heterogeneous data and complexity both on the ingest side
(e.g., bibliographic metadata) and in inter- and intra-organizational
exchange of usage, patron, purchase, and accounting data. While data format
and exchange standards are a given, how do policies, implementations, and
standards interact? What are some examples of effective alignment of
standards, policies and implementation, and what challenges remain?

Agenda:

Data quality, policy, and large-scale data flows
How do regional consortia establish and implement policies to allow them to
cope with increasing amounts of data in a widening variety of formats?

– Hilary Newman, Vice President of Implementation Services, Innovative
Interfaces, Inc.

Academic library perspective
Individual research libraries provide local, customized services for their
audiences that are based upon large quantities of data — hopefully of high
quality and supported by easy-to-use tools and processes provided by vendors
and consortia. What are the successes, stress points, and failures from the
perspective of the academic library?

– Maribeth Manoff, Coordinator for Networked Service Integration,
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

– Robert McDonald, Associate Dean for Library Technologies, Indiana
University

For more information and to register, visit the event webpage
(http://www.niso.org/news/events/2009/ datasystems09). Registration is per
site (access for one computer) and includes access to the online recorded
archive of the webinar. NISO and NASIG members receive a discounted member
rate. A student discount is also available. Can’t make it on the 11th?
Register and gain access to the recorded archive for one year.

This webinar is sponsored by Ex Libris.

Google Chrome

Google is very busy these days. Add to the list of their activities the new operating system Chrome. Digital Inspiration had this to say about Google Chrome.

Built from SUSE Studios, the Chrome OS Linux is basically is a light install of SUSE Linux containing that latest developer build of Chrome for Linux that launches by default on startup.  You can either download either a virtual hard drive with Chrome OS installed to run it inside Virtual Box or VMware, or you can burn the Linux distro onto a disk and install it to your hard drive. The files are compressed in the .tar.gz format so you can use the free 7-Zip program to extract them on to the local drive.

When you start up Chrome OS Linux, the Google Chrome browser will automatically run and will ask you to choose whether to set Chrome as the default browser and to send anonymous data to Google about the browser. Everything should be automatically setup for you to quickly browse the web. Most websites will work fine though the Flash player is not supported in this version of the Google Chrome browser.

Google Chrome is open source and according to their official blog site is very lightweight. Currently, it is still under development. If you want to play around with this, it is possible to download the browser Google Chrome.

A New Literacy

Over at incrementalism.net, there was a recent post called Academic Exercises. This post was a reaction to a piece in the Wire by Clive Thomson who quotes a survey done by Andrea Lunsford and her research on student writing.

In the Wire article, Clive begins with a familiar refrain: young adults entering college are unable to write well. Their attention span is limited. They are not well educated. They spend hours of their time talking about themselves on Facebook or Tweeting nonsense. To counter this stereotype, Clive summarizes the recent research of Pr. Andrea Lunsford.

Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.

Her conclusions contradict the stereotypes of young adults who cannot write. Here is a list of some of her conclusions:

• Technology is reviving our ability to write
• Technology is taking our literacy in new directions
• Young people write more than any other generation
• Young people are adept are formulating arguments in a public and oftentimes controversial sphere

What is interesting about Clive’s article is that he reports that Andrea Lunsford found that students are disappointed with their academic papers because there is no audience. So, what students write does not have an immediate or no effect on the world. Their exercises tend to be purely intellectual exercises.

The post, Academic Exercises, re-emphasizes this last point. Many of the papers written for college are exercises. They don’t necessarily engage the student in new and interesting ways. They have no or at best a minimal affect on the world at large.

So I find it really interesting to learn that a whole generation of students shares my disdain for purely academic exercises. OK, maybe that’s an overstatement, but I think the article does point out a need for change in the way school work is assigned. Students who are used to creating and sharing their creations as a part of their daily life won’t be motivated to work on projects that they’re expressly forbidden to collaborate with their peers on, and which effectively die on the day they’re handed in for grading.

As this post highlights, there are many new ways of engaging students. But of course, this takes a lot of time in order to plan lessons and organize new types of learning activities adopted to various learning styles. Unfortunately, my experience is that many in academia are fantastic researchers. Yet, the amazing teachers stand out because there are not many of them. There seems to be a struggle not just with students and exercises but also in terms of the role played and expected of faculty. Are faculty researchers or instructors or both? If they are also instructors why is it that there are not graduate courses to help future faculty to become good instructors? Of course, research brings in a lot of money and prestige for a college/university. It is also students who bring money, prestige, and who become future alumni. Though some colleges/university focus on the importance of instruction, not all provide the support that faculty might need in order to meet the changing face of what students expect and how they hope to be engaged. It is not just that some schools need to know how to better engage students but also how faculty can be better prepared as instructors.

RDA Website: Humor and All

ColinAndShort have this very useful and funny website on RDA at: http://sites.google.com/site/codlinandshort/home.

All the links are real and lead to not just chapters of RDA but also to OCLC’s work with RDA, ONIX and FRBR for example.

The presentation makes for an enjoyable read and definitely less intimidating than the very dry texts that are usually presented on RDA and FRBR.