Celeripedean is off for a short holiday break. See you next year

Library and Archives Canada has set up a website answering frequently asked questions about RDA. It is a good starting point and has some good links.

Colin and Short’s website, Resource Description and Access Happy Fun Time just keeps getting better.

Who can resist Claude François singing in the snow?

But in all seriousness, this site has been updated and has some great links to RDA and FRBR.

Just posted from NETSL, their spring meeting at Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. NETSL’s spring conference always has something for everyone. This year the focus is on looking towards the future and the relationship between cataloging and metadata. The program looks great so far.

Mark your calendars for the NETSL Annual Spring Conference Program 2010: Crosswalks to the Future

When: Thursday, April 15, 2010

Where: College of Holy Cross, Worcester, MA

Keynotes:

*     Dr. Barbara B. Tillett, Chief, Policy and Standards Division, Library of Congress.

“Building Blocks for the Future: Making Controlled Vocabularies Available for the Semantic Web”

*     Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager for Google Books, Google Magazines, and Google Patents.

“Creating a trillion-field catalog: metadata in Google Books”

Watch for announcements with further program information and registration details coming after the first of the year.

Questions, suggestions, or other feedback? Contact Amy Hart at netslpresident@nelib.org.

NETSL: New England Technical Services Librarians is a section of the New England Library Association. For more information about NETSL see http://www.nelib.org/netsl/

Some time ago, Thomas Mann’s published to the web his article, “What is distintive about the Library of Congress in both its collections and its means of access to them, and the reasons LC needs to maintain classified shelving of books onsite, and a way to deal effectively with the problem of “books on the floor”". It has already made the rounds of many blogs and listservs; to access the PDF version, click here.

Recently, Jim Weinheimer, from the Cooperative Cataloging Rules and an active participant on the NGC4LIB listserv, published a reply to Thomas Mann called “An Open Reply to Thomas Mann”. The pdf can be found at: http://eprints.rclis.org/17331/1/OpenMannDistinctive.pdf.
Jim offers delivers some good replies to Thomas Mann. Two that stand out are:

• Jim explains that Mann argues that: “We cannot do new things because we are too busy doing old things.”
  • Here, Jim objects to the view that librarianship is experiencing a small “bump” as he calls it. After this curve in the road, things will return to normal. I agree with Jim. Librarianship is not experiencing just a bump in the road. Librarianship is radically changing in ways I don’t think we even understand yet. Sticking to the routine or to how things have always been done will not help us prepare for these changes.
• Jim argues against libraries and librarians being “custodians of the printed materials”
  • Libraries have long since regarded themselves as solely in the print business and storing print materials. For one, it is extremely expensive and not many institutions have a budget that would allow to buy, maintain, and store a host of printed materials. Also, in order to serve their communities, it has long been known that libraries need communities services, outreach programs, services for computers, wi-fi, etc. This means that libraries are more than storage units for printed materials. What makes them come alive is their array of services that include print materials and much more.
• The old days of librarianship are over.
  • Technology is changing ever so rapidly. The way people interact with that technology to inform themselves is also changing. It is not that print materials are not a way to become informed. But it is not the only way now. Given the variety of how people seek, gather, and obtain information, libraries need to be thinking of how to meet these needs, namely how to change to meet these needs.

Jim’s reply is not long (7 pages). It is worth reading.

José Borbinha from the University of Portugal recently posted this request to participate in a case study for the European Digital Library:

This is an invitation to take part in an evaluation of an experiment in the TELplus project (http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/telplus)

Please evaluate the system described below and fill the questionnaire, according to the instructions.

The questionnaire is anonymous, and we estimate it can be answered in less than 5 minutes.

However, it has to be preceded by a “test drive” with the system, which can take as long as you want…

We appreciate the answers to the questionnaire until the end of the day of December 16 (Wednesday), please!

For any further clarification, please feel free to email to <nuno.freire@bnportugal.pt> <mailto:nuno.freire@bnportugal.pt>

———————————————-

————– Brief introduction ————–

The aim of this task is to explore possible improvements for search in The European Library (http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org), under the assumption that a presentation of the results, following the general ideas of the FRBR model, could help.

Considering that The European Library amounts to about 150 million records in 32 different languages, this might have the potential to narrow down the search results by clustering similar records (including of multiple languages).

In order to evaluate that, we developed a case with a sample collection of the works of the Literature Nobel Prize winners. For that, we used records extracted from 11 libraries, thus with a high number of works with many translations in multiple languages. We are now inviting you to evaluate this system and answer to the questionnaire available at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TELplus_FRBR_Prototype

———————————————-

———- Description of the system ———-

The system to experiment is available here:

http://digmap2.ist.utl.pt:8080/lgteFrbr/indexFrbrClustering.jsp

The system was prepared like this:

1- All the records were received in MARC21 or UNIMARC

2- All the records were transformed to the “TEL Application Profile” and indexed by a Search Engine, just like The European Library is doing nowadays

3- In parallel, all the records were also processed to build a new “FRBR database”, built according to a set of “FRBR motivated” rules that try to pre-build clusters according to what is perceived to be the same work.

The way the system works is like this:

1- Each search is first done by the Search Engine! But instead of presenting the results immediately…

2- …they are first sent to the FRBR database, which returns the same results but now grouped according to what this database already knows from the initial work’s clustering (this might comprise more records than those initially found by the search engine, and also might include enhancements in author’s names and dates). These are the results that finally are shown to the user!

For easy evaluation of the prototype, and answering the questionnaire, the search results can also be seen without the FRBR clustering at:

http://digmap2.ist.utl.pt:8080/lgteFrbr/indexFrbrLibrary.jsp

———————————————-

—– Important things to know in advance —–

- The unique purpose of this experiment is to explore new ways to present search results in order to help ANONYMOUS users to better find resources, AND NOT TO PROPOSE ANY “FRBR OPAC”!!! We only looked for inspiration in the main concepts of the FRBR model, and we never intended to build a formal FRBR database!!! In this sense, we are hiding from the presentation of results any reference to any FRBR concept, for not distracting/confusing the user.

- However, this prototype also is intended to mainly be evaluated by librarians or professionals with knowledge of the domain, so we also were not concerned in providing a “final product”. This means that the presentation of the results was decided with the main purpose of supporting evaluation, and not usability. For example, in order to see a specific record, we just present the original MarcXchange record, and did not care to provide any other visualization…

- Please do not search with diacritics. For example, to search by “L’étranger”, please use “L’etranger”.

We found a problem with this in the last moment with the search engine that might be solved at any moment, but until there is remain an annoying limitation…

- This service is hosted in a “working server”, so you might experience a slow performance if too many users are trying it on the same time… If that occurs, sorry, but please be patient…

- After this evaluation we will produce a public document with the results, as also the detailed description of the architecture of the system and of the processes…

———————————————-

—————-The collection —————-

This collection contains 92.535 records extracted from the following Libraries:

- British Library

- French National Library

- German National Library

- National Library of Hungary

- National Library of Latvia

- National Library of Lithuania

- National Library of Portugal

- National Library of Serbia

- National Library of Spain

- National Library of the Czech Republic

- Russian State Library (only records from Russian authors)

- We also received a collection form the Royal Library of Belgium, but it was not possible to use it due to a detail in the records for which we had no time to adapt the FRBR system…

The generic criteria for extraction was “all the records where the author was a Literature Nobel Prize winner” (we got a lot, but as you can imagine, we also got some noise… we did not care too much about that, as we don’t think it was important…).

This announcement was just posted by Glenn Patton:

I wanted to call OCLC-CAT readers’ attention to recent updates to the Expert Community pages on the OCLC web site (http://www.oclc.org/us/en/worldcat/catalog/quality/expert/default.htm).  The pages have been updated to clarify that, following the conclusion of the experiment last August, the functionality remain in place.  Activity has continued to be strong over the past 4 months:

August 2009             19,890 replaces

September 2009  20,854 replaces

October 2009            23,794 replaces

November 2009   18,600 replaces

The recording of the Wrap-up webinar is also available on the updated pages.  If you didn’t get a chance to participate in one of the live sessions, click on “Recorded web sessions” in the navigation bar on the left and select “Expert Community Wrap-up Webinar” from the list.

If you would like to track your own institution’s statistics, log on to OCLC Product Services Web (http://psw.oclc.org/) and select “download records and reports”.   Select the report, “OCLC Product Code Detail Usage Report”.  You can either display the report or download it.  To track your Expert Community replace activity, look for the product code, ONT6390.  Statistics are available for July through October of this fiscal year as well as for February through June of last fiscal year.  November data should be available in the next few days.

On behalf of my OCLC colleagues, thanks again for your support of the Expert Community.

Glenn E. Patton

Director, WorldCat Quality Management

OCLC

Thomas Mann’s article, “What is distintive about the Library of Congress in both its collections and its means of access to them, and the reasons LC needs to maintain classified shelving of books onsite, and a way to deal effectively with the problem of “books on the floor”", has already made the rounds of many blogs and listservs; to access the PDF version, click here. As always, Thomas Mann presents a good read and persuasive arguments against transforming the Library of Congress into something it isn’t.

To back up, the mission of the Library of Congress is:

The Library’s mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations.

This is from their mission and strategic priorities 1997-2004. The document goes on to list four priorities that touch primarily on how LC is to acquire, organize, preserve, maintain, secure, sustain, make available to Congress and the American people for present and future use the collection of human knowledge and creativity.

It is unprecedented in human history — and a uniquely American offer — to open public access to an institution that is in many respects the working library of a government and a de facto national library.

—-

What does Thomas Mann suggest the Library of Congress is turning into? In short, he is criticising a report by Deanna Marcum called “The Meeting on Digital Strategy”. His argues that Deanna compares LC to Google, newspapers and their for-profit business model, and Amazon and their business model of making a profit rather than promoting scholarship. In this sense, Thomas Mann suggeststhat Deanna Marcum is one of many who want to turn the Library of Congress into a for-profit business that purports to provide “easy” digital access to current and quick information. It is a striking commentary. However, Thomas Mann provides some persuasive arguments about why LC cannot do this.

• Preservation
  • From reading LC’s mission statement as well as Thomas’ summary of it, it is clear that LC strives to preserve past and current knowledge and human creativity. It receives as part of this goal millions of free books thanks to the mandate that all copyright books in the US be deposited in LC. In terms of providing access to these resources, LC is unique in that it provides sometimes the only copy of that item. Because not everything has been digitized and items still in copyright are not digitized, this means that LC is the only place to consult these materials. If this stopped, then access to these resources would no longer be available. As Thomas Mann points out, this would be a serious blow to scholarship.
• Scholarship
  • LC has in its mandate to provide resources for scholars as well as Congress and US citizens. In this sense, it is not just a question of finding quick and easy information that may or may not be relevent. The one stop search box and search results based on keywords is not practical. Thomas Mann gives a good example. What is a person is looking for a document about square footage and population statistics. But the document does not have such keywords as square footage, sq. ft., population, statistics, stats, or some variation of those words. Then any search with these keywords will not yield the wanted document. However, with the amount of results that such a search on Google would turn up, the person probably wouldn’t know the existence of such a document. The key to LC’s way of organizing information is that it does not rely on keywords but a classification based on a hierarchy of subjects as well as a classification alpha-numeric string denoting the primary subject. So if the document does not have any keywords of population or statistics, this would be reflected in the subject headings. Thomas Mann argues that this type of information allows scholars to find relevent information.
• Access to scholarship and quality of cataloging
  • Given the last example, Thomas Mann points out that easy access to information depends on the quality of cataloging. He was able to find the resource needed because the catalogers at LC put in subject headings and a call number. Unlike Google or Amazon, LC describes each resource and provides several ways of accessing that resource (author, subjects, title, …).
• Non commercial
  • Another aspect that Thomas Mann sees as separating LC from other libraries is that it is non commercial. Given its mandate to preserve and provide access to human creativity and knowledge, LC is going to collect and make available resources that simply are not current, do  not fit into any business model, and will not make a profit for LC. In fact, Thomas Mann says that without the help of taxpayers money, LC would have folded years ago because it is not in the money making business.

Thomas Mann asks us to question the drive to digitize collections in terms of what is being digitized and the type of access provided with online resources. He also asks us to look at what libraries are and what the Library of Congress means to the United States. If it is a de facto national library, should this be clearly stated in its mission? This is an interesting article and well worth reading whether or not you agree with Mann.

So June is the big date…..(maybe?) according the the RDA-L listserv.

RDA: Resource Description and Access will be published in June 2010.  While we regret this delay in release of RDA, the transition from publication of AACR2 as a printed manual to release of RDA as a web based toolkit is a complex process with many interdependencies.

The updated text of RDA incorporates recommendations from constituencies and other stakeholders approved at the JSC meeting earlier this year.  The revised text has been successfully loaded into the RDA database.  The product is currently undergoing thorough quality review and testing in preparation for release.

We recognize that customers and prospective users of RDA need reliable and timely information for planning and budgeting.  We are confident that this revised deadline is a realistic target for publication of RDA.

Pricing and purchasing information will be introduced at the time of the ALA Midwinter Meeting, 15-18 January 2010.

Mary Ghikas,  Chair Committee of Principals Alan Danskin, Chair Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA Don Chatham, Chair Co-publishers

Direct from the blog, Resource Shelf:

From an E-Mail:

We invite you to take a peak at the new Policies Directory before it goes live on the 13th. Click the URL below and use the following authorization/password to

Head to https://policies-preview.oclc.org

and use the authorization=100028264
Password=oclc

A few things to keep in mind –

+ You must use the demonstration authorization to log in. Your normal authorizations won’t work on this site. But, once you login you can search for your own library (or anyone else’s)

+ The data in the preview environment is several weeks old. It was copied from the current Policies Directory in mid October and has not been updated since.

+ The environment is not ‘live’. Changes made in this interface will not update the current Policies Directory.

+ A few changes are still in progress. For example, the Help files have not yet been loaded.

+ This preview site will be available 9:00 am to 5:00 pm EST through Friday, December 10th.

A list of the changes to the Policies Directory are included here http://www.oclc.org/info/policies/

Source: OCLC