NISO’s Information Standards Quarterly Winter Issue

Posted on December 27, 2013 by

ISQ_banner_smallNISO recently announced the winter 2013 issue of Information Standards Quarterly (ISQ) is available and its theme is the evolution of bibliographic data exchange. This issue is edited by OCLC’s Ted Fons and is freely available on the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) ISQ site.

The Metadata Discussion Group (MDG) tackled BIBFRAME in our October discussion and we agreed that we would like to see more concrete examples of BIBFRAME in action. Therefore, I was thrilled that Jackie Shieh wrote about George Washington University Libraries experience as an early experimenter in the BIBFRAME initiative. While is article focuses more on the administrative side, it is possible that we will start seeing the results of these early experimenters soon. Zepheira and LC’s 2014 plans for BIBFRAME focus on software development and demonstrations, as well as short-term analysis of lingering issues.

It is difficult for library staff to comprehend and anticipate how linked data will affect our workflow, the display of our bibliographic records, and user access/retrieval. I feel like BIBFRAME is a massive trust exercise and we cross our fingers that those who are building and tweaking the model are leading us in the right direction. But, we should try to read as much as possible on the subject since it impacts us greatly. NISO webinars and their publications have been good resources for us on best practices in the library community.

Possible Government Shutdown October 1st

Posted on October 1, 2013 by

On Friday, the Library of Congress Twitter account posted the following two feeds:lc_shutdown_twitter_feed

We’re all thinking of our colleagues affected by the stress of this potential shutdown. If the shutdown does happen, what LC websites will be affected for catalogers? Let’s start with what’s NOT affected:

  • Classification Web
  • Cataloger’s Desktop

Bruce Johnson (LC’s Policy & Standards Division) distributed an email today on the two resources and reports, “… but should any technical difficulties arise during the closure no customer service or technical support can be provided.”

So what is affected? The LC Twitter feed reports following LC sites will be down:

We suspect all the thesauri (such as TGM) and the Linked Data Service will be affected. This has folks discussing the feasibility of relying on linked data versus having local files.

LC Name Authority File maintenance may remain in limbo without that maintenance process running. (i.e., name authority work done via the NACO program).

Again, we’re all thinking of our library colleagues and hope a quick resolution is in the works.

Information, Data, and Relationships

Posted on August 29, 2013 by

Capture from Larry Abramson's Immersion software resultsThis summer there were two NPR audio stories on data that I found especially interesting and highly recommend:

1. Geoff Nunberg’s June 21st Fresh Air commentary, “Calling It ‘Metadata’ Doesn’t Make Surveillance Less Intrusive.”

Nunberg (a regular contributor to Fresh Air) is a linguist at Berkley’s School of Information* and as such he has remarkable insight on the differences between the words Data and Information. This podcast is a bit under six minutes, but he touches on the role of data and information in libraries and in the Google Books project. So, what is the difference between data and information? Listen and find out, folks.

2. Larry Abramson’s Morning Edition story, “How A Look At Your Gmail Reveals The Power of Metadata.”

This six and a half minute audio story is great because Abramson performs one of those trust exercises–he lets a software called Immersion analyze his email and visually map relationships gleaned from people in his email account. Immersion is developed by folks at the MIT Media Lab. One of the designers of the software was able to quickly analyze Abramson’s graphical representation of his email contacts and accurately determine his relationships and when they shifted (like when he started getting serious with his girlfriend).
This is interesting software, but this is something that users voluntarily sign up for, versus having a third party gather data without consent.

 

*According to their About page, “The UC Berkeley School of Information was created in 1994 to address one of society’s most compelling challenges: enabling people to create, find, manipulate, share, store, and use information in myriad forms.”

OCLC WorldShare Metadata Record Manager

Posted on June 21, 2013 by

 

OCLCLast month OCLC announced beta testing has begun on their OCLC WorldShare Metadata Record Manager. They are collaborating with pilot libraries in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Spain on this new record management product.

OCLC worldX graphic

OCLC WorldShare is an enterprise system and according to their news release, WorldShare Metadata Record Manager will be available to libraries using WorldShare Management Services (WMS) beginning in September 2013. In 2014, Record Manager will be available to all OCLC cataloging members using WMS, alternative cloud-based services or traditional integrated library systems.

Their goal is to help libraries maintain their collections and reduce costs in a global environment.

ALA Midwinter BIBFRAME Forum

Posted on June 17, 2013 by

Although not breaking news, the Library of Congress posted a video of the ALA Midwinter Bibliographic Framework Initiative Update Forum.

I won’t have time to look at it this week. If you have time to give the recording a watch, leave a comment here send a message to the listserv and let me know what you think!

VIAF News

Posted on June 4, 2013 by

 

VIAF

Karen Smith-Yoshimura (OCLC) recently announced that three presentations made to the VIAF Council are available online.

* VIAF Uniform Titles and Multilingual Bibliographic Structure Project
OCLC colleagues Smith-Yoshimura and Janifer Gatenby collaborate to illustrate how uniform titles show the romanization of titles rather than the original script of the work and use Tolstoy’s War and Peace as an example. With some fancy-schmancy data mining from WorldCat they are able to present War and Peace in the original Cyrillic script.

* Scholars’ Contributions to VIAF
Smith-Yoshimura and David Michelson (director of the Syriaca Reference Portal at Vanderbilt) present their new approach to enrich VIAF with contributions from Syriac studies scholars. OCLC Research collaborated with these scholars to enrich VIAF by adding Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) to existing and new names.

* VIAF and WorldCat, is a presentation by OCLC Research Chief Scientist Thomas Hickey on other ways to enhance VIAF with data from WorldCat. He focuses on WorldCat Identities, which has many names that aren’t in VIAF and looks at possibilities.