The new issue of TechKNOW is now available. July 2010, Volume 16, Issue 2

• AutoIt for Technical Services Workflow / Becky Yoose, Miami University Libraries
• Coordinator's Corner / Fred Gaieck, Ohio Reformatory for Women
• Book Review: Introducing RDA: A Guide to the Basics / Chris Oliver
• BarTender Software Allows Dayton Metro to Eliminate Stickers, Streamline Workflow / Andrea Christman, Dayton Metro Library
• US RDA Testing Period
• Book Review: Acquisitions in the New Information Universe: Core Competencies and Ethical Practices / Jesse Holden
• LCSH Headings for Cooking and Cookbooks Have Been Changed

In a move that could have far-reaching implications for competition in the library software and technology services industry, SkyRiver Technology Solutions, LLC has filed suit in federal court in San Francisco against OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. The suit alleges that OCLC, a purported non-profit with a membership of 72,000 libraries worldwide, is unlawfully monopolizing the markets for cataloging services, interlibrary lending, and bibliographic data, and attempting to monopolize the market for integrated library systems, by anticompetitive and exclusionary practices.Seen on the Library Technology Guides site.

News from ALA.The ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA) has approved the consolidated Greek romanization table of April 2010. This revised table differs from the existing table only in the inclusion in the consolidated table of two archaic letters and additional examples. The consolidated table also does not include Coptic for which a separate table will be developed. The approved consolidated table has replaced the existing table on the Cataloging and Acquisition Web site (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html) and will be published in the Summer 2010 issue of Cataloging Service Bulletin. The Policy and Standards Division wishes to express its gratitude to those who commented on the draft table.

Image via WikipediaLC continues to create cartographic genre/form terms.
The Policy and Standards Division (PSD) of the Library of Congress continues to develop genre/form headings on a discipline-by-discipline basis, and will implement genre/form headings for cartographic resources on September 1, 2010....
On September 1, 2010 the Library will implement cartographic genre/form headings and the revised form subdivisions in new cataloging. PSD will work to update existing bibliographic records to change the form subdivisions and add genre/form headings, and expects to complete the process within a year.Related articles

• Genre/Form Terms Policy at LC (catalogablog.blogspot.com)
• Bigwood, David: Name Authority Records Enhanced with Geographic Coordinates (catalogablog.blogspot.com)
• Bigwood, David: Genre/Form Headings for Moving Images (catalogablog.blogspot.com)

Image via CrunchBaseGoogle has bought Metaweb, the folks behind Freebase. This could be an important step on the way to a more semantic web.
In addition to our ideas for search, we’re also excited about the possibilities for Freebase, Metaweb’s free and open database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Better yet, we plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase and would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data. We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone. And to the extent the web becomes a better place, this is good for webmasters and good for users.Related articles

• Google Acquires Metaweb To Make Search Smarter (techcrunch.com)
• Deeper understanding with Metaweb (googleblog.blogspot.com)

Image via WikipediaI'm wondering, now that Atlases is a genre term (as it should be) what will the subject headings for world atlases be? Earth $vAtlases maybe?

I also just noticed the difference between topographic maps and physical maps. The later do not include any vegetation or man-made structures. Many maps with topographic in the title should get the genre term Physical maps.

The final report of the ALCTS Non-English Access Working Group on Romanization has been released.
The Working Group was established by the ALCTS Non-English Access Steering Committee in June 2009 to examine the current use of romanized data in bibliographic and authority records and to recommend whether romanization is still needed in bibliographic records. The Working Group would like to thank all who submitted comments on our draft report released in November. This input from the wider cataloging community was invaluable, and many of the comments received have been incorporated directly into the final report.The Committee considered 2 options: A) transliteration and vernacular in records and B) vernacular only in records.
A majority of the Working Group believes that the factors discussed in this report are significant enough to make a general shift to Model B in bibliographic records premature at this point. Some members of the Working Group feel that having romanized access points in records provides enough added value that their use should be continued indefinitely. Others believe that in an environment of shrinking staffs and production pressures we should anticipate future developments in making our decision and recommend a move to Model B sooner rather than later. However, most believe that although a gradual move towards the use of Model B for current cataloging is probable, we should continue use of Model A for now as we prepare for a potential transition.The committee had other recommendations as well.

The latest issue of the NISO Newsline supplement Working Group Connection is now available.
Related articles

• Institutional Identifier (catalogablog.blogspot.com)

Today, VuFind 1.0 has been released.
In addition to improved stability, the new release includes several features missing from the previous release candidate:

• Flexible support for non-MARC metadata formats
• A mobile interface
• Dewey Decimal support
• Integration with Serials Solutions' Summon
• Dynamic "recommendations modules" to complement search results with relevant tips

Here is the description of VuFind from their home page.
VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include:

• Catalog Records
• Locally Cached Journals
• Digital Library Items
• Institutional Repository
• Institutional Bibliography
• Other Library Collections and Resources

VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of the components. And since it's open source, you can modify the modules to best fit your need or you can add new modules to extend your resource offerings.

A post on AUTOCAT alerted me to this, suggestions for changes to LC subject headings can be made from the Authorities & Vocabularies service. There is a suggest terminology tab at the top of the page. I missed that for how long?
The LC Authorities and Vocabularies service welcomes any suggestions you might have about terminology used for a given heading or concept.

Would you like to suggest a change to this heading?No need to be a SACO member, or even a librarian.

A post on AUTOCAT alerted me to this, suggestions for changes to LC subject headings can be made from the Authorities & Vocabularies service. There is a suggest terminology tab at the top of the page. I missed that for how long?
The LC Authorities and Vocabularies service welcomes any suggestions you might have about terminology used for a given heading or concept.

Would you like to suggest a change to this heading?No need to be a SACO member, or even a librarian.

The NISO Institutional Identifier (I2) Working Group (WG) has released a midterm report and is looking for comments.The NISO I2 WG is soliciting feedback on the report and guidance for the next steps in developing this standard from individuals and groups involved in the digital information transactions. Stakeholders include publishers/distributors, libraries, archives, museums, licensing agencies, standards bodies, and service providers, such as library workflow management system vendors and copyright clearance agencies. Anyone involved at any level in the distribution, licensing, sharing or management of information is invited to participate.

Please read the information below and participate in the evaluation of our midterm work by reading the midterm release document and answering a few questions about each development area. You are the stakeholders for this information standard. We must work to ensure that it meets your needs, so your input is very valuable and important to us.

Accurate Metadata Sells Books by Calvin Reid appears in a recent Publishers Weekly.
Now, Dawson said, accurate metadata has become a marketing tool for publishers, a shopping guide for consumers, and an absolute necessity for distributors and retailers. The growth of the importance of metadata, Dawson said, led to the creation of ONIX, or Online Information Exchange, an XML-based standardized format for transmitting information electronically. (XML, or extensible markup language, is a digital format that allows data to be easily reused in other forms.) XML software is said to be easy to use, inexpensive, and its tags or descriptions are easy for people, as well as machines, to read.The metadata for ebooks is also important. Calibre, a popular ebook tool, uses metadata from LibraryThing. Libraries are in this, if not directly. OCLC has a service to enrich ONIX metadata with WorldCat information and authorities. The LibraryThing metadata can come from libraries.

Macon, Georgia will host the next OnLine AudioVisual Catalogers (OLAC) conference, from Friday, October 15, through Sunday, October 17, 2010, at the new Macon Marriott City Center. Registration will be available through September 20, and afterward if space allows.

Dr. Robert Ellett and Mac Elrod will be among our speakers.

The standard registration fee is $150.00 ($100.00 for LIS students), which includes three continental breakfasts and two lunches.

Macon is in central Georgia, approximately 75 miles south of Atlanta; it is easily accessible by shuttle bus from Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

A preconference on NACO funnel training will be held on Thursday, October 14; the registration deadline is July 15.

The deadline for poster session applications has been extended to July 15.

To register, or for more information, visit the official conference website: http://www.olacinc.org/drupal/conference/2010/index.html

or the conference blog:

http://macon2010.wordpress.com/


Hotel reservations should be made directly through Marriott: http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/mcnfs-macon-marriott-city-center/. Our group code is OLAOLAA.
Widely posted and distributed.

In other OLAC news, the June 2010 OLAC Newsletter is now available. Always good reading.

Related articles

• Bigwood, David: Genre/Form Headings for Moving Images (catalogablog.blogspot.com)

Image via WikipediaThe Nodalities blog has the post The Data Publishing Three-Step. Agree completely. Our cataloging already meets common standards, the resources for linking are becoming more common. For example, Ross Singer made this announcement yesterday.I just wanted to let people know I've made the MARC codes for forms of musical compositions (http://www.loc.gov/standards/valuelist/marcmuscomp.html) available as http://purl.org/ontology/mo/Genres.

http://purl.org/NET/marccodes/muscomp/sy#genre

They follow the same naming convention as they would in the MARC 008 or 047, so it's easy to map (that is, no lookup needed) from your MARC data:

http://purl.org/NET/marccodes/muscomp/sy#genre

etc.

The RDF is available as well:
http://purl.org/NET/marccodes/muscomp/sy.rdfNow all we have is the last step, just make it available.

One thing the Nodalities blog post neglects to mention is to use tools that make it simple. Druple now makes it very easy to create RDF. The lead article, Drupal: Semantic Web for the Masses in the Nodalities magazine covers that very nicely.

BibApp is a tool to connect people and their research interests at an institution.
BibApp is a campus research gateway and expert finder. It matches researchers on your campus or research center with their publication data and mines that data to see collaborations, create visualizations of areas of research, and find experts in research areas. With BibApp, it is easy to see what publications can be placed on the Web for greater access and impact. BibApp can push those publications directly into an institutional repository.
BibApp allows researchers and research groups to promote research, find collaborators on campus, and make research more accessible. It also allows libraries to better understand research happening in local departments, facilitate conversations about author rights with researchers, and ease the population of the institutional repository. Finally, BibApp allows campus administrators to achieve a clearer picture of collaboration and scholarly publishing trends on campus.
BibApp is the result of a collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Illinois Informatics Institute at the University of Illinois (https://www.informatics.illinois.edu/icubed/) provided generous funding for the development of the 1.0 release of BibApp.
BibApp is a Ruby on Rails application, coupled with the Solr/Lucene search engine, and either MySQL or PostgreSQL as its datastore. It uses open standards and protocols such as OpenURL and SWORD and automatically pulls in data from third party sources such as Google Books and the Sherpa/Romeo publisher policy database. BibApp imports publication data in RIS, MEDLINE and Refworks XML bibliography formats and exports data in several citation formats (APA, Chicago, IEEE, MLA, more) via CiteProc. BibApp also provides a web services API for delivering data as XML, YML, JSON, and RDF. BibApp is released under a University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/UoI-NCSA.php).
Live installations of BibApp can be found at:

• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — http://connections.ideals.illinois.edu
• The MBLWHOI Library at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — http://bibapp.mbl.edu/
• The University of Kansas Medical Center — http://experts.kumc.edu/

Research Buzz notes that the New York Times has published more subject headings.This release includes 498 of the most commonly-used subject headers, which, like the names, are mapped to DBPedia and/or Freebase. The NYT hopes to eventually release all 3,500 of its subject descriptors.Thurs. 1 July, 2010 Gary Price over at Resource Shelf also covered this and offers some more details.

The code listed below has been recently approved. The code will be added to applicable Value Lists for Codes and Controlled Vocabularies lists. See the specific value list for current usage in MARC fields and MODS/MADS elements.

The code should not be used in exchange records until 60 days after the date of this notice to provide implementers time to include newly-defined codes in any validation tables.

MARC Authentication Action Code
The following code has been added to the MARC Authentication Action Code List for usage in appropriate fields and elements.

Addition:

croatica

Croatian National Bibliography Code croatica signifies that the descriptive elements have been edited and all headings were verified against the relevant authority file to prepare the record for inclusion in the Croatian National Bibliography.

The source codes listed below have been recently approved. The codes will be added to applicable Source Codes for Vocabularies, Rules, and Schemes lists. See the specific source code list for current usage in MARC fields and MODS/MADS elements.

The codes should not be used in exchange records until 60 days after the date of this notice to provide implementers time to include newly-defined codes in any validation tables.

Standard Identifier Source Codes
The following source code has been added to the Standard Identifier Source Codes list for usage in appropriate fields and elements.

Addition:

itar

ITAR (Importtjeneste og autoritetsregistre)

Subject Heading and Term Source Codes
The following source code has been added to the Subject Heading and Term Source Codes list for usage in appropriate fields and elements.

Addition:

gccst

Government of Canada core subject thesaurus (Gatineau [Quebec]: Library and Archives Canada)

Image via WikipediaQuery WorldCat from Twitter.
#Ask4Stuff is a new, Twitter-based service that returns a WorldCat search when you send a tweet with the tag #Ask4Stuff. So if you send the following tweet:

#Ask4Stuff lake erie shipwreck

You'll get a tweet back that says something like:

@YOURNAME A few things about lake erie shipwreck in #Ask4Stuff, check out http://is.gd/cY7gi