New authorities blog

Collocate and Disambiguate: Currents in authority control and authority data, a new blog on authority control. It seems to be off to a good start (and I love the name!)

OpenLibrary news

If you’ve not heard of the openlibrary.org initiative, the idea is “one web page
for every book ever published.”

A pretty noble undertaking….
Anyhow, news is that have now have a total of 13.4 million books,
with about 18 million more records to go.
Of course quantity and quality are not the same. ;-D
As for where these records are coming from, they have started
merging library records with other book data (vendor data?)

An API has been created for use by developers at
http://www.openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api
Other news includes some translation services,
and the fulltext searching of 230,000 books.

To visit the openlibrary project,
http://www.openlibrary.org

OCLC and Google team up

Link: http://liswire.com/node/63

Excerpt:
OCLC and Google Inc. have signed an agreement to exchange data that will facilitate the discovery of library collections through Google search services.

Under terms of the agreement, OCLC member libraries participating in the Google Book Search™ program, which makes the full text of more than one million books searchable, may share their WorldCat-derived MARC records with Google to better facilitate discovery of library collections through Google.

Google will link from Google Book Search to WorldCat.org, which will drive traffic to library OPACs and other library services. Google will share data and links to digitized books with OCLC, which will make it possible for OCLC to represent the digitized collections of OCLC member libraries in WorldCat.

creating persistent links to LC records

Kind of old news at this point, but it has been floating around in my inbox.

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The Library of Congress is pleased to announce “LCCN Permalink” — a new persistent URL service for creating links to bibliographic records in the Library of Congress Online Catalog using the Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN).

LCCN Permalink is a convenient way to cite items from the Library’s collection in your bibliographies, reference guides, emails, blogs, databases, web pages, etc. Not only can you easily construct a permalink yourself, but we also display them as part of the bibliographic record in the LC Online Catalog (http://catalog.loc.gov/).

How to create an LCCN Permalink

Simply begin your URL with the LCCN Permalink domain name — http://lccn.loc.gov/ — then add an LCCN.*
Examples: http://lccn.loc.gov/2003556443 or http://lccn.loc.gov/82643250 or http://lccn.loc.gov/mm78044693

* LCCNs should be formatted according to the info:lccn URI specification (http://info-uri.info/registry/OAIHandler?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=reg&identifier=info:lccn/). Instructions are also available in the LCCN Permalink FAQ: http://lccn.loc.gov/lccnperm-faq.html#n10

How LCCN Permalink works

An LCCN Permalink retrieves a MARCXML-formatted bibliographic record using the Z39.50/SRU protocol. Both valid and cancelled LCCNs (MARC 21 fields 010a and 010z) are searched. LCCN Permalink displays are based on the Full Record display in the LC Online Catalog. Not only can you link directly into the LC Online Catalog, but you can also view the record in MARCXML, MODS, and Dublin Core formats.

More Information

The LC Permalink FAQ at http://lccn.loc.gov/lccnperm-faq.html provides additional information on this new service. Specific questions can also be sent to the Library’s Ask-A-Librarian service at http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-digital.html.

posted by A. Della Porta
ILS Program Office
Library of Congress

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LCSH, Faceting, searching and more

I finally got around to reading the first issue of the Code4Lib journal.

Of interest to those interested in library catalogs, metadata, etc. is the article, Facet-Based Search and Navigation With LCSH: Problems and Opportunities

As a person who uses LCSH, I completely understand some of the frustrations in wrangling with it. Although LCSH is dynamic with revisions and updates, in all honesty, I think it is generally slow to change, is hard to maintain, and is not easy to use. It also seems to be rather hard for libraries and others who use LCSH to easily implement headings changes in an automated way, without considerable manpower and oversight. Perhaps, that is a problem with both the automated systems used in libraries and also with LCSH, as alluded to in the article.

Anyhow, I found this article interesting and thoughtful.

Facet-based search and navigation interfaces are becoming increasingly popular on commercial websites, and several facet-based interfaces for library catalogs are now available. Many of these interfaces attempt to provide Web-style faceted interfaces to Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in order to provide options for browsing and for navigating large result sets.

[snip]

Three types of solutions are proposed. Changes to:

• System design, which can be implemented with existing data
• LCSH practice or the rules for applying LCSH
• Structure of LCSH or data encoded in LCSH authority records

the history of tech services (humor)

427 A.D.
The Library at Alexandria decides to contract out its annual weeding project; Vandal hordes are the lowest bidder.

http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~murrizol/ts_history/tshist.htm

what is MARC? a video

For a little workshop/presentation thing… This video is a little hard to see at youtube but it hopefully shows the connection between MARC and records in OCLC, Voyager, Google books, and more.

Links to LCSH subject headings weekly change list

LC Subject headings

ALCTS Future of Cataloging

http://www.ala.org/ala/alctscontent/alctspubsbucket/bibcontrol/NextSteps2006.pdf

cataloging images on the web

Researchers teach computers how to name images by ‘thinking’
http://live.psu.edu/story/20538

Excerpt:
University Park, Pa. — Penn State researchers have “taught” computers how to interpret images using a vocabulary of up to 330 English words, so that a computer can describe a photograph of two polo players, for instance, as “sport,” “people,” “horse,” “polo.”

The new system, which can automatically annotate entire online collections of photographs as they are uploaded, means significant time-savings for the millions of Internet users who now manually tag or identify their images. It also facilitates retrieval of images through the use of search terms, said James Wang, associate professor in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology, and one of the technology’s two inventors.

The system is described in a paper, “Real-Time Computerized Annotation of Pictures,” given at the recent ACM Multimedia 2006 conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., and authored by Jia Li, associate professor, Department of Statistics, and Wang. Penn State has filed a provisional patent application on the invention.