gmane.culture.libraries.ngc4lib

Cross-Walk - LC Subject Headings to MeSH Headings

Karen Tschanz — 2008-10-07T18:34:04

We are interested in identifying one or more cross-walks for conversion of LC Subject Headings to MeSH subject headings and vice versa. Also, if you have used such a cross-walk, what has been your experience with it? Thanks for your help! kst

ER&L '09 Registration, Scholarships, & Awards, and Conference T-shirt Design Contest

Barbara Blummer — 2008-10-06T09:18:36

*Please excuse the cross postings* Electronic Resources & Libraries 2009 February 10-11, 2009 Pre-Conferences February 9, 2009 UCLA - Covel Commons Los Angeles, CA ----------------------------------------------------------------- REGISTRATION Registration is now open for Electronic Resources & Libraries 2009! http://www.electroniclibrarian.org/erlwiki/Registration Early-bird rates are in effect for registrations by December 14, 2009: Professional: $220 Student: $100 Paraprofessional/Support Staff: $150 GENERAL INFORMATION Travel and Hotel information: http://www.electroniclibrarian.org/erlwiki/Travel_Hotels ----------------------------------------------------------------- SCHOLARSHIPS, AWARDS & GRANTS This year the conference scholarship committee has worked with sponsors to provide funding to help students, staff, professionals and international colleagues attend ER&L. The awards are as follows: Student Scholarship, Recent Graduate Grant, Innovation Award, Needs-Based Travel Grant,

Re: Library Technologies and Library School (was Commercial Vendors and Open Source Software)

B.G. Sloan — 2008-10-05T20:29:51

Jim Weinheimer said: "Although I am not directly related to teaching in library schools, I do try to follow developments. Certainly, library schools have been closing for some time, or slowly merging into computing science." Actually, the closing of library schools seems to have slowed for the time being. Eleven schools closed in the 1980s. Seven schools closed in the 1990s. Only one school (Clark-Atlanta in 2005) has closed in this decade. At the same time, two NEW schools have been accredited in this decade (Denver and Valdosta State), and a third is slated for accreditation action at ALA Midwinter. And there are three additional schools that have applied for ALA accreditation. Only a few schools (Hawaii, LIU, Suny-Albany) look like they have merged with computing science departments. There are still quite a few standalone library schools. And most of the schools that have merged with other departments have tended to allign themselves with education or communication departments. Bernie Sloan Sora Asso

automated response

Kathy Miller — 2008-10-04T02:54:36

I am out of the office Oct. 6 through Oct. 10.

Jangle version 1.0 draft specification now available for review and comment

Ross Singer — 2008-10-03T15:36:22

Hi everybody. Pardon the cross-posting. Jangle, an open specification to apply the Atom Publishing Protocol to library services and resources, has just released a draft version of a 1.0 release spec. http://jangle.org/drupal/1_0rev1spec The goal of Jangle is to provide a very simple and easily understandable RESTful interface to library data that can be accessed with common commodity Atom clients. The draft spec has been released to get feedback on the usefulness and clarity of the specification and to solicit ideas for how to improve Jangle for use in actual production environments. If you have any opinions, positive or negative; criticisms, constructive or otherwise, feel free to leave comments. Grammar and sentence structure could definitely use attention. For a more in-depth introduction to Jangle, there is an article in the latest issue of the Code4Lib Journal, "Unveiling Jangle: Untangling Library Resources and Exposing them through the Atom Publishing Protocol" available at: http://journal.co

Esther J. Piercy Award

Betsy Simpson — 2008-10-03T13:37:54

Nominations are being accepted for the 2009 Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) awards for professional achievement The Esther J. Piercy Award, a $1,500 grant and citation donated by YBP, Inc., recognizes contributions to library collections and technical services by a librarian with no more than 10 years of professional experience who has shown outstanding promise for continuing contribution and leadership. Winners will be chosen based on accomplishments related to technical services and resources in such areas as: leadership in professional associations at local, state, regional or national level; contributions to the development, application or utilization of new or improved methods, techniques and routines; significant contribution to professional literature; and conduct of studies or research in the technical services. Send nominations, including, a statement giving the reasons for nomination, the date your nominee entered his or her first professional position and

Re: Library Technologies and Library School (was Commercial Vendors and Open Source Software)

Weinheimer Jim — 2008-10-03T07:14:17

Although I am not directly related to teaching in library schools, I do try to follow developments. Certainly, library schools have been closing for some time, or slowly merging into computing science. Something very interesting I discovered is a basic text "Introduction to Information Retrieval" by Manning, Raghaven, and Schutze, Cambridge University Press, which is available on the web for free(!) at: http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~hinrich/information-retrieval-book.html, which I am trying to get through. It is primarily a computer science book, discussing clustering, Matrix decompositions and so on. There are graphs, charts, and equations of breathtaking incomprehensibility.. It is all very impressive, but I must say that I believe I would be concerned if this text were used extensively in a library school curriculum. At least from what I have read, I can't find anything about people, about the users. There is also no mention of any traditional library methods. In my opinion, some of the basic differen

Re: Library Technologies and Library School (was Commercial Vendors and Open Source Software)

2008-10-02T21:36:24

Janet Swan Hill said: "If you (generic you, not directed at any one person) want to try to improve the educational situation, you might try infiltrating the bodies that have some influence ...like ALISE, like ALA and its Committee on Accreditation and its Education Assembly." I've actually tried that, to no avail. I was even a member of an ALA presidential committee that was charged with discussing LIS education reforms. I joined ALISE and participated in some heavy-duty online discussions of LIS education reform (actually several discussions over the years). There have been recent ALA and ALISE presidents who saw LIS education as a major policy issue. What happened? Not much. I'm not sure ALISE has the clout it needs to significantly influence LIS education, and while ALA has some clout (accreditation) that hasn't seemed to influence the individual LIS schools all that much. In fact, the top 15 or 20 North American LIS schools (US News and World Report) have formed their own organization (http:

Call for presentations: ELAG 2009, 22-24 April 2009, Bratislava

Ron Davies — 2008-10-02T21:35:53

Call for presentations: "New Tools of the Trade", ELAG Conference, 22 – 24 April, 2009, Bratislava, Slovakia. Web 2.0, social networking applications, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, facetted searching, semantic linking and digital documents are just some of the new developments that are rapidly changing the systems environment in libraries and what users expect from the systems that they use. To respond to these challenges, systems librarians and developers need to "re-tool": they need to discover and master new ways of developing and applying informatics to solve information problems. The ELAG 2009 Conference is calling for presentations on new tools including: *innovative software, applications and environments *emerging formats, protocols and standards or new ways of applying existing standards *new procedures and techniques Place: Bratislava, Slovakia Host: University Library of Bratislava, (Univerzitná knižnica v Bratislave) Dates: 22 - 24 April, 2009 Deadline for submissions: 24 November, 200

Librarian innovators and library organizations

B.G. Sloan — 2008-10-01T23:12:38

I thought this new Library Journal article fits in very well with our ongoing thread about libraries and innovation: Hill, Chrystie, and Meredith Farkas. What We Need: A survey of library innovators exposes pressure points in the profession—and how to relieve them. Library Journal, October 1, 2008. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6598080.html An excerpt: "Each year, Library Journal recognizes 50 or so emerging leaders in the profession as Movers & Shakers. These library professionals are passionate about the work they do and are moving the profession forward, often in creative and innovative ways...Some enjoyed and were encouraged by amazing institutional support and acknowledgement, while others received minimum internal support for their innovative work. This made us wonder how the entire cohort has been shaped, encouraged, or discouraged by our institutions. While we tend to be highly self-motivated on the whole, all of us are affected by organizational culture and management that can either

Re: Library Technologies and Library School (was Commercial Vendors and Open Source Software)

Weinheimer Jim — 2008-09-30T07:35:00

A lot of good questions. My own attempt toward the beginnings of a fundamental answer is this: librarians/catalogers need to understand exactly where their fields of expertise lie. It is *not* coding. Maybe 40 years or so ago, librarians were leading the field of coding with the development of MARC format (or maybe not). In any case, once librarians managed to achieve their goals of: a) creating catalog cards more efficiently and b) transfering these records from database to database, they pretty much stopped there. While USMARC changed its name to MARC21 to take in other Anglo-American countries, the basics never changed. Even when relational databases came, it was all about creating a MARC21/ISO2709 record so that it could be displayed locally (no printing of cards anymore) and uploaded to OCLC or RLIN, and downloaded again. I think this proves that coding is not our strength. One of our areas of strength lies in the intellectual organization of information sources. Whether our catalogs happen to be clay

Re: Library Technologies and Library School (was Commercial Vendors and Open Source Software)

Tim Spalding — 2008-10-01T17:03:58

Karen, Have you hear the famous Clay Shirky "love" speech? http://conversationhub.com/2007/07/10/video-clay-shirky-on-love-internet-style/ Basically, sometimes the solidity is with the thing people love, not the thing with the solid edifice. I feel quite confident Koha will be, like PERL, supported in five years. HiP? I wouldn't bet on it. This doesn't apply to all "free" solutions, of course. Tim

Re: English will not only do, but do better

Alexander Johannesen — 2008-10-01T16:45:52

Yes, very; in Topic Maps, everything is a (and if you wanna go completely abstract, nutty and datamodally-correct, so is is associations, types, and occurrences; they're just special , or shorthands, if you will), and the meaning of each topic is handled through a proxy of other topics (through associations), types (topics used as type) and occurrences (a special topic type). This is a meta model in which you create your more specific model. The id attribute is completely up to any closed system to make up as they go along, and is not something you can rely on. But, there's hope. Names are pretty much ajour with titles and so forth, but the topic at hand might be tht book you've got in your hand, Here's pretty much the same; Some title some responsibility letter In and of itself, it's too abstract, but it doesn't require much to be useful in a flash, and

Re: English will not only do, but do better

Dobbs, Aaron — 2008-10-01T16:30:03

Not to open the MARCXML is [good/bad] argument again... (Leaving out discussions on AACRx punctuation and capitalization practices, etc., too) Is a rethink of MARCXML, or whatever, similar to: Title Título Titel Different that what you're saying? Is the "245" moniker fairly standard? Is it too abstract for mapping? -Aaron :-)' -----Original Message----- From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB< at >LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Alexander Johannesen Sent: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 11:42 AM To: NGC4LIB< at >LISTSERV.ND.EDU Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] English will not only do, but do better On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 16:15, Jan Szczepanski ub.gu.se> wrote: I am myself of both Norwegian, Swedish and Czech heritage, speak 4 languages, married to an Aussie with bi-lingual kids, and I've got relatives across the globe all speaking different languages. I know the import

Re: English will not only do, but do better

Alexander Johannesen — 2008-10-01T15:42:04

I am myself of both Norwegian, Swedish and Czech heritage, speak 4 languages, married to an Aussie with bi-lingual kids, and I've got relatives across the globe all speaking different languages. I know the importance of providing multi-lingual interfaces and backends to people, don't you worry. :) I think perhaps the definition of "the language question" is at fault here; I'm purely speaking of an XML vocabulary in this case, not the content of that data model. Heck, why do you think I'm such a Topic Maps fan? :) Hi there G'day Heisan Tjenare Notice here that the XML vocabulary is in English, while the content itself is in its respective language with the appropriate attributes to denote language. Alex

Re: English will not only do, but do better

Jonathan Rochkind — 2008-10-01T14:56:47

Yes, for users, whether in Europe or North America or anywhere else, we need to support multi-lingual displays. Perhaps even for staff users such as catalogers, sure. That doesn't mean our machine data files need to be multi-lingual. Jonathan Jan Szczepanski wrote:

English will not only do, but do better

Jan Szczepanski — 2008-10-01T14:15:53

I disagree with Alexander Johannesen and Bernhard Eversberg about the language question and just want to point to the fact that in Europe all languages are equal and I enclose an exampel: + TOWARDS MULTILINGUAL “SEARCH & RESULT” One of The European Library’s objectives is to provide information in all partners native languages; this means having the portal interface translated in all full members’ languages. It also implies a more ambitious target that is to extend the multilingual capabilities of the portal; in other words, provide a language understanding of queries and return the appropriate search results in the same language. EDLproject Work Package 2 aims at integrating the outcomes of multilingual access research into The European Library portal. The European Library language policy follows similar guidelines to Europa, the portal site of The European Union: “As far as possible, the aim is to provide the public with the information they are looking for in their own language.

Re: Google Booksearch Data API: Another blow to library metadata

Stephens, Owen — 2008-10-01T08:53:16

Somewhere in this thread (I think) there was discussion of around XML and bib data, and MODS was mentioned as a better encoding of bib data into XML than MARCXML (which some felt wasn't a particularly difficult feat). Anyway, I thought that this might be of interest http://copac.ac.uk/development-blog/2008/09/persistent-identifiers-for-c opac-records/ - COPAC is a union catalogue for many of the largest UK HE Research Libraries, and they are doing some interesting development work now - in this particular case they are exposing records in MODS - 'tho you have to know the record ID Owen Stephens Assistant Director: eStrategy and Information Resources Central Library Imperial College London South Kensington Campus London SW7 2AZ t: +44 (0)20 7594 8829 e: o.stephens< at >imperial.ac.uk

Re: Library Technologies and Library School (was Commercial Vendors and Open Source Software)

Weinheimer Jim — 2008-10-01T06:54:16

This may be true, but I don't think that libraries can afford to wait decades (which in internet terms is eons). Already, and I'm not kidding, many of my students cannot even imagine what it was like to do any kind of research before Google (What? No copy and paste?! People had to *write things down*??!!!) For them, it's like people were living in the Stone Age running from mammoths and saber-tooth tigers. So, maybe while libraries are waiting around for systems to trust, our users will have moved on long before and forgotten us completely. It's a quandry for libraries, I admit, but I don't think we can afford to ignore the vast majority of materials that our users are demanding today just because they don't fit into our usual framework. Many of these resources disappear, as you say, but this is where we could work closely with the Internet Archive, which has an immense number of sites stored. If something isn't being archived, we could probably get it on a fast track somehow. If that's not suitable, per

Re: Library Technologies and Library School (was Commercial Vendors and Open Source Software)

Bernhard Eversberg — 2008-10-01T06:40:53

Yes. That means, the best scenario would be to have a not too small number of libraries who commit themselves to at least some development work, and to have some longer-term staff for that purpose, not just projects that run at most two years and are then shut down. These libraries would band together as a developers' community which could of course be open for global participation. This is not impossible. VuFind seems to be setting an example, and there is sufficient stuff out there so that one need not start from scratch. We have had a similar model running here for over 25 years, and hundreds of special libraries are successfully using the software. Those who can afford it can also call in freelance supporters instead of providing the manpower themselves. (Our LCSH browser, for example, is based on it. This way, it could be rigged up in a matter of days. Some config work, some PHP, was all.) B.Eversberg

Re: Library Technologies and Library School (was Commercial Vendors and Open Source Software)

Janet Hill — 2008-09-29T15:48:04

Jesse Ephraim says: Libraries schools need to teach (and librarians need to accept) that technical skills are required to be a librarian I respond: More power to you, as you pursue this thought. I have been agitating since 1985 to get library schools to spend just a teensy-weensy bit more of the curriculum on teaching cataloging, with only limited success. The reforms necessary for what you want are extensive, starting with extending the LIS masters program to more than the "quick 36" or so hours currently required, and including strengthening of the accreditation standards. Resistance to both is strong and persistent, and based on economic considerations ("people won't pay more for a degree, or stay longer in it if the field doesn't pay more"; "if my school requires more credit hours, the students will go to another program"; etc.), on realities of the professorate (we are graduating precious few PhDs in LIS, and that's what we need to expand the professoriate; PhDs in related fields don't want to t