I Really Don’t Know

oooooh, I’m on t’internet

The videos from Code4Lib Con 2008 are now up - thanks to the enormous efforts of Noel Pedens (master videography, library geek, artist and brewer).

Here’s me presenting work on finding relationships in MARC data.

Visit the Code4Lib Conference 2008 schedule for the full conference presentations.

US Copyright Made Simple

The ALA are selling a lovely little Copyright slider to simplify deciding if a work is in the public domain or not - I haven’t held one, so can’t comment on build quality, ease-of-use or even the usefulness of the device, but it seems like a great idea.

My first thought on seeing it was that it would be great for them to make this available as a PDF for people to download and make their own - after all the ALA is all about making sure everyone has work to do ;-)

The content is licensed under a CC license, but I can’t see from the photos which one - does anyone know?

My second thought after finding the instant gratification of a download was not a option was that maybe the format was a little stuffy - I’d much prefer to see an element of fun in the decision  making process. Maybe this form factor would be better:

The Cootie Catcher by glueslabs, on Flickr. Licensed under CC-BY-NC

Code4Lib 2008, looking back over 3.5 days

I went to the Code4Lib Conference again this year - report over on Panlibus.

Marc, RDF and FRBR

I’ve been playing with some ideas over the past six months on how we can really move bibliographic data forwards into a structure that could have huge benefits.

The impetus to describe some of that for everyone finally came in the form of a conference, with a deadline for submission that is in just a few days time. The conference is WWW2008 and the workshop is entitles Linked Data on the Web. There are a whole load of reasons to go - I got to go to last years and learnt a huge amount as well as getting to speak about data licensing.

This year I’ve submitted a substantial paper about the work I’ve done on finding relationships in MARC data, something I’m already scheduled to present on at Code4Lib late next month. I’ve had a lot of help thinking about these problems from Nad and he’s helped out enormously on getting the paper finished. Thanks also have to go to Danny, he’s been of huge help understanding how to think about RDF and how to describe it - he wrote chunks of the paper too.

Please, grab the paper, have a read and let me know what you think.

Semantic Marc, MARC21 and The Semantic Web. (PDF, 440Kb)

Update: Thanks to Damian for pointing out the error in the example turtle - don’t know how we missed that!

Podcasting Library Software Manifesto

http://blogs.talis.com/panlibus/archives/2007/12/the_library_20_1.php

A few of us got together to chuck around Roy’s Library Software Manifesto.

Tags: library software manifesto

Schneider, Karen G: Kindle doesn’t light my fire

Schneider, Karen G: Kindle doesn’t light my fire:

I suspect the Kindle doesn’t hit the high notes after all…

Technorati Tags: Amazon, ebook, ebook reader, Kindle

Names Names Names

Over at OCLC, Thom and his team are doing work to match names across several international Name Authorities. This comes after the recent announcement about allowing non-latin characters into the LC/NACO Name Authority.

This is great work and ties up somewhat with threads I’ve been thinking about following discussions on other lists.

Firstly, Nicole brings together thoughts from Tim Spalding with blog comment on the RDA drafts. This challenges the notion that controlled subject vocabularies serve end-users particularly well. This is covered in David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, of course. This is one of the key things that changes when an index no longer require a huge room full of drawers of cards to keep it in.

Secondly, there’s a thread about linking to digitized books (login required) going on over on NGC4Lib. In that thread folks are discussing the cataloguing of books digitized by Google Book Search and others.

Jan Szczepanski describes how she is cataloguing GBS books:

You can collect in two ways, Tim’s way or my way, or a combination of both.

My way, or what I could call the quality way means that You carefully looks at every title. Who likes “white noise”? I use the same criteria I use for paper books.

Maurice York is interested in that approach:

I’m curious about this trash-or-treasure line of thinking as a reasoned basis for the manual effort of selection of digitized texts. You are quite right that libraries specialize in selection and have been doing it for thousands of years (more in generalities than realities, since I don’t believe any library with a currently functioning collection has been around for more than a few hundred). But it seems to me that this is the very reason Google saw libraries as such an attractive proposition for digitization–they have been building high-quality collections of print materials and (presumably) sorting much of the dross according to sustained plans over long periods of time. When you say that the vast majority of texts in Google are “bad quality, bad relevance”, that seems more a dig at American libraries and how we collect than at Google, since Google’s collection is no more and no less than what librarians have created. Let me expand that a bit….it’s something of a criticism of the libraries of Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, England, and France as well, all of whom are digitizing books with Google.

These snippets of bits & pieces are all starting to fit together. Not quite sure what the jigsaw is of yet, but it’s going to be interesting.

It seems to me that subject classification has to be opened up to everyone - and simplified. It doesn’t need to be a hierarchy anymore, and it doesn’t need to be controlled. On the other hand, names need some real clever work, to decide which names are the same and which are different requires a huge amounts of intelligence and knowledge. Authority files have historically helped with this, but we need to make those work much harder.

I should write some more on how I think this stuff fits together - mental note to self, must write a paper on Marc and RDF just as soon as we have Talis Insight out of the way.

Technorati Tags: library, multi-lingual, open-data

Multi-lingual Authority

Over at hangingtogether.org Karen notes that the CPSO at Library of Congress have announced that:

The major authority record exchange partners (British Library, Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine, and OCLC, Inc., in consultation with Library and Archives Canada) have agreed to a basic outline that will allow for the addition of references with non-Latin characters to name authority records that make up the LC/NACO Authority File.

This is a great step, the LC/NACO authority files form a rich web of data that can be used to improve many things, including search as Karen mentions.

The only question is… why has it taken so long to accept non-latin characters in library land?

Technorati Tags: library, multi-lingual