Monday Morning Blog

This morning I was reading an interesting blog post by Karen Coyle about the Google Book Search Project ( http://kcoyle.blogspot.ca/2012/07/fair-use-deja-vu.html ).  Apparently Google filed a case that claimed that digitizing a book in order to make it searchable is "fair use" and thus legal in the U.S. as long as proper precautions are taken to ensure that this digitization doesn't essentially make an entire copyrighted book or substantial sections of it free to use and download. One of the arguments made by Google is that full text searching is far superior to searching using library catalogues.  Karen argues that this is essentially "throwing libraries under the bus".  She says that full text searching should be seen as complimentary to "standards based metadata", not a superior replacement for it.  I agree with her.  When I used to do a lot of reference work I found that there were times when full text...

For those who weren't at the MARC 21 Standards meeting, this is the link that I recommend for looking information about MARC tags: http://www.loc.gov/marc/bibliographic/ That's not all folks..... As promised, here is OCLC’s version of the MARC standard: http://www.oclc.org/bibformats/default.htm I don’t tend to use this one that much because it is generally less up to date and also I find it a little harder to navigate.   However, it does have some strengths so it may be worth having a look at it sometime. It gives a slightly different explanation or definition of the MARC tag that helps clarify why it might be used.   A very useful feature is that this website lists some of the odd local or OCLC specific tags which are not part of the “official” standard.    An example is the 099 tag which can be found in this version of the standard.   In short, the OCLC version of the MARC Standard is much more complete but not my first place to look because i...

This is an interesting report of a Pew Internet study which was done in Nov -Dec 2011 and funded by the Gates Foundation: http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/06/22/libraries-patrons-and-e-books/ As expected with something funded by the Gates Foundation, it focuses on U.S public libraries but I think that its still of interest to those working in academic libraries.  From my point of view, findings that Americans value and use the library and like eBooks but often either can't find or use the eBooks that the library offers are key.  Unlike paper books that sit on a shelf, a library user who doesn't know how to search or where to begin searching, will have a hard time locating eBooks which appear readily accessible to library workers.  In addition, as long as a print book is written in legible type-face on reasonable quality paper, most readers do not require an special technology to just pull a book off a shelf and start reading it.  Not so with eBooks. ...

I've promised to share information about commonly used cataloguing tools.  This is the first of several posts that I am going to make on this topic.  The post includes a series of brief exercises to help you explore the different functions and information that can be accessed through the calculator.  This link is for the cataloguing calculator.   It is found in the Cataloguer’s Desktop but it is also freely available on the web from any internet connection. It’s a tool that I used in my cataloguing class and it might be useful to have for those times when you want to quickly cook up a Cutter Number or country code and you don’t want to pull out your cheat sheets: http://calculate.alptown.com/ Here’s a few things that you can do to get orientated to using the calculator: 1.        Suppose you want to cook up a Cutter Number.   Click the LC Cutter search option then start typing the last name, title, etc (except location...

Taking three weeks off for vacation seemed to result in my getting behind in everything.  So, I will try to get back into doing my regular posts again. My brain isn't in the metadata mode at the moment so I don't have a metadata update to post.  I do, however, have an interesting blog post from Ken Haycock about leadership in libraries and the eight core values that all managers share: http://www.kenhaycock.com/index.php/Ken-s-Blog/Entry/8-core-beliefs-of-extraordinary-bosses.html I found this blog post to be very good food for thought.

I finally decided to stop getting the Auto-Cat Listserv for the time being and went to the digest version of the OCLC listserv.  Wow!  This is so much better.  I got the OCLC digest this morning and all of the complaining and carrying on is essentially filtered out.  What I would like to pass along is a little bit of clarity about Day One for RDA from OCLC.  This is a direct quote from the head of the Metadta Services Department and chair of the Program for Cooperative Cataloguing (PCC), Linda Barnhard bout what Day One "means": This means that for authority records: ·Saturday, March 30, 2013 is the last day that new AACR2 authority records will be permitted in the LC/NACO Authority File. ·Beginning Sunday, March 31, 2013, all new authority records entering the LC/NACO Authority File must be coded RDA. This means that for bibliographic records: ·Beginning Sunday, March 31, 2013, all access points on bibliographic records coded "pcc" must...

There's been so much buzz on the listservs for the last two to three weeks that it has been hard for me to keep up with it all and for me to find something that might be useful to share with everyone. So, why don't I talk a bit about what the buzz has all been about?  It seems that the announcement of day one for the implementation of RDA as March 13th 2013 has started a lot of controversy.  It is almost as though people thought that RDA would go away and it doesn't appear to be.  Now there is a lot of "freaking out".  I haven't been able to read all of what people have written on the issue.  In fact, I think that I might have read about a 10th of it but I feel that it's enough for me to understand what all the buzz is about.  Here is my summary: 1)  A lot of people don't like RDA for a variety of reasons and don't want to have to learn or use it. 2)  There seems to be a lot of confusion about what RDA implementation mean...