Group items tagged

This think piece tells why the online library catalog fell from grace and why new directions pertaining to cataloging simplification and primary sources will not attract people back to the online catalog. It proposes an alternative direction that has greater likelihood of regaining the online catalog's lofty status and longtime users. Such a direction will require paradigm shifts in library cataloging and in the design and development of online library catalogs that heed catalog users' longtime demands for improvements to the searching experience. Our failure to respond accordingly may permanently exile scholarly and scientific information to a netherworld where no one searches while less reliable, accurate, and objective sources of information thrive in a paradise where people prefer to search for information.

OFFSHOOT is a model of an online catalog that would be moderated by the public library community. Constructed as an alternate means to creating an OPAC, OFFSHOOT is cataloging from the "wiki" point of view. Traditional library catalogs, both the public side and internal side, have historically been "locked", giving library patrons little to no opportunity to annotate the library records. OFFSHOOT is the opposite extreme, giving library patrons complete control over the library catalog records. This enables two things within the library system: a veritable multitude of "catalogers" working on a volume of records that has been traditionally worked on by 3 to 10 people, and an intensive expansion in the amount of cross-referencing within the library catalog.

When you contemplate the sheer artifice of the card, it's a wonder that library users have managed to adopt the library view of the bibliographic universe, and often without any formal training. And although we have progressed beyond the card catalog to online catalogs, we are still working within some of the constraints of that technology. For the sake of our users it would be a good idea to decide to leave the card behind us, once and for all.

On this episode of Interviews with Innovators, Jon Udell's guest is Beth Jefferson, the founder of BiblioCommons. Her company's new software aims to transform public libraries' online catalogs into environments for social discovery of resources that are cataloged not only by librarians, but also by patrons.

Folksonomies, or user-created taxonomies, are currently used as collaborative tools to describe images, films, hyperlinks, and other objects and documents. LibraryThing is a website that lets users catalog their own book collections through the use of Library of Congress Subject Headings and social tagging. This paper records the results of exploratory research focusing on the connection between folksonomies and controlled vocabulary and utilizing LibraryThing as a possible benchmark to measure tagging’s efficacy and accuracy as an instrument for subject analysis.

This is the home page for a mailing list called NGC4Lib -- Next Generation Catalogs for Libraries.

Open source collaborations hope to revive the insights once garnered from dirty catalog cards

If we believe all the hype and rhetoric then we are essentially Information & Knowledge Professionals [1]in an Information & Knowledge Society[2] with an Information & Knowledge Economy [3]during the formative years of the Information & Knowledge age[4].

This manifesto is intended to propose that we do just that; that as students, faculty and staff we transform SLIS and create the kind of utopian digital learning organization that we all supposedly advocate. Let us apply the Web 2.0, Library 2.0, social networking, knowledge management principles that we are all in training to implement in society at large. Let us engage in the manifestation of a vision we all allegedly maintain:

Should the Library of Congress (LC) jettison Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), the longstanding professional taxonomy? That’s one of the provocative suggestions in a new report released last month by LC. “The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools,” commissioned by LC and written by associate university librarian Karen Calhoun of Cornell University, was making waves weeks earlier, thanks to a critical review of a draft of her paper, written for AFSCME 2910, the LC Professional Guild, by Thomas Mann (author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research). It warned of “serious negative consequences for the capacity of research libraries to promote scholarly research.”

In the list which follows, the elements in the NLM Metadata schema are outlined

catalog and community where users can upload work or select a piece of public domain writing, create reading groups and tag literature.

a web-based format where users can read and discuss the book right inside the text. The Unbound Reader uses "proximity chat," which allows users to discuss the book with other readers close to them in the text (thus focusing discussion, and, as an added benefit, keeping people from hearing about the end). It also has shared annotations, so people can leave a comment on any paragraph and other readers can respond.

This session will describe the work that BiblioCommons has been undertaking to explore implementation models for Social Discovery Systems in library environments, with seed funding form three Canadian Provinces.

Our profession has been talking a lot lately about centralization of cataloging efforts, digital library efforts, and even IT services. In retrospect, the conversation about centralized reference services was a bit premature, but a new distributed—but as yet unmanaged—infrastructure seems to be emerging. (Perhaps a new cottage industry opportunity?)

Schemes to add functionality to the web OPAC fall into four categories: web OPAC enhancements, web OPAC wrappers, web OPAC replacements, and integrated library system replacements. I’m outlining these four techniques in a report I’m editing for an OhioLINK strategic task force and a bit of a reality check on this categorization is desired, so if I’m missing anything big (conceptually or announcements of projects/products that fall into these categories), please let me know in the comments. Generally speaking, this list is ordered by cost/complexity to implement — from lowest to highest — as well as the ability to offer the described enhanced services from least likely to most likely.