"Eric suggests that this interface “provides information services similar to tables-of-contents and back-of-the-book indexes.”"I’d like to put the top 50 (or other N) words (or top N m-word phrases, etc) directly on a catalog page, not requiring the user to follow a possibly mystifying “Analyze using text mining techniques” link"

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"For many things I’d want to do with it, the data isn’t really clear enough to do it. For example, the dc:subject element has both LCSH (or LCSH-style) subjects, and dewey (or dewey style) class numbers. For many things I’d want to do, I need to know which is which. Dewey numbers might go in a shelf browse, but LCSH subjects don’t. LCSH subjects might go in a subject search or subject heading display, but dewey numbers probably don’t."

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"we still need a formalized model of what we are talking about, and what we say about it. You need this in order to make your data inter-operable with other systems, and to write reasonable software that can understand it. This is just the way software engineering is done, and I think metadata engineering is a part of software engineering.""Since most of the the cataloging world is still struggling to grasp basic principles of software engineering and computational thinking (which I think are _crucial_ for ‘cataloging’ or metadata engineering, for creating metadata for software use) — I think this kind of trend-hoping buzzword-waving is very dangerous in destroying the little consensus we have about actually moving forward into the computer world. (I could say “into the 20th century”, heh). We already have enough people taking a “reactionary” position against change, we don’t need to add people who think they are taking a “visionary” position against the actual clear software-engineering-based ways forward, advocating instead a vague non-solution of “I don’t know what it is, but it’s got something to do with RDF!”.""Miksa says: “I don’t feel we’ve taught catalogers to understand the catalog system in terms of a database–not truly, in any case.”"

"You are saying that MARC serves as our metadata _schema_ or _vocabulary_. It is NOT just a serialization format or an exchange format, it is in fact our schema, it defines what elements are available and what they mean.

Now, to me, THAT is in fact the biggest problem with MARC. We’ve taken what was originally designed as simply a transport format, and turned it into a schema. In the process, by having ONE standard that is BOTH our metadata schema and serialization format, by entangling these two concepts, it makes any kind of movement or inter-operability much more complicated. It makes it nearly impossible to have a serialization of our data in some _other_ serialization format in a ‘lossless’ way, because the serialization format and the schema are so entangled.""So here is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to talking about “computational thinking” and cataloging. What we’re doing when we’re creating standards for “bibliographic control” or “metadata engineering” — we’re doing data modelling for a computer environment. And there are 50 years of practice, experience, and theory on how to do data modelling for a computer environment. And if you ignore all that…. well, you’re trying to re-invent the wheel, and you’re probably not going to come up with a very good wheel.""At one point, library cataloging was ahead of everyone else in structured data modelling, we were kind of the only game in town. That point ended around 50 years ago. And we’re still data modelling like computers don’t exist, forget data modelling for the web in particular. There are still challenges and unanswered questions, I don’t (some on code4lib might disagree) think these are all answered questions. But there are answered questions, you can’t engage with this without understanding the lessons of 50 years of data modelling for the computer environment, and that’s what discussions on NGC4Lib and RDA-L often Jonathan Rochkind MARC data-modelling seem to be doing to me."

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"Each of these options has pros and cons for the user. I wish we didn’t have to present the user with so many options, and could just give the user a tool that would work in a variety of contexts and needs, but the technological and business environment just doesn’t make that possible right now. I continue to be of the opinion that the library providing some form of “multi-vendor content search” like broadcast federated search is a crucial tool for us to supply for our users search toolboxes.

Now, I continue to be very interested in the “aggregated index” solutions like SerialSolutions Summon and Ex Libris PrimoCentral that are appearing in the academic/scholarly research market. I think they have a lot of promise to hit most of the benefits of broadcast federated search solutions while reducing a lot of the problems with broadcast federated search solutions."

"unicode normalization forms seem to matter for display too. I have found that both Firefox and IE on Windows (at least) will end up displaying decomposed unicode, well, screwily. For instance, many decomposed forms, if you try to put them in a browser title bar with html <title>, seemed to end up being displayed just as blocks, rather than their proper characters. In the browser window itself, decomposed unicode forms faired better, but still often seemed to be displayed in a variety of kind of screwy messy ways (diacritics not lining up properly with the letters they applied to, etc.)."

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"Since the policy will apply only to articles prepared for peer review, it thus does not apply to Harvard Business School Cases and Notes, or to articles written for the Harvard Business Review or other publications that are not peer-reviewed. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the license for a particular article upon express direction by a Faculty member."

"it’s in the interest of OCLC members, OCLC as an organization, and libraries that may be considering OCLC services — to let you share your holdings for ILL even if you aren’t buying cataloging copy from OCLC. It means that OCLC’s holdings registry for ILL sharing (and for WorldCat API’s) remains competetive, remains the best around. Driving people away from sharing holdings only hurts OCLC, does it not?""I think OCLC ought to not only allow holdings-sharing without record-buying, but ought to be aggressively getting OCLC numbers on other vendors records, to make it as efficient as possible for libraries to share their holdings with OCLC regardless of where they get their cataloging. "

"I don’t know if OCLC’s actions are an intentional attempt at forcing ‘lock in’, or due to unfortunate lack of technical flexibility in their back-end systems.

But if the former, it’s just as likely to backfire, and cause them to lose the Resource Sharing business that libraries were perfectly happy to keep with OCLC at a reasonable price!"

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"But the company quietly dropped a fundamental feature, one signalled by the dropping of “Computer” from Apple Computer’s name: the iPhone could not be programmed by outsiders.""But the App Store has a catch: app developers and their software must be approved by Apple. If Apple does not like the app, for any reason, it is gone. I Am Rich was axed from the Store after it was ridiculed in the press. Another app, Freedom Time, never made it in. It counted down the days to the end of George W. Bush’s US presidency, and that was deemed too politically sensitive. An e-mail reader was denied because it competed with Apple’s own Mail app. Imagine if Microsoft’s Bill Gates had decreed that no other word processor but Word would be allowed to run on the Windows operating system. Microsoft lost a decade-long competition lawsuit for far less proprietary behaviour.

Despite outsiders being invited to write software, the iPhone thus remains tightly tethered to its vendor – the way that the Kindle is controlled by Amazon. George Orwell’s 1984 was retroactively zapped from Kindles around the world after Amazon grew concerned that it had sold the book without permission.""what is fine for a single device may be bad for the ecosystem.""This is the significance of the iPad. It could have been built either like a small Apple Macintosh – open to any outside software – or as a big iPhone, controlled by Apple. Apple went with the latter. Attach a keyboard to it and it could replace a PC entirely – boasting plenty of new apps, but only as Apple deems them worthy.

If Apple is the gatekeeper to a device’s uses, the governments of the world need knock on the door of only one office in Cupertino, California – Apple’s headquarters – to demand changes to code or content . Users no longer own or control the apps they run – they merely rent them minute by minute."

“Don’t lie to the user.”

"It seems like something a user would expect, in this day and age, that when they look up a book the listing could actually TELL them if they can check the book out (and how long they’ll have to wait to get it, if there’s a recall involved, etc), if they can view it in the library, if they can request it for delivery, etc. Our ILS is currently incapable of doing that — to the extent that it even always displays a ‘request’ button, and the user has to actually click on it to find out if they actually can make a request or not. Which is generally the only way a user can find out what services are available, by trying them."

"what if Proquest excepted digital attachments with dissertations? But then I realized they’d have to get into the much of digital archiving,"

See also http://thewhalehunt.org/

"So my understanding is that many ‘entries’ in a cataloging record are meant to be ‘citations’. They are meant to unambiguously identify the work cited. In the age when cataloging rules were created, what you’d do with that unambiguous citation was simply look it up in a printed or card catalog.

But the very precise rules involving ‘main entry’ and ‘uniform title’ should, I believe, allow software to unambiguously find the target of the citation in a database, if it’s there.""If you’re going to spend all these expensive cataloger hours following very precise rules, wouldn’t it be sensible to make the rules result in data that can actually be interpreted to do what’s it’s supposed to do?"

"Try to replicate the experience of browsing the shelves, but online you get the benefit that you can arrange books in more than one dimension (as amazon windowshop does in two), re-arrange them in different orders (for instance LCC OR DDC OR something else entirely, don’t have to pick just one), and additionally be able to allow unified browsing of a corpus that may be in several different physical locations (including off-site storage) or may be currently checked out but maybe you want to include them in the ‘browse’ anyway.

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to provide such an online serendipitous browse experience, like a physical shelf browse but taking advantage of the unique affordances offered by the online environment. "

"what you want is standards-based APIs, not vendor-specific APIs.""There are a couple challenges that keep us from getting there though. One is that the library community, historically, is, well, pretty AWFUL at writing standards. We come up with standards that don’t actually accomplish what they were intended to accomplish, are too complicated for anyone to implement right (on either producer or consumer side), and leave so much wiggle room that someone can claim they support the standard but not in a way that any other software will ever understand. (NCIP anyone?)"

"s a surrogate for the physical object in the digital environment, we want to be able to link to the surrogate in different ways — from simply bookmarking it, to building more complicated ’semantic’ relationships based upon it. All of that depends on having a persistent identifier — a persistent bib ID — for the surrogate. Changing the bib ID of the surrogate in the digital environment in unpredictable ways would be analagous to periodically changing where the physical item is physically shelved in unpredictable ways! The internal unique identifier for the surrogate is essentially it’s digital “location”."

"I had spent about an hour profile-surfing when I saw him: Nomadagascar, sandwiched between Photofilmguy and Anil2469. According to his profile, Nomadagascar was a 28-year-old, sandy-haired, gap-toothed, 5’10,” artist/designer based in Brooklyn, a non-smoker, a light/social drinker, who said the five items he can’t live without are “a sketchbook, a red pen, espresso, silence, noise,” and who described the pace of his life as “manic hermit.” What stopped me was the fact that Nomadagascar was not just another attractive stranger on a dating website. I had seen this photograph before. His real name is Jonathan Harris, and I was familiar with the artwork to which his profile referred.""he was taking those profiles, created for a specific purpose and with specific expectations in mind, to a museum exhibition wall and placing them beside a zoo-like museum blurb."

"The author there makes the very good point that publishing fake journals actually isn’t the most troubling thing that “medical education and communications companies” like Excerpta Medica, the Elsevier subdiary do: far more dangerous is getting sponsored marketting and managed research into “real” journals. These can even be articles written by marketing staff, but with the name of an academic researcher who didn’t write it put on it. This (two year old!) article from PLoS Medicine is a good introduction. ""At least 10% of articles in biomedical journals are written by marketting departments, not by the named academic author?!? How can this not be grounds for dismissal if the academic lending his/her name is found out? I don’t get it. But like I said, I’m no medical librarian."

"Websites? Oh yeah, those are like brochures with even more pictures! Or at least that's the impression I get from looking at library vendors sites."

"our “unique value proposition” is probably more about delivery — nobody else is going to do for free what we will""What if… you could send a txt message from your cell phone with an ISBN, or better yet an MMS from your cell phone with a photo taken of an ISBN barcode, send it to the library, and the library would automatically request that book by the appropriate delivery mechanism for you?""The biggest barrier would be that our actual document delivery/request services lack any kind of API.""OCLC, an API to ILLiad please? Pretty please?"

"I’m currently only seeing 22 hits, mostly all journals. I could swear that yesterday I saw 50, some of which were conference proceedings (from real or fake conferences? I dunno), but maybe I did a slightly different search then. These are of course just titles that happen to have wound up in WorldCat somehow, it’s not necessarily an exhaustive list. Most of these titles have no holdings in WorldCat. Not sure how they ended up in WorldCat, but most records have a note “ISSN prepublication record.” Sounds like someone did get them from the ISSN authority? Still wonder why they don’t show in Ulrichs. I think all of these records were specifically published in Australia"

"I suggest that Elsevier needs to get a message from libraries that selling it’s imprint to the highest bidder will hurt their bottom line. We ought not to spend huge money (and we do spend HUGE money) for questionably legitimate products from a publisher of ill repute.

If Elsevier was willing to prostitute their imprint once, how many more fake journals may also be included in their catalog, and in ScienceDirect?"

"This is great. I hope that vendors are starting to realize that machine access is not an add on to charge us more money for — it’s a key feature neccesary for us to fully utilize the content we are already paying for, neccesary for it to continue to have value for us."

"When I find them, I’ve been clicking the button CrossRef provides to report them to the publisher. It’s not clear if JStor actually is interested in fixing this or not. They usually email me back with the full citation. So I’ve started putting in the comments field “I am a systems librarian, just alerting you to the issue, don’t need the citation.” If they told me “We’re aware of the problem, and am working to fix it, please stop reporting,” I would."

"Allow someone to take a picture of an ISBN barcode that’s on most post-ISBN books, and send it to library software to get library services. Imagine if you could hold a book barcode up to your mac laptop camera (I have no idea how to write software that grabs such a picture), or snap a picture with your cellphone and MMS text it to a library number (I still don’t have a phone with a camera, but I think that kind of thing is possible?), and get a page like this (via Umlaut). "

"Reading Salo’s article, the proper technical solution seems obvious to me (recognizing that ‘obviousness’ is usually a sign that the commenter (me) doesn’t know enough about the domain being discussed) — a name authority file that not only allowed authors, submitters, librarians and repository managers to query an ‘authority file’ integrated seamlessly into their workflow — but also allow them, when not finding the name they want in the file, to automatically submit whatever new name they type in to be included for next time, in this centralized authority file. Yes, ‘wiki style’. Meaning just about anyone can add a name. (Or at least anyone with access to deposit or manage documents in an participating repository of any sort — which is just about anyone)."

"We’re used to thinking of an OCLC number as identifying a particular WorldCat record. But that’s not the way I’m using them at all. For instance, Google Books will allow you to query on OCLC number to see if Google Books has a record matching that OCLC number. I don’t need to have a WorldCat record in front me; all I need to do is know the OCLC number of the edition I’m interested in, and I can ask Google Books if they have it. This is incredibly valuable. Of ISBN, LCCN, and OCLC number, the identifiers generally found in our library-sector bibliographic data, the OCLC number has the greatest coverage.""...an informational OCLC number merely saying that it represents the same manifestation as the WorldCat record with that number.""OCLC’s reclamation service now offers you the ability to match your non-WorldCat records to WorldCat records, add an OCLCnum in the MARC 035 to your non-Worldcat records. ""The data monopoly business model is simply not a sustainable business model"

"And one of my favorite features, LCSH to LCC mappings. Which are in LCSH authority records of course, but now you’ve got live access to the info in LCSH authority records to make this mapping. This could come in handy. I wish there were a way to look up an LCC and get it’s LCSH mappings too, but there isn’t on the live database — but heck, you can download the data, presumably updated regularly. You could easily re-index yourself to provide this reverse lookup."

"(I’d link to his post in the listserv archives, but the listserv archives are presented as a “cumulative PDF document”. Um. Never seen that before. But that’s actually not what this letter is about, so moving on…).""IFLA really needs to fulfill this responsibility to keep links working."

"much of good software design lies in figuring out the simplest possible way to achieve your task in code. Even when what you want to accomplish is complex, your task is to figure out a simple software architecture to accomplish it. In fact, that applies to user interface design too. And perhaps to the field of ‘design‘ in general.""I used to think my job as a programmer was to implement whatever the customer asked for. If it could be described algorithmically, it could hypothetically be turned into a computer program, and I thought my job was to turn any requirements into an algorithm, and get it implemented. I knew I was a good enough programmer to implement anything if I could describe it algorithmically. But lately, I’ve started saying ‘no’ when I can’t figure out a simple way to implement it. "

"Incidentally, the case of JStor, which sends significant numbers of ‘bad’ DOIs to Google Scholar, you get the same kind of ‘broken-ness’ as a matter of course, even when CrossRef is performing fine. I had my first actual report from a patron of a mal-functioning service that ended up being caused by JStor’s bad metadata sent to Google. I assume that for every report from a user, there are 10x or 100x more users that are encountering the same problem, but don’t bother to report it." Great comments from CrossRef Director of TechnologyChuck Koscher

"I don’t want to display any of these links to my users unless I know clicking on them is going to give non-zero hits. Hopefully the API will tell me that, otherwise my app will just have to do a request in the background first and screen-scrape the HTML to make sure there are non-zero hits."

"GPO Item Number is stored in MARC field 074, a field in fact reserved just for that. The MARC documentation tells me “The GPO item number is not the same as the unique number that identifies each entry in the Monthly Catalog of Government Publications, nor is it an order number.” Okay, great, now I know what it’s NOT, but what the heck IS it? And why was this value chosen to be recorded in MARC instead of, say, “the unique number that identifies each entry in the Monthy Catalog”, which would seem to be a lot more useful to me, but which isn’t in fact recorded in our MARC (doesn’t even have a place to record)."

"I think that’s definitely the ‘killer feature’ of worldcat.org, and apparently Google agrees: Worldcat’s ability to mediate between the web in general, and your own LOCAL library, at least for printed books. The way to work for greater adoption is to recognize your ‘killer’ feature, the useful thing people will want that they can’t easily get elsewhere, and capitalize on it, make it work as easily and as powerfully as possible. OCLC isn’t in my mind quite doing that yet. ... 1. Make those links show up on the summary results screen, right now they only show up on the item detail page, and are kind of subtle there. 2. Take a page from Google Scholar’s “preferences” — let a user select a (or several) affiliations from a search of the entire Registry, and let them do it and save it without logging in, like Scholar does, in cookies. You can plug Worldcat accounts there as a way of letting these preferences persist accross browsers or whatever, but don’t require a login."

"I’ve set up a virtual computer to run within Windows Vista."

"One of my favorite compliments toward the Code4Lib community comes from a Code4Lib conference report to be published in a forthcoming Code4Lib Journal. Joanna DiPasquale writes “[Code4Lib] wants the library to win, and it is doing something about it.” An encomium that I think applies equally well to the women mentioned in this post. Metadata design and control understood as technology is a key contribution the library science tradition has to offer, and key to the continued relevance of libraries. And these metadata technologists are doing something about it.""I wonder if there’s something about working with non-print (music and motion picture) data that encourages people to take a more technologically activist attitude toward metadata?"

"$b wherein jrochkind actually finds a use for ISBD punctuation, and then gets frustrated again / $c by Jonathan Rochkind""Now, ISBD punctuation alone does NOT really give us machine parseable data. It kind of looks like it ought to, I think it was intended to, some cataloger’s seem to believe it ought to, but it just isn’t so. It’s just not quite un-ambiguous enough, especially when you add in (frequent) cataloger error and ‘judgement’." N-gram paper.

"It may (soon) no longer be necessary to have a whole bunch of content in one place to provide a good research environment. But that’s not the only reason libraries have been in the content provision business. We’ve also been in that business in order to provide affordable access to content via collective purchasing and cooperative sharing, access to content individuals would not be able to afford on their own. This is in fact a common mission to both public and academic libraries."

"The right proportion of white space to content (neither too much nor too little; in terms of margins, line-height, padding, etc) can make a huge difference in the experience of usability. Sadly, few of us have designers on staff at our libraries."

"I hardly ever use it, but occasionally eliminate an especially useless result from my list. Using this feature requires enabling and keeping your google cookies/login, which I try to avoid when doing google searches (but usually don’t succeed).""what is social tagging or any other aggregation of ’social’ data in general but ‘codifying prejudices as if they were science’? (And what is Google’s _original_ page rank, but an aggregation of individual prejudiced decisions to make links to certain pages with certain names?)""The biggest mistake many people make is thinking that Google’s ordinary ranking in the first place is some kind of objective science, unaffected by manipulation and ‘prejudice’. Google from the start could be accused of “codifying people’s prejudies as if they were science” — and yet, it works out, more or less. But it’s important to remember what you’re dealing with, especially as librarians, information professionals."

"Sure, much like a broadcast search application, Umlaut goes out and searches several different external databases using APIs, or screen scraping, etc. But a link resolver is focused like a laser on a very particular application, receiving a known item citation and trying to find versions, services, and descriptions of that known item in external databases. That special focus leads to code that you’d never put in a general purpose federated search application; and also allows one to leave out all sorts of code that would be basic requirements in a federated search application."

"When I was looking at our web site one day, and realized we had a) one link that you could click on to get a list of subjects, and then click on a subject to get a list of databases (Hermes), and b) another link you could click on to get a (somewhat different) list of subjects and then click on a subject to get a list of databases, this time with cross-searching ability (Metalib, our federated search product)…"