Sunday, April 25, 2010

"Collect the World"

I've been listening again lately to one of my favorite bands, Toad the Wet Sprocket. On their album Fear (1991) the track "Butterflies" [listen to sample on Pandora] includes a refrain that starts, "In time, I will collect the world..."

As I've been studying the intricacies of cataloging, and thinking about cataloging electronic resources in particular, like streaming media and Web sites, I keep hearing this song. Maybe we're not collecting the world so much as the pointers to the world, the abstract representations (in highly structured form) to objects like books or sheet music or maps or LCD projectors or digital artifacts.

In Catalog It! Kaplan and Riedling provide a handy flow chart for the structure of the 245 Tag (p. 104) and a list of General Material Designations (GMD) (p. 105). Here is where we do our Naming, providing the title of the work and the statement of responsibility, with twelve valid subfields to account for non-print-book materials, subtitles, authors, illustrators, and so on. I'm grateful that my library automation program doesn't require me to enter every detail for MAchine Readable Cataloging... it would take so much longer than it already does to add materials to the system. Still, it's been useful to learn to parse fields I hadn't had to pay much attention to before now.

What I'd like to learn well enough to explain is the way MARC21 or MARC generally can leverage Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web -- or how the "SemWeb" can leverage MARC. Allan Cho, a librarian at the University of British Columbia, wrote an article last June called How RDF Can Use MARC in the Semantic Web World: Using Existing Library Cataloguing Methods in Organizing the Web. To quote Wikipedia,
The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata data model. It has come to be used as a general method for conceptual description or modeling of information that is implemented in web resources, using a variety of syntax formats.
Talis is one noteworthy organization exploring the representation of MARC21 records as RDF for the semantic web. [pdf] The latest blog post of their "Library 2.0 Gang" talks about new models for bibliographic record supply. And ResourceShelf reports that at last week's British Columbia Library Association Congress presenters discussed working with e-book metadata and compared examples of cataloging using AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition) with RDA (Resource Description & Access), showing how records would be coded in MARC 21.

It's an exciting time to be serving as a librarian and studying librarianship. And it will be interesting to see how library catalogs and semantic webs emerge, like chrysalides becoming butterflies.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

The Metajoy of Metadata

This week the Library of Congress, Twitter, and Google made digital archiving history, as described by Wired's Ryan Singel in the Epicenter blog post Library of Congress Archives Twitter History, While Google Searches It | Epicenter | Wired.com. It makes me wonder: how will the LOC tag and catalog Tweets? Here are the perspectives of the different parties: the blog post by the LOC's tweeter Matt Raymond making the announcement, How Tweet It Is!... and the Twitter Blog post, Tweet Preservation. Google's blog describes their new Twitter search capabilities in Google Replay. The Library's Matt Raymond explains
We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.
This particular cataloging problem -- elements of the public Twitter timeline as digital content -- didn't exist five years ago when Allison Kaplan and Ann Riedling released the 2nd ed. of Catalog It! through Linworth Publishing.
Although I've been writing much more this week on internal discussion boards with classmates than I have been publishing here, I welcome the chance to explore a cataloging conversation with a wider community of librarians, cybrarians, folksonomists and anyone else interested. This text has been fascinating reading, and the exercises illustrative. I appreciate that the authors presciently point readers to FRBR, and articulate (p. 11) that "The future of cataloging is focused on the organization of metadata." As I've alluded to in internal discussions, it's not clear that I can add record data for "the dog books on Mrs. Smith's reading list" (p. 13) because of the nature of our shared network catalog. Kaplan and Riedling make clear (pp. 140f) that the MARC 590 Local Notes tag won't help in this case because it won't be indexed in the system and so won't be searchable by my students, but I may be able to use Tag 526. I'll update the post or blog when I discover from network cataloging staff if Tag 526 is indexed by our SirsiDynix system.

I'm still coming to understand MARC records in the broader context of standardized metadata. In describing its "Metadata for Digital Content" group working to meet the challenge of remediating metadata the LOC site explains
The MDC group members include catalogers, programmers and digital project managers, and represent different service units of the Library concerned with digital content. All are united by the common need for more effective descriptive metadata, which is of increasing importance for the burgeoning amounts of new digital material added to the Library’s website every day. In studying the question of "what are users looking for, and can they find it?," the group determined that the overall quality of the online bibliographic records plays a big part in success or failure. So, how can the records be structured to help users discover relevant resources when they search?  ...
The group has made considerable progress through the creation of a master list of standardized metadata elements used to map existing digital collection records to a single XML metadata scheme. The XML metadata uses the Metadata Object Description Schema.
 This official MODS website further explains that
As an XML schema it is intended to be able to carry selected data from existing MARC 21 records as well as to enable the creation of original resource description records. It includes a subset of MARC fields and uses language-based tags rather than numeric ones, in some cases regrouping elements from the MARC 21 bibliographic format.
MODS does have limitations, including some that seem significant to me:
MODS includes a subset of data from the MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data. As an element set that allows for the representation of data already in MARC-based systems, it is intended to allow for the conversion of core fields while some specific data may be dropped. As an element set for original resource description, it allows for a simple record to be created in some cases using more general tags than those available in the MARC record.

However, the schema does not target round-tripability with MARC 21. In other words, an original MARC 21 record converted to MODS may not convert back to MARC 21 in its entirety without some loss of specificity in tagging or loss of data. In some cases if reconverted into MARC 21, the data may not be placed in exactly the same field that it started in because a MARC field may have been mapped to a more general one in MODS. However the data itself will not be lost, only the detailed identification of the type of element it represents. In other cases the element in MARC may not have an equivalent element in MODS and then the specific data could be lost when converting to MODS.
This discussion is not as hypothetical as it may sound, as we are working in our library this year to add records of our streaming media to our catalog to make them easier for teachers and students to find. Many of our ebooks are also included in our online catalog.

025.431 : The Dewey Blog is one of my favorite blogs, and I learn something from every post, even while it reminds me that I'm not a professional cataloger. I've found that the OCLC's experimental Classify service has significantly increased my confidence with assigning Dewey numbers, especially when it reinforces my hunches or suggests another level of precision that makes sense to me. [Melvil Dewey photo (in his younger, happier years?) retrieved from http://www.fbi.fh-koeln.de/institut/projekte/ddc/DDCen/index.html 4/18/2010]

Monday, April 12, 2010

Browse an internet safety bibliography through Delicious tagging ; overview lessons

I've organized a bibliographic tour on Internet safety using the Beta Browse feature on Delicious. Let me know how it works for you! My presentation on these topics fits within the context of proposed lessons on digital citizenship, digital footprint, and Internet safety currently in development in partnership with our Guidance department. For the overview see the CyberSafety page on my professional resources PBworks wiki, ed2oh.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Internet Safety video worth sharing

From RECfilms YouTube channel, with credit given to Frank Musto, art teacher and lead computer tech. at Commack High School, New York. For me watching this is like the horror film where one yells to the protagonist to "look out!"



Thanks to Jeannie for sharing the link!

YouTube - Internet Safety

YouTube - Internet Safety

Internet Safety and Doug Johnson's descriptors for Tomorrow's Libraries

Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog post last month contrasting 12 differences between the school libraries of the past and those of the future reminded me most of all of our work from the first week of LBS 850 on "Change as a Constant In School Libraries". His second couplet seems apropos to this week's work on Internet safety:
Yesterday's libraries were all about getting information.
Tomorrow's libraries will be all about creating and sharing information.
He also talks about tomorrow's libraries as "all about online services, digital resources... teaching how to evaluate and use information... helping users organize information in ways that make sense to them... [and] being intellectual property counselors." All of these services and roles relate to how professional librarians can help students navigate and learn from the Web.

Both the full post and the comments are well worth reading!

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Finding ways to make PD timely and useful

My experience of professional development as an educator has been mostly positive, with a sense of community built, skills acquired, and time well spent. I aspire to contribute to a growing body of tools and knowledge as I collaborate with other members of my learning community in designing our next round of activities. See also the professional resources page for our virtual learning commons and my professional learning wiki at http://ed2oh.pbworks.com/.

New government resource for internet safety

In Net Cetera: Chatting With Kids About Being Online, OnGuard Online gives adults practical tips to help kids navigate the online world.
Net Cetera

Friday, April 2, 2010

mitali's fire escape: Anisha Battles For Her School Librarian

mitali's fire escape: Anisha Battles For Her School Librarian via Kathy Lowe: Great post on Mitali Perkins' blog this week, written by 8th grader Anisha in Cambridge advocating for school librarians like Karen Kosko!