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Collocating Serial Formats Via “Linking ISSN”

Earlier this week I received an e-mail from the director of the ISSN International Center announcing a session at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim to talk about the “linking ISSN”. Abbreviated ISSN-L, this is a new addition to the revised ISSN standard (ISO 3297, published last August) that allows for the collocation of separate ISSNs under a single ISSN-L. The ISSN standard now explicitly states that an ISSN is a unique identifier for a specific serial in a defined medium. In other words, separate ISSN should be assigned to each different medium version of a serial. The ISSN-L table brings these separate ISSNs together.

This is a preview of Collocating Serial Formats Via “Linking ISSN”. Read the full post (1416 words, estimated 5:40 mins reading time)
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2008 06 06 Comments (4)

Passing on ResearcherID

This morning I got an invitation to join ResearcherID, a new author profile service from Thomson Scientific. The service sounds nice enough — who doesn’t want to take steps to avoid confusion between authors? — and if you have access to other Thomson products (like ISI Web of Knowledge or Web of Science) it may be even nicer. I’m all for the establishment of unique identifiers so we can start to do some interesting things with co-citation analysis and mining the web of connections in journal articles, but I’m not signing up. At least not yet.

This is a preview of Passing on ResearcherID. Read the full post (3425 words, 1 image, estimated 13:42 mins reading time)
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2008 05 02 Comments (3)

Thumbgrabber: a metadata augmentation tool

Blogging on Peer Review ResearchIn reading a background paper for the American Social History Online portal, I was reacquainted with a paper by Muriel Foulonneau, Thomas Habing and Tim Cole from UIUC called “Automated Capture of Thumbnails and Thumbshots for Use by Metadata Aggregation Services.”1 This is the abstract:

The practice of including thumbnails in short record displays, increasingly common in local implementations, is being adopted by metadata aggregation service providers as well. In addition, thumbnails and Web thumbshots have begun appearing as part of Web search results. This article reports on a project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to make more comprehensible heterogeneous resources available on the UIUC CIC metadata portal by incorporating thumbnails and thumbshots of image and Webpage resources in the context of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. In addition to thumbnails provided by partner data providers, UIUC has developed an automated process to generate thumbnails and thumbshots from the Webpages resources pointed to by the metadata records.

This is a preview of Thumbgrabber: a metadata augmentation tool. Read the full post (319 words, 1 image, estimated 1:17 mins reading time)
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2008 04 29 Comments (0)

NELLCO’s Universal Search Solution Project

Boundaries are being blurred between the academic and commercial Web, between library resources, between the citation and the item itself. Students have no patience with these arbitrary boundaries; they want information, and they want it now, wherever it may be located.1

Earlier this year, the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO) announced that they had received a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to build a “Universal Search Solution” — a ‘one-box’ search into a unified index of a range of electronic resources. Indexed databases include OPACs, subscription-based resources, and selected free web resources. It is a two year grant to build and implement the tool for NELLCO members and release the code into open source. Index Data will be contracted to build the tool.

This is a preview of NELLCO’s Universal Search Solution Project. Read the full post (724 words, estimated 2:54 mins reading time)
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2007 11 29 Comments (0)

OAI-ORE Open Meeting, March 3 2008, Johns Hopkins University

Here is the press release describing the event:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Open Archives Initiative Announces Public Meeting on March 3, 2008 to Release Object Reuse and Exchange Specifications

Ithaca, NY and Los Alamos, NM, October 31, 2007 - On March 3, 2008 the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) will hold a public meeting at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD to introduce the Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) specifications. The ORE specifications are developed in response to a significant challenge that has emerged in eScholarship. In contrast to the paper publications of traditional scholarship, or even their digital counterparts, the artifacts of eScholarship are complex aggregations. These aggregations consist of multiple resources with varying media types, semantics types, network locations, and intra- and inter-relationships. The future scholarly communication, research, and higher education infrastructure requires standardized approaches to identify, describe, and exchange these new outputs of scholarship.

This is a preview of OAI-ORE Open Meeting, March 3 2008, Johns Hopkins University. Read the full post (557 words, 1 image, estimated 2:14 mins reading time)
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2007 11 09 Comments (0)

Solr-ized MARC Record Catalog

Rob Casson of Miami University announced this weekend the beta availability of their video catalog. In a subsequent posting, Rob describes the user interface elements. Rob and the crew at Miami are seeking feedback on the interface, so if you have some be sure to offer it to them.

A couple of notes on the mechanisms Rob is using. Apache Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library (also an Apache project). You can think of Lucene as the raw indexing and search engine with Solr layered on top to provide a non-Java interface to a rich feature set. What Miami has done is extract all of the bibliographic and related item records out of their Innovative Interface system, written programs to transform that data into XML, indexed it with Solr/Lucene and created a search interface.

This is a preview of Solr-ized MARC Record Catalog. Read the full post (449 words, 2 images, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)
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2007 06 04 Comments (1)

A Report on Namespaces Used by OAI-PMH Repositories

I had a need for a survey of the metadata namespaces used by OAI-PMH repositories, so I wrote up a quick shell script and XSLT style sheet to parse through the list of Registered Data Providers at the OpenArchives.org website. The results of this effort are pretty interesting. Some of them:

This is a preview of A Report on Namespaces Used by OAI-PMH Repositories. Read the full post (369 words, estimated 1:29 mins reading time)
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2007 03 20 Comments (3)

Presentation Summary: “Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project”

Richard Rodgers presented this talk based on the work of he and MacKenzie Smith in the Digital Library Research Group at MIT. The original abstract of the presentation was:

Many questions are raised as previously unreachable digital content is found in and among new repositories–is each repository an island or a separately searchable resource? SIMILE (Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in Unlike Environments) has developed an extensive ‘tool chain’ for gathering and manipulating data assets. Richard Rodgers and MacKenzie Smith, MIT, will demonstrate how tools developed by the SIMILE project can be used as powerful instruments for the federation, discovery, exploration, and curation of metadata.

This is a preview of Presentation Summary: “Cross-Repository Semantic Interoperability: the MIT SIMILE Project”. Read the full post (530 words, estimated 2:07 mins reading time)
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2007 01 29 Comments (3)

Best Practice Proposal for a DESCRIPTION Datastream

OhioLINK is deep in the process of migrating content from our old Bulldog/Documentum-based system to, well, something else, and we’ve been talking about the treatment of the metadata in the course of the migration. I think it is safe to say that the Bulldog asset management system (and Documentum, which bought and integrated Bulldog into its product line about five years ago) is not really known for its rich handling of metadata. Or at least how the library community thinks of metadata: Dublin Core, MIX, MODS, MARC, VRA Core, PREMIS, FGCD, etc. — all at the same time in the same application engine with structured crosswalks between them. 1 I think it is also safe to say that pure, unqualified Dublin Core, the only datastream that is required for every FEDORA object, does not completely encompass the descriptive fidelity needed for our objects. These observations, combined with reading a mid-term project report from the RepoMMan effort in the U.K., got me thinking about metadata and how we should store it in FEDORA objects. The outcome of that line of thinking is this proposal: “to establish a practice of creating an in-line XML datastream with the label ‘DESCRIPTION’ that contains the primary descriptive metadata for each object.”

This is a preview of Best Practice Proposal for a DESCRIPTION Datastream. Read the full post (752 words, estimated 3:00 mins reading time)
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2006 09 06 Comments (4)

Can Google be Out-Googled?

I have been heard to remark to other librarians on occasion a comment along the lines of “Don’t fear Google; Don’t Chase Google; Let’s Out-Google Google!” After allowing the confused stare linger for a moment or the hysterical laughter die down, I explain my thesis: we have something Google doesn’t have — no, it isn’t the selective care with which we select “authoritative” material (the PageRank algorithm does a pretty good job at that); and no, it isn’t our warehouses of books (the Google Book Search project will pretty effectively capture that) — we have faceted metadata. And lots of it.

This is a preview of Can Google be Out-Googled?. Read the full post (1419 words, 3 images, estimated 5:41 mins reading time)
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2006 07 30 Comments (13)
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Friday the 25th of July 2008 at 8:17:51 AM EDT (-0400). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/tag/metadata/

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