Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Website Archivability

With the recent Symposium: 404/File Not Found: Link Rot, Legal Citation and Projects to Preserve Precedent at Georgetown Law School, it’s important to take into consideration the future archivability of the webpages you and your institution create. We all take for granted the fluidity of the web and frequently forget that content on websites changes, and is lost, constantly. This is not just restricted to news sites, but impacts everything from our institutional sites to government and court sites. Many organizations are working to preserve the content on the internet, from individual websites, to the documents, videos, and images that they includes. And they seek to do this in as authentic a way as possible as well as to give future users the ability to access and interact with the sites in the way it was originally intended.


To assist in the creation of websites that promote archiving, Stanford University Libraries recently published a set of Recommendations for Web Builders to Improve the Archivability of Their Content, with archivability referring to “the ease with which the content, structure, and front-end presentation(s) of a website can be preserved and later re-presented, using contemporary web archiving tools.” This documentation builds on other resources relating to web archiving and seeks to improve collective web preservation efforts. 

Friday, October 24, 2014

Library of Congress BIBFRAME update

On September 4th a presentation entitled Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME): Update & Practical Applications was given to Library of Congress staff. Beacher Wiggins, Kevin Ford and Paul Frank deliver an explanation of the current state of BIBFRAME and its implications for library metadata. The target audience for the presentation is experienced catalogers; BIBFRAME structure and concepts are explicated in an understandable way. Paul Frank attempts to assess the impact of BIBFRAME implementation on the work of a typical cataloger.

The presentation is available for viewing via the Library of Congress' BIBFRAME media portal at http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/media/updateforum-sep04-2014.html.

Friday, October 17, 2014

New report offers recommendations to improve usage, discovery and access of e-content in libraries


A group of professionals from libraries, content providers and OCLC have published Success Strategies for Electronic Content Discovery and Access, a white paper that identifies data quality issues in the content supply chain and offers practical recommendations for improved usage, discovery and access of e-content in libraries.


Success Strategies for Electronic Content Discovery and Access offers solutions for the efficient exchange of high-quality data among libraries, data suppliers and service providers, such as:
  • Improve bibliographic metadata and holdings data
  • Synchronize bibliographic metadata and holdings data
  • Use consistent data formats.

See the article at http://www.librarytechnology.org/ltg-displaytext.pl?RC=19772

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

"Court" and "Jurisdiction" in RDA

At its meeting in November, the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA (JSC) will be considering several recommendations submitted by the JSC Technical Working Group intended to clarify the use of "court" and "jurisdiction" and related terms in RDA. According to the abstract provided by the Working Group in its paper, "[t]he main proposal restricts the meaning of 'jurisdiction' to the context of place and separates it from the context of corporate body. Other proposals make appropriate changes to the terminology of RDA instructions and definitions and scope notes of RDA elements and relationship designators."

The responses from the national libraries and library organizations that are members of the JSC run the gamut from nearly complete acceptance (Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) to complete rejection (German National Library) of the Working Group's recommendations, with other organizations falling somewhere in between. ALA and the Library of Congress have given quite nuanced responses, approving some recommendations and suggesting changes to others.

The Working Group's paper and the organizational responses to it are available at: http://www.rda-jsc.org/working2.html#technical-4.

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

The hidden costs of ebooks for academic libraries

Despite the convenience and attraction of e-books, they actively discourage intense reading and deep learning, according to Peter C. Herman, in a Septemer 29, 2014 post to the Times of San Diego.


http://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2014/09/29/hidden-costs-e-books-university-libraries/