Planet Cataloging

Planet Cataloging is an automatically-generated aggregation of blogs related to cataloging and metadata designed and maintained by Jennifer Lang and Kevin S. Clarke.
http://planetcataloging.org/

First Monday Podcasts

First Monday now has podcasts. In the latest, Siva Vaidhyanathan discusses how the Google Book Project threatens copyright.

http://www.firstmonday.org/podcasts/index_new.html

Open Library Opens

Open Library is "a wiki platform for combining information about books from various sources to create a single, open source, publicly-built and publicly-modified catalog of books past and present. " (ACRLog)

http://demo.openlibrary.org/

VuFind: A Next-Gen Catalog from Villanova

"A team at the Falvey Memorial Library at Villanova University is developing a next-generation library search interface called VuFind. Currently in the beta stage of development ... the library plans a production release of the software by November 2007." (Smart Libraries)

http://www.vufind.org/

NISO Forum on Understanding the Data Around Us

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and Amigos Library Services will host a forum on "Understanding the Data Around Us: Gathering and Analyzing Usage Data" to be held November 1-2, 2007 in Dallas, Texas. Registration is now open. Early bird discount closes October 18th.

http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/usage07/index.html

In Google We Trust

"An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web."

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/pan.html

Changes at Google Scholar

"Did you know that Google Scholar has launched its own digitization project, separate from the high-profile Google Book Search mass digitization?"

http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=37309

Step 2 in merging RLG Union Catalog with OCLC WorldCat complete

"Phase 2 of the RLG Union Catalog integration into [OCLC's] WorldCat is complete. Phase 2 involved loading Institution Records into WorldCat from the RLG Union Catalog for institutions that requested that the OCLC RLG Service Center extract their records for them. Some 30 million Institution Records were created. Other activity included creating new Master Records, postings and Institution Records linked to the new Master record for titles not yet represented."

http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=21014