OCLC WorldCat Identities

OCLC's WorldCat Identities has gone into production as part of Worldcat.org.

http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001485.html

http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001487.html

(Lorcan Dempsey's weblog)

New Blog by John Wilkin

John Wilkin's blog: John's blog on libraries, library technology, and pizza.

"I work as Associate University Librarian for Library Information Technology and Technical and Access Services at the University of Michigan Library. I hope to address a number of issues here that require a more sustained narrative than blogs typically involve, and I hope to explore the use of CommentPress to allow feedback and commentary on pieces of those narratives."

http://scholarlypublishing.org/jpwilkin/

Among the first few posts are:

Metasearch vs. Google Scholar and Next Generation Library Systems

(Lorcan Dempsey's weblog)

Circulation Analysis Added to OCLC's WorldCat Collection Analysis Service

"The [OCLC] WorldCat Collection Analysis Service can now evaluate a library's circulation activity to help identify potential collection development opportunities." (OCLC Abstracts)

http://www.oclc.org/collectionanalysis/

Privacy

De Rosa, Cathy, Joanne Cantrell, and Andy Havens, et. al. Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World: A Report to the OCLC Membership, Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2007. At: http://www.oclc.org/reports/sharing/default.htm
This report is based on a major survey of the attitudes and perceptions regarding sharing, privacy, and trust on the network of people in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Like its major predecessors Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition (2003) and Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005), it is a weighty document printed in full-color on glossy paper to do justice to all of the tables, piecharts, pictures, and diagrams. However, it is also freely available as a downloadable PDF file, either by individual section or in its entirety. It is chock-full of interesting findings, and well worth spending a lot of time with it, which is almost required given its scope. One tidbit of note, although not all that surprising, is that respondents want to have their privacy protected by default, but also want to have the option to give up that privacy when they wish -- for example, to gain the benefits of social networking. Note: I am employed by OCLC, although I did not have anything to do with this report.
--Reprinted by permission from Current Cites 18(10) (October 2007)

Future of Bibliographic Control Draft Report Webcast

The draft report webcast of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control is available. Go to LC's website at

http://www.loc.gov/index.html

Click on "News from the Library" on the right, then click on "Future of Bibliographic Control."

Final report is due November 30, 2007, followed by a 2 week comment period.

(AUTOCAT)

New Issue of D-Lib Magazine

The November/December 2007 issue of D-Lib Magazine is now available at:

http://www.dlib.org/

This issue's articles include:

Manakin: A New Face for DSpace
Scott Phillips, Cody Green, Alexey Maslov, Adam Mikeal, and John Leggett
Texas A&M University

Good Terms - Improving Commercial-Noncommercial Partnerships for Mass Digitization: A Report Prepared by Intelligent Television for RLG Programs, OCLC Programs and Research
Peter B. Kaufman and Jeff Ubois, Intelligent Television

SERU (Shared Electronic Resource Understanding): Opening Up New Possibilities for Electronic Resource Transactions
Karla L. Hahn, Association of Research Libraries

Census of Institutional Repositories in the U.S.: A Comparison Across Institutions at Different Stages of IR Development
Soo Young Rieh, Karen Markey, Beth St. Jean, Elizabeth Yakel, and Jihyun Kim, University of Michigan

The Design and Implementation of an Ingest Function to a Digital Archive
Andrew Waugh, Public Record Office Victoria

Utah Digital Repository Initiative: Building a Support System for Institutional Repositories
Karen Estlund, University of Oregon; and Anna Neatrour, University of Utah

Creating Online Historical Scrapbooks with a User-Friendly Interface: A Case Study
Allison B. Zhang, Washington Research Library Consortium

RDA Update

Outcomes of the October 2007 meeting of the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA have been mounted on the JSC Web site:

http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/0710out.html

(from AUTOCAT e-list)

LC Law Team Reclassification Projects

From LC Cataloging Newsline, v. 15, no. 4 (November 2007):

The Law Team, Social Sciences Cataloging Division, has
embarked on several projects to reclassify materials in the Law
Library of Congress. The first such project is a major effort to
reclassify approximately 800,000 "pre class K" titles. Arranged in
the Law Library stacks simply by name of country, these titles
often have duplicate shelf location numbers and are therefore
difficult to retrieve. The Law Library requested that the Law Team
focus first on materials from Latin American countries of strategic
interest to the United States Congress. In fiscal year 2007 (year
ending Sept. 30, 2007) the Law Team reclassified all the Cuban and
Venezuelan treatises and more than eight truckloads of Mexican
titles. These materials are vacuumed and searched by Law Library
staff before being forwarded to the Law Team.

In a second project, the Law Team undertook to reclassify more
than twenty shelves of Dutch books from the "Nederlandse
staatswetten" series. In addition, a sizeable backlog of Swedish
ministerial publications issued before the year 2000 was eliminated
as a result of an agreement with the Law Library that allowed those
items to be classed with the issuing ministry rather than by topic.

Much of the Law Team's energy was devoted to reclassifying the
pre-1970 congressional hearings. Thousands of hearings were
processed by the Law Team during the first year. Under its
agreement with the Law Library, Google has now digitized about
72,000 of these hearings. An estimated 25,000 remain to be
reclassified and digitized. Once a presentation format for the
digitized data is selected and implemented, linking will be
possible between the bibliographic record and the digitized data.
In collaboration with the Cataloging Policy and Support Office and
the Law Team, cataloging automation specialist David Williamson
provided customized software for downloading OCLC records for pre-
1970 congressional hearings that lack bibliographic records in the
LC integrated library management system. This program, Z-
ProcessorHearings, has proven to be very useful, since it
eliminates manual input of much repetitive data. There is a
separate database containing records of the digitized hearings, and
each record contains a barcode that will permit future linking to
the corresponding bibliographic record. The linking enterprise
will make the hearings readily accessible to the Library's users,
while allowing Law Team members to determine whether a particular
hearing has been digitized.

New Legal Search Engine Launched by Thomson West

Westlaw WebPlus is now available on the web and within Westlaw. It's a free Web search engine created by the Westlaw editorial staff to improve web searching by filtering search results based on legal relevance.

Westlaw WebPlus can be used for finding:

• local news or regulations not found on Westlaw
• government agency information related to a transaction or issue
• recent or informal commentary on a legal issue
• company information, direct from the source
• information on a person to supplement public records found on Westlaw
• general Web information about legal topics
  

You can narrow your search results by applying one of three filters: subject, domain type or file format.

Podcasts from Future of the Integrated Library System symposium

The recent Lincoln Trail Libraries System Symposium on the Future of the Integrated Library System was a very successful event and broke expected attendance numbers undoubtedly due to the timeliness of the content. Those who were unable to attend, now have a second chance to hear the presentations due to Lincoln Trail Libraries System having recorded the sessions and having now placed the podcasts on a website for access by all: http://lincolntrail.typepad.com/ilssymposium/

Included are presentations by: Carl Grant, President of CARE Affiliates on the ILS marketplace, from a vendor perspective and a second presentation on Open Source Software as well as presentations by Karen Schneider, author of Free Range Librarian, Rob McGee, President of RMG Consultants, Chip Nilges, OCLC and several others.

OCLC Members Council Proceedings

Proceedings from the October 2007 OCLC Members Council meeting are available at:

http://www.oclc.org/memberscouncil/meetings/2008/

Cataloger's Learning Workshop

"Cataloger's Learning Workshop is a clearinghouse portal for cataloging and metadata training resources for information workers. ... a cooperative project of the Library of Congress, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, and the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services, a division of the American Library Association."

http://www.loc.gov/catworkshop/