OCLC Web-scale Management Services now available to early adopters

OCLC is moving its Web-scale library management services from pilot phase to production with the release of acquisitions and circulation components to a limited number of early adopters. On July 1, OCLC began working with libraries that are interested and prepared to implement Web-based services for acquisitions and circulation. This will be followed by successive updates for subscription and license management, and cooperative intelligence—analysis and recommendations based on statistics and workflow evaluation among participating libraries. The cloud computing environment and agile development methodology will facilitate incremental updates while minimizing impact to library operations. More information about OCLC's Web-scale library management services may be found at: http://www.oclc.org/webscale/.

OCLC Cooperative eNews, vol. 1, no. 9 (July 2010)

Google purchases Metaweb, creator of Freebase

Google has purchased Metaweb, the creators of Freebase. Freebase is "An entity graph of people, places and things, built by a community that loves open data," or "Freebase is an open, Creative Commons licensed repository of structured data of more than 12 million entities." According to Google's blog,

In addition to our ideas for search, we’re also excited about the possibilities for Freebase, Metaweb’s free and open database of over 12 million things, including movies, books, TV shows, celebrities, locations, companies and more. Google and Metaweb plan to maintain Freebase as a free and open database for the world. Better yet, we plan to contribute to and further develop Freebase and would be delighted if other web companies use and contribute to the data. We believe that by improving Freebase, it will be a tremendous resource to make the web richer for everyone. And to the extent the web becomes a better place, this is good for webmasters and good for users.

New York Times Index releases subject headings to the Linked Data Cloud

The New York Times, which has already released subject headings for people, places and organizations as terms available to the semantic web, is now releasing 498 topical subject headings. In an article dated June 24, 2010, authors Kristi Reilly and Jennifer Parrucci describe broader and narrower terms and the differences between a paper and an online thesaurus. It's very interesting.

Actually, if you use the tag "linked data cloud" to search the NYT archive, there are several articles on their decision to release their thesaurus to the Linked Data Cloud, how they did it using RDF and SKOS, and how you can get ahold of their thesaurus to do anything you want with as well as an example of a little application created with the data. It's fascinating.

Thanks to Kathy Winzer of the Robert Crown Library at Stanford Law School for pointing me to the original article.

Accurate Metadata sells books

I've come back from AALL all fired up. The session on RDA and the Semantic Web finally got me thinking beyond the bother of a learning a new cataloging standard to the reason for doing so -- which, I think, is to make the data we've got locked up in our library catalogs usable by the rest of the world in ways we have not even considered. The article Accurate Metadata Sells Books by Calvin Reid in Publishers Weekly discusses how important accurate metadata about books and ebooks is to the publishing industry. As David Bigwood, in Catalogablog, points out, some of the metadata comes from nonlibrarians, as in ONIX (Online Information Exchange, an XML-based standardized format for transmitting information electronically) which is used by publishers, distributers, retailers and consumers, and Librarything, whose data is used by Calibre, an open source management tool for e-books. Library data is already enriching these metadata systems -- OCLC metadata is used to enrich ONIX, and Library Thing gets some of its metadata from libraries, too. Already our data and metadata is being used by non-librarians in ways we hadn't really considered. It will be interesting to see how this increases, and in what ways.

From Catalogablog

Is this an opensource answer to things like Encore?

Today, VuFind 1.0 has been released.

In addition to improved stability, the new release includes several features missing from the previous release candidate:

* Flexible support for non-MARC metadata formats
* A mobile interface
* Dewey Decimal support
* Integration with Serials Solutions' Summon
* Dynamic "recommendations modules" to complement search results with relevant tips

Here is the description of VuFind from their home page.

VuFind is a library resource portal designed and developed for libraries by libraries. The goal of VuFind is to enable your users to search and browse through all of your library's resources by replacing the traditional OPAC to include:

* Catalog Records
* Locally Cached Journals
* Digital Library Items
* Institutional Repository
* Institutional Bibliography
* Other Library Collections and Resources

VuFind is completely modular so you can implement just the basic system, or all of the components. And since it's open source, you can modify the modules to best fit your need or you can add new modules to extend your resource offerings.


from Catalogablog

OCLC Policy Statement on RDA Cataloging in WorldCat for the U.S. Testing Period

On June 15, 2010, OCLC released a statement entitled: OCLC Policy Statement on RDA Cataloging in WorldCat for the  U.S. Testing Period (available at: http://www.oclc.org/us/en/rda/policy.htm)

Catalogers who are familiar with RDA rules may begin to contribute original cataloging to WorldCat using RDA, or wait for the results of the RDA testing. All RDA records should be coded 040 $e "rda" and "$b eng". To see sample RDA records in WorldCat, RDA records may be searched via the new OCLC index: Descriptive conventions (label "dx:" in the Connexion Browser).