Mass Digitization

Hahn, Trudi Bellardo. "Mass Digitization: Implication for Preserving
the Scholarly Record" [18]Library Resources & Technical Services
52(1) (January 2008): 18-26.

"Digitization is not preservation." This is a sentence that I've heard countless times at digitization workshops over the years. Trudi Bellardo Hahn takes libraries to task for allowing Google and other for-profit vendors to make the rules for the mass digitization, and ultimately preservation, of our scholarly record. Based on a talk she did in 2006 at the Eighth Annual Symposium on Scholarly Communication, Hahn cautions us to pause and think a little bit more about five areas: pace of developments, risk versus vision, justification for digitizing books, trust, and leadership. She argues that libraries should look at who's driving the car of mass digitization, and to make sure that they are more involved in every step of the process, especially when it comes to digitization leadership.

--Reprinted by permission from Current Cites 19(2) (February 2008)

LCSH: Pre- vs. Post-Coordination and Related Issues

"In 2006, the Director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access (ABA) at the Library of Congress (LC) requested the Cataloging Policy and Support Office to review the pros and cons of pre- versus post-coordination of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The final report recommended, and the ABA Management accepted, that LC catalogers continue to apply pre-coordination of LCSH terms.

Unsolicited comments were received from Lois Chan, Arlene Taylor, and Danny Joudrey, who are all professors of cataloging. They wrote to support the continuation of LCSH and spoke to the benefits of pre-coordination. The benefits include precision of searching, improved browsability, disambiguation of concepts, and suggestibility. By having pre-coordinated strings, users can infer context of the concepts, and the terms can be parsed by machines to take advantage of post-coordinated searching when that is desirable – getting the best of both worlds in a sense. In combination with complementary vocabularies from social tagging, a user can be led to the structured, controlled vocabulary to improve recall and precision of searching.

The LC report documents the recommendations approved in June 2007, regarding further automation of the assignment of subject heading strings, the expansion of machine validation of strings, further simplification of practices including the fixed order of subdivisions, exploration into LC’s use of the current generation of sophisticated search engines, the enabling of more social tagging additions to the LC records, and encouragement of Web applications that take advantage of LCSH. On this latter point, LC intends to make LCSH freely available on the Web in a SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Schema) format for the world at large. "

Read more and link to report at: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/pre_vs_post.html

(TS-SIS e-list)

Martha Yee's Cataloging Rules

http://myee.bol.ucla.edu/

"Martha M. Yee has updated her suggested cataloging rules and RDF model."

(Catalogablog)

CONSER/BIBCO ALA At-Large Meeting Summary

http://www.loc.gov/acq/conser/CONSER-At-Large-Midwinter08.pdf

Topics discussed include:

* CONSER standard record
* Title presentation on e-resource web sites
* PCC Series discussion paper
* Integrating resource cataloging manual issues

(Catalogablog)

WorldCat Blog

"Welcome to the WorldCat Blog! – a fun spot to read about what’s happening on WorldCat.org and to share cool ways that people are using the site and their libraries. ...

The team here at WorldCat.org is working on new tools and new ways to allow you to make the most of all the resources WorldCat has to offer - to aid your interests, work, and library selections – and to collaborate and share with other WorldCat users. We will be sharing these things with you in this blog and hope that you will share your thoughts and ideas with us as well."

http://worldcat.org/blogs/

(Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog)

Open Library

"At only 21, Aaron Swartz is attempting to turn the library world upside down. He is taking on the subscription-based WorldCat, the largest bibliographic database on the planet, by building a free online book catalog that anyone can update.

Many academic librarians are wary of Mr. Swartz's project because it will allow nonlibrarians, who may be prone to errors, to catalog books."

Read more at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i24/24a01101.htm

Open Library: http://www.openlibrary.org/

(Chronicle of Higher Education)

Harvard's Case for Open Access

See the piece by Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library:

"The motion before the FAS in support of open access to scholarly articles concerns openness in general. It is meant to promote the free communication of knowledge. By retaining rights for the widest possible dissemination of the faculty’s work, it would make scholarship by members of the FAS freely accessible everywhere in the world, and it would reinforce a new effort by Harvard to share its intellectual wealth."

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521835

(Library Journal Academic Newswire)