Tag: Library of Congress

CIL 2011: Building Community with Faculty Suppliers

Speakers: Regina Reynolds & Laurie Kaplan

The US ISSN Center (part of the Library of Congress) is primarily responsible for assigning ISSN and metadata to journals. They work with the international ISSN network as well as answering questions from libraries and publishers.

R.R. Bowker is a subdivision of ProQuest. They create metadata for libraries and publishers and several products like Ulrichs. They have one employee working in the ISSN Center assigning ISSNs, creating CONSER records, screens incoming requests, and solves problems. Initially, they worked mostly with the Ulrichs database, and now are working with the SerialsSolutions database.

The relationship began over metadata. Bowker wanted data for Ulrichs, and the ISSN Center needed more staff to do it. The contract is non-exclusive, but to date, no other company has been involved. LoC would like to develop more relationships like this, in part to reduce duplication of effort.

The benefit for publishers is a one-stop shop for ISSN registration, Ulrichs inclusion, and CONSER records in WorldCat. The serials community benefits from having a standard number for each publication, fuller records, and an advocate for gathering that metadata.

Some of the challenges have been technological (firewalls, different computers, etc.) and administrative (different bosses, holidays, etc,). They are looking to better ways of collaborating between the ISSN record creation and the Ulrichs record creation.

Standards matter. Common data elements can be mapped.

More detail in the current issue of Serials Review.

Speaker: Jim DelRosso (DigitalCommons@ILR)

When creating a digital repository, start small. They started initially with getting faculty publications up. This required developing strong relationships with them.

While you may be starting small, you need to dream big as well. What else can you do?

Get support. Go to the offices of the people you want to work with. Get familiar with the administrative assistants. But, be ready to do everything yourself.

Plan ahead, but write it in pencil. They organizational structure of your repository needs to be flexible to handle outside changes.

Once you get going, take time to assess how it’s doing. Get familiar with the reports available in your system, or use tools like Google Analytics. Don’t rely only on anecdotes. Use both numbers and stories.

IL 2010: Adding Value to Your Community

speaker: Patricia Martin

[I took notes on paper because my netbook power cord was in my checked bag that SFO briefly lost on the way here. This is an edited transfer to electronic.]

She told a story about how a tree in her yard sprang up and quickly produced fruit, due in part to the fertilization that came from some bats living in her garage. The point being is that libraries are sitting on hidden assets (i.e. bat shit), but we haven’t packaged it in a way our community will recognize and value it (i.e. bat guano fertilizer).

She thinks that the current conditions indicate we are on the cusp of a renaissance generation that will lead to an explosion of creativity. Every advanced civilization gets to a point where there is so much progress made that traditions become less relevant and are shed. We need to keep libraries, or at least their role in society/education, relevant or they will be lost.

Martin says that the indicators of a renaissance are death (recession), a facilitating medium (internet), and an age of enlightenment (aided by the internet). We are seeing massive creativity online, from blog content larger than the volumes in the Library of Congress to Facebook to the increase in epublications over their print counterparts.

Capitalism relies on conformity, but conformity won’t give us the creativity we need. Brands/companies who are succeeding are those who provide a sense of belonging/community for their users, who empower creativity among them, and who manage the human interface.

The old ways have the brand at the center, but the new way is to have the user at the center. This sounds easy, until you have to live it. When the user is at the center, they want to build a community/tribe together, which creates sticker brands.

Jonathan Harris wants us to move forward towards creating a vibrant culture online that’s not about celebrity tweets. He is studying the things that people yearn for and creating a human interface to explore it. It is projected that 80% of data generated will come from social networks – how will we make sense of it all? Why would the RenGen (renaissance generation) still use libraries if the traditional book is our brand? We need a new story about the future where libraries are present, in whatever form they become.

A president of a cloud computing company is quoted by Martin as saying that in the future, screens will be everywhere. The return on transaction (faster) will replace the return on investment. He saw the cloud storage demand grow 500 times in 2009, and expects that rate will only continue into the future as we generate more and more data.

Story is the new killer app – the ultimate human interface. The new story of the future will be built around preconition.

Libraries can create value by leaving the desk and going into the community to provide neutral information to meet the needs of the community. We add value by putting users at the center, letting them collaborate on the rules, and curating the human interface.

CIL 2010: Conversations with the Archivist of the United States

Speakers: “Collector in Chief” David Ferriero interviewed by Paul Holdengräber

Many people don’t know what the archivist does. They often think that the National Archives are a part of the Library of Congress. In fact, the agency is separate.

Ferriero is the highest ranking librarian in the administration. It’s usually a historian or someone with connections to the administration. He was surprised to get the appointment, and had been expecting to head the IMLS instead.

He is working to create a community around the records and how they are being used. His blog talks about creating citizen archivists. In addition, he is working to declassify 100 million documents a year. There is an enormous backlog of these documents going back to WWII. Each record must be reviewed by the agency who initially classified them, and there are 2400 classification guides that are supposed to be reviewed every five years, but around 50% of them have not.

You can’t have an open government if you don’t have good records. When records are created, they need to be ready to migrate formats as needed. There will be a meeting between the chief information officers and the record managers to talk about how to tackle this problem. These two groups have historically not communicated very well.

He’s also working to open up the archives to groups that we don’t often think of being archive users. There will be programs for grade school groups, and more than just tours.

Large digitization projects with commercial entities lock up content for periods of time, including national archives. He recognizes the value that commercial entities bring to the content, but he’s concerned about the access limitations. This may be a factor in what is decided when the contract with Ancestry.com is up.

“It’s nice having a boss down the street, but not, you know, in my face.” (on having not yet met President Obama)

Ferriero thinks we need to save smarter and preserve more digital content.

LITA 2008: What is “Social Cataloging” and Why Should You Care?

“Having games in the library strikes me as being like having bocce in the frat house.”

Speaker: Tim Spalding, Founder of LibraryThing

“I have no practical advice for you, but I have inspiration and screen shots.” Such as, images from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and book pile photo submissions.

Social cataloging does not need to be defined. LibraryThing is a good example of social cataloging, but it’s not the only resource out there like that. (LibraryThing is now larger than the Library of Congress.) Good Reads focuses more on the social aspects, and Shelfari is being revived by Amazon. There are other sites like CiteULike and Last.fm that do social cataloging of things other than books.

Social cataloging explores the socialization. LibraryThing embraces the social and the digital because there is no physical aspect (except for what you have in your own collection).

Social cataloging ladder:

  • personal cataloging – your stuff
  • exhibitionism, voyeurism – about you and your stuff
  • self expression – book pile photos, reviews
  • implicit social cataloging – tag clouds on books that incorporate data from all owners, recommendations, connect with other owners of more obscure books
  • social networking – “friends” lists, users who share your books, groups
  • sharing – book covers of different editions, author photos
  • explicit social cataloging – work-level records (any title you would agree on at a cocktail party) for both books and authors, series data
  • collaborative cataloging – building the catalogs of famous dead people, developing an open-source alternative to Dewey

Regarding why Spalding felt it necessary to pull data from libraries and not just Amazon, he says, “Once you are over the age of 30 and you are not a Philistine, you have books that Amazon is not currently selling.”

Interesting factoid about how things are tagged on LibraryThing: LGBT and GLBT tags have two completely different lists of books.

Traditional cataloging is based on the physical form of cataloging with cards. It was too difficult to change subjects or to add weight to particular subjects because you couldn’t do that with physical cards. We need to get away from this now that we have all the flexibility of digital cataloging. Digital cataloging is social cataloging.

LibraryThing users are doing about 1,000 work combinations per day! Voluntarily! Experts on book topics are the ones pulling the data together, not experts on cataloging.

LibraryThing members figured out what books are on Dr. Horrible’s shelf based on a fuzzy still from the video. And then the guy who lives in the apartment where it was filmed corrected the editions listed.

There are many non-librarians who are passionate about books and classification. People care about libraries and library data.

On the other hand, we suck. Our catalogs are fundamentally not open to the web because our pages are often session-specific and not friendly to index spiders. Worldcat.org is getting fewer visitors, whereas Dogster.com is getting more.

Library 2.0 is in danger. Libraries are concentrating on what they can do, not what they can do best. We don’t need to have blogs or pages on Facebook. “Having games in the library strikes me as being like having bocce in the frat house.”

Do not pay anyone for Library 2.0 stuff. Do it yourself. OCLC is not yourself.

Or, pay Spalding for his 2.0 enhancements (LibraryThing for Libraries).

Social cataloging is about the catalog, about what you can do right now, about passion, and about giving (not taking).

ex libris

I finally read Anne Fadiman’s book Ex Libris this weekend. It has been on my wishlist for a year and on my bookshelf for about six months. It’s a slim paperback of 162 pages, but like most non-fiction, it took me three sittings to make my way through it. Most of the essays come from … Continue reading “ex libris”

I finally read Anne Fadiman’s book Ex Libris this weekend. It has been on my wishlist for a year and on my bookshelf for about six months. It’s a slim paperback of 162 pages, but like most non-fiction, it took me three sittings to make my way through it. Most of the essays come from her column “The Common Reader” in the Library of Congress’ publication Civilization, and they are personal stories about her experiences with books and reading.

Continue reading “ex libris”

publication pattern change

A magazine with “weekly” in the title will actually be published 52 times this year — go figure!

I heard on Marketplace this morning that the magazine US Weekly will actually be published 52 times this year. The reporter said that the magazine had made enough money from ad revenue and sales to be able to publish an issue every week this year. I was curious to see what the publication pattern history has been, so I took a look at the Library of Congress record for the magazine. It appears that from 1985-Jan 1991, the magazine was published weekly, but from Feb 1991 until now it was published bi-weekly. I expect that something about this may show up on SERIALST, eventually.

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