Monthly Archives: March 2009

Another datum for the theory that non-textual catalogers are often forward-thinking. We do not believe that trying to control the use and transfer of bibliographic metadata is in the best interests of OCLC member libraries. As catalogers, our mission is … Continue reading →

Jonathan Brinley brought my attention to this via a delicious post: Decimalised Database of Concepts Dewey Decimal Classification in RDF with links to LCC and DBPedia I am very curious where the heck that comes from, who is responsible for … Continue reading →

Testing out Xerxes with a vanity search, I happened to find there were a couple letters to the editor about my last Library Journal article. Nice, proves someone read it, thanks letter writers! (And proves this meta-search stuff really does … Continue reading →

So I have to confess I can’t bring myself to read the RDA draft. I’m not even sure where it’s located. It’s somehow just too depressing and likely to make me mad. Not to mention it’s intimidatingly gigantic , and … Continue reading →

Xiaoming Liu talks about what the OCLC xID service does to translate from the WorldCat MARC to some simple metadata fields: As of now, we make a rather subjective “educated guess” when we implement xISBN system. For the record, I … Continue reading →

Ada Lovelace was arguably the first computer programmer. (And first to find/fix a bug!) Ada Lovelace day is today, and is “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.” I’d like to take the opportunity … Continue reading →

While you won’t find much of a clue in your google searching, ISI does offer some limited APIs and direct-linking-syntaxes for the Web of X products. (More info on my subsequent use of ISI and Scopus webservices can be found … Continue reading →

And it’s built in dimensional analysis. Gee, how long will take my OPAC indexer to index 3 million odd records at 53 records per second? 3168106 /  (53 per second) I got an answer in hours, which means I did … Continue reading →

So I’m trying to figure out what a “GPO Item Number” is, and what it’s relationship to a “Sudoc number” etc is. Contrary to the implications of ‘item number’, it looks like more than one document can share the same … Continue reading →

Dorothea Salo says some things I’ve been thinking too, but was scared to say in public, especially as an outsider to repository endeavors who maybe just lacked a full understanding to make my thoughts valid. But I trust Dorothea to … Continue reading →