Monthly Archives: September 2009

So my understanding is that many ‘entries’ in a cataloging record are meant to be ‘citations’. They are meant to unambiguously identify the work cited.   In the age when cataloging rules were created, what you’d do with that unambiguous citation … Continue reading →

So, okay, here’s another puzzle for the catalogers. A 700 (or 7xx in general) could be an ‘analytic’, representing one element that’s the contents of the item cataloged. OR could just represent a contributor (who isn’t ‘main entry’) to the … Continue reading →

So lately I keep thinking about this idea I think of as a “false promise” in a user interface.  Not sure if other people already recognize this and refer to the concept by some other label, let me know if … Continue reading →

So I know plenty of catalogers read my blog  (or used to).  Appreciate any feedback or advice you have on this. Basically, I’m trying to figure out how to actually do a useful user-friendly display of  ‘series’ information from MARC … Continue reading →

Fiacre O’Duinn alerts us to a kind of interesting interface Amazon provides, which I hadn’t been aware of before: Amazon Windowshop. Fiacre asks if this is what the library catalog should look like. I wouldn’t want the WHOLE library catalog … Continue reading →

So, if you try to architect your applications solidly and flexibly, and build in features for integration, and it all works out okay, one of the benefits you get is it’s pretty easy to combine them. I’ve added a feature … Continue reading →

So, I have a servlet (based on initial work from Tod Olson at uchicago, expanded by me) to provide holdings information from Horizon in the DLF ils-di “dlfexpanded” format. The servlet code and some documentation is available. That’s the short … Continue reading →

So DAIA is a nice little response format-slash-API specification from Jakob Voss. It’s focused on a very specific goal: describing what services are available for a given item, possibly providing URLs to access that service for a given item, telling … Continue reading →

I have returned from my leave of absence, and am back at work.