VTLS : Metadata

Blogs:

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 15:24:10 GMT

Blogging, Journalism And Credibility. Disinformation Mar 21 2005 1:34PM GMT [Moreover - Blogging news]

Search Engines:

Mon, 21 Mar 2005 12:17:16 GMT

Building off of Alane's call over at It's All Good to "peer outside the garden walls" of the library world, I stumbled over to the O'Reilly "Emerging Technology Conference" to see what happened. After doing so, I began to beat myself around the neck and head for wimping out on asking my boss to attend this conference as I was not sure how I would adequately explain how all of this is related to libraries.

Lots of interesting content - especially some of the announcements at the conference, such as this - Amazon Calls for Open Search Results:

"The first results of Amazon's OpenSearch effort have begun to take shape on its A9.com search engine. The site includes over 35 searches from other sites, including the New York Times and photo site Flickr, which can appear as columns alongside normal Web searches.

To fulfill its OpenSearch vision, A9.com has built an extension to the RSS 2.0 standard. The initiative is comprised of XML-based search results, XML files that identify and describe a search engine, and OpenSearch aggregators such as A9.com that support the standard.

"We want this to do for search what RSS has done for content," said Bezos."

It seems like if anyone can drive this sort of stuff, it is either Amazon or Google.
With local search becoming a bigger and bigger player, how could we integrate library holding's into the local search function of A9? Better yet, how can we show Amazon or Google it is worth their while to make sure that library holdings get included in their searches?

[TechnoBiblio]

RSS:

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:55:52 GMT

RSS: Moving Into the Mainstream by Randy Reichardt, Cameron Science and Technology Library, Universi .... RSS: Moving Into the Mainstream by Randy Reichardt, Cameron Science and Technology Library, University of Alberta. From Ei UPDATE, March/April 2005 [Peter Scott's Library Blog]

Search Engines :

Wed, 26 Jan 2005 15:24:01 GMT

MSN Gets Ready to Expand RSS Support. eWeek Jan 13 2005 2:58AM GMT [Moreover - Online information news]

XML:

Sat, 21 Aug 2004 16:57:56 GMT

PRISM 1.2 available for public comment. PRISM 1.2 is now available for a 45-day period of public comment. PRISM stands for "Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata". From yesterday's press release: "PRISM defines a set of XML metadata vocabularies that assist in automating repetitive tasks that are used in accessing, managing, tracking and repurposing content. The PRISM Specification and the PRISM Aggregator DTD, which is an application of the PRISM Specification, provide tools for interoperability so that organizations can easily and automatically syndicate, acquire, exchange and find magazine and mainstream journal articles, catalogs, images, and other types of content across multiple repositories....In addition to posting PRISM 1.2 for comment, the PRISM Working Group is posting two related specifications in the 'Contributed Resources' area of the PRISM website. These resources, an RSS (RDF Site Summary) 1.0 module for PRISM 1.2 and an RDF schema for PRISM 1.2 were developed by Nature Publishing Group, a leading science publisher, but they are of general utility and can be used by all publishing domains, scientific, educational, trade, or otherwise." The PRISM standard was developed by the non-profit IDEAlliance. [Open Access News]

Metadata : XML :

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 12:58:28 GMT

XML 2004. The State of XML "As a software developer I feel increasingly unhappy with the development of a monolithic mass of technology building up, only reasonably accessible behind a Java or .NET API. In contrast, the REST model of composed, simple interactions s [Planet RDF]

Metadata :

Tue, 20 Apr 2004 13:03:32 GMT

XMLEurope, Monday. I'm in Amsterdam at the RAI conference centre for XMLEurope 2004. I have some photos from Monday's sessions (and also some from walking around Amsterdam yesterday). ldodds, mattb, dajobe, jang, danbri, shellac, edd (naturally!), Steve Cayzer were all around,... [Planet RDF]

XML :

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 13:05:56 GMT

Sun snatches up XML guru. Tim Bray, one of the three editors of the XML 1.0 specification, said he expects to work on new applications for Web logs.and RSS technology. [Computerworld News]

OAI :

Wed, 10 Mar 2004 17:20:18 GMT

Presentations online. The presentations from the conference, Thinking Beyond Digital Libraries - Designing the Information Strategy for the Next Decade (Bielefeld, February 3-5, 2004), are now online. Several are on OA and OAI-compliant repositories. [Open Access News]

Metadata :

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 14:02:38 GMT

Amazon Offers Many RSS Feeds. Amazon is offering numerous RSS Feeds.

RSS :

Tue, 24 Feb 2004 18:11:33 GMT

The Coming RSS Revolution. Syndication
Source: Forbes
The Coming RSS Revolution
An introduction to RSS from a mainstream business publication. Feedster and NetNewsWire are mentioned. No mention of other syndication standards. Information professionals wanting to learn more about RSS and other syndication tools should check out this "classic" article by Steven Cohen and his Library Stuff site. Jenny Levine's site is also a good place to learn more. Both Steven and Jenny continue to be the leaders in teaching the library community about RSS and syndication. Finally, the article doesn't mention that many web-based solutions exist that allow you to organize and read RSS and other feeds without having to purchase and download any software. Bloglines.com (free) and MyFeedster (free) are two examples.
See Also: Librarians' Index to the Internet Now Offers a Feed of Its Wonderful "What's New This Week" List [ResourceShelf]

Metadata :

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 15:34:23 GMT

RDF and OWL are W3C Recommendations. The World Wide Web Consortium today released the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the OWL Web Ontology Language (OWL) as W3C Recommendations. RDF is used to represent information and to exchange knowledge in the Web. OWL is used to publish and share sets of terms called ontologies, supporting advanced Web search, software agents and knowledge management. Read the press release for the full list of twelve documents and testamonials to see how organizations are using these technologies today. [Planet RDF]

OAI :

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 14:37:56 GMT

OAI and OA-X. Henk Ellermann is on the team with folks from KNAW and DARE to extend the OAI protocol. He's written a brief introduction to the extended protocol, which allows for the exchange of object files, not just metadata. This is the key to supporting full-text searching, presenting thumbnails of image files, and creating new data providers that pull selected objects from other providers. It also standardizes the ingest procedure, which could be used to automate journal submissions or harvest papers from personal web sites for an institutional repository. [Open Access News]

Weblogs :

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 13:38:29 GMT

Blogs at the University Libraries.

As more universities get involved in campus-wide weblog projects, I see more libraries being on the forefront in these efforts. Take The University of Minnesota Libraries. They are working to get weblogs to their campus community. Maybe there needs to be a weblog about the various universities that are going (or need help going) this route. (link via Blog Drivers Waltz) [Library Stuff]

OAI :

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 20:32:29 GMT

Institutional repository at the U of Amsterdam. Kurt De Belder built an innovative OAI-compliant institutional repository for the University of Amsterdam, with funding from SURF. Among the nice features are a powerful search engine that supports field searching, indexing by Scirus along with the OAI-compliant search engines, a long-term preservation arrangement with the Royal Library of the Netherlands, and a "Document of the day" highlighted on the front page with a link. It has an easy way to pull together publication lists for individual authors (such as this one for J.F.A.K. van Benthem, whom I used to read in my past life as a logician). An associated site provides OA to Amsterdam dissertations, and highlights a "Dissertation of the day". [Open Access News]

OAI :

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 16:26:51 GMT

OAI service providers. Gerry McKiernan, Open Archives Initiative Service Providers, Part I: Science and Technology, Library Hi Tech News, November 2003, pp. 30-38, Part II: Social Sciences and Humanities, ibid., December 2003, pp. 24-31. [Open Access News]

XML :

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:29:06 GMT

XML: The Basics at http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200312/ij_12_08_03a.html

XML :

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:28:01 GMT

XML Basics, Part II: The Key Concepts. Internet.com Jan 13 2004 8:18PM ET [Moreover - XML and metadata news]

Metadata :

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 11:18:36 GMT

Proposed calendar server extensions could help calendaring software. From the XML Cover Pages, it looks like there might be some new extensions to help further the use of standardized approaches to using calendaring software (like calendar apps included in OnTime, Groupwise, Outlook, Exchange, Mozilla, iCal, Evolution, etc.

Most older and well-established calendaring tools that possess the ability to share calendaring data amongst workgroups have stored them in a proprietary manner, which is understandable due to the fact that there were no real standards to manage calendars. This wasn't a big problem, unless you needed to share your calendars across computers, networks, or devices (PDAs, office computers, home computers, etc.). Using an open standard called WebDAV, which allows for remote authoring and publication of materials to be distributed over the web, apps like iCal for Mac OS X and Mozilla started using the webcal ICS format for calendar exchanging.

Because of these open standards, and the growing number of extensions for calendaring and remote authoring, it's now possible to break free from proprietary methods and packages. It would be really nice if tools like Outlook, Exchange, Groupwise, OnTime, etc., could publish or even share data with these newer standards without having to manually import a file (much less something proprietary or dumbed-down like HTML). That way users could use any sort of mail client they like, and have instant integration into a shared/networked calendaring system based on open standards without the proprietary expense price tag.

These newer standards are very interesting and easy to maintain, and should really help further open calendaring. Even better, most are based on XML. They allow for security and authorization (also built into the server-side software), private views, etc., all with freely available (often open source) tools. For someone who uses a Mac (at home) and both Windows and Linux (at work), it would be nice to be able to use one server-based calendar file and a myriad of different calendaring clients on my various environments than to maintain (or "hot sync") many iterations of the same data.

[inSilico - A Princeton University Library metadata and digital library blog]

Metadata :

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:47:32 GMT

RDF Site Summary (RSS). To web people, metadata might seem to be the equivalent of calculus to a high school senior. That is, what's often heard when discussing the topic, is "when will I ever be able to use this in the real world".

That is further echoed in the use of RDF, which is seen as one of the most obfuscated metadata standards out there. But in recent months it has become more and more useful. Suddenly this stuff is able to be used by the Joe 6-Pack web user.

There have been several interesting announcements in the last few weeks about content providers and publishers using RDF Site Summary (RSS). RSS is a variation on the RDF theme. It allows content providers (like me) to expose and syndicate their content for inclusion in other web sites, databases, instant messaging software, and many other useful tools. For example, I syndicate news feeds from sources such as the Washington Post into my instant messaging software.

First came the announcement in July that Elsevier would expose their PRISM metadata in an RSS compliant manner. In doing so, libraries and end users could access tables of contents for Elsevier journals in their favorite tools.

It's evident that other publishers are catching on. Earlier in the week, a primer was released to help publishers gain a better understanding of RSS. And now there's an announcement from NISO about their publication, Metadata Demystified: A Guide for Publishers. Let's hope they start using it in a major way. This publication addresses the ONIX standard, which book publishers are using to translate similar types of information as the PRISM people. LC is using ONIX in conjunction with the 856 MARC field to provide tables of contents for new books.

So, you might be asking again, how can you use this in the real world? Well, imagine being able to display the current issue's TOC next to the PULinks logo in the online catalog, or having the RSS feed the EJournals page automatically without having to maintain a separate database or a kludged catalog record! That's the power of XML -- make the content providers do some of the work for you! [inSilico - A Princeton University Library metadata and digital library blog]

Metadata :

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 20:07:17 GMT

Presentations on metadata and institutional repositories. The presentations from the RLG Members' Forums, To Have and to Hold: Metadata and Institutional Repositories (Washington and Chicago, December 9 and 12, 2003) are now online. [Open Access News]

XML :

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 14:36:51 GMT

XML and ejournals. The latest number of OCLC Systems & Services is a special issue on how "XML and its related technologies can help to fulfil the promise of e-journals." (Only abstracts are free online.) All eight articles are of interest, but see especially Dennis Nicholson on The European Open Archives Forum and Peter Murray-Rust and Henry Rzepa on XML for scientific publishing. [Open Access News]

RSS :

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 16:24:44 GMT

RSS? What is it?. Professional Reading Shelf (5 Items) World Summit on the Information Society Source: IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) IFLA Has Posted Three Reports From the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva Repo [ResourceShelf]

Metadata :

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 23:28:12 GMT

MARC. The following documents are available for review by the MARC 21 community:

Proposal No. 2004-01: Making Subfields $e, $f, and $g Repeatable in Field 260 of the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format.
Proposal No. 2004-02: Defining New Field Link Type Codes for Subfield $8 (Field link and sequence number) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Holdings Formats.
Proposal No. 2004-03: Designating the Privacy of Fields 541, 561 and 583 in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Holdings Formats.

These papers will be discussed in a meeting of the MARC Advisory Committee on Saturday, January 10, 2004 and Sunday, January 11, 2004 in San Diego.

A draft agenda for the meeting is available.

Several other papers will be posted soon. [Catalogablog]

Metadata : OAI :

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 12:29:28 GMT

PubMed Central is OAI-compliant and offering new services. In October, PubMed Central (or a portion of it) became OAI-compliant. One consequence is that it now allows users to download the the full-text XML for its open-access articles and FTP the text, data, and image files associated with an article. See the PMC list of open-access PMC journals for the scope of these important new services. [Open Access News]