Will Google's Keyword Searching Eliminate the Need for LC Cataloging and Classification?

Nope!, says Thomas Mann, a Reference Librarian in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress, "its limitations make cataloging and classification even more important to researchers." See Mann's paper, written for AFSCME 2910, here. There is a similar article in Library Journal, entitled Research at Risk, that I would also recommend. LJ recently did an about-face on its rather unpopular new policy of restricting articles to subscribers who establish a login, so you should be able to access this article freely. If not, and you haven't activated your login, drop me a line and I'll be happy to share.

Online Access for Report of the State Auditor

At the request of Ann, we've added a field to the bib record for the Report of the State Auditor that will provide access to the current online version of Salary and Travel Supplement. Give it a try and see how you like it.

Also, if anyone knows of a more common name for this publication, I could provide variant title access to that, making it a lot easier to find. Just let me know.

When I Talk Through Google...

...it makes me feel like #1.

Our good friend Google has a cool new service in Beta: an instant messaging/ voice chat program called Google Talk. Jennifer and I tested it out and it is very easy to download and use both for text and voice chatting. Although we did get a good bit of static the 2nd time we tried voice chat aka talking. Should be a major competitor in the IM game when widely released.

Happy weekend.

It's a WikiWiki World

If anyone is interested in getting involved with Wikis, here's a chance to get in on the ground floor. The LISWiki just launched on June 30, 2005 and there are plenty of topics waiting to be covered or just fleshed out. Unlike Wikipedia, LISWiki's mission embraces opinion pieces ("with factual information properly presented, of course"). So, if you have a soap box that's been gathering dust, they want to hear from you as well.

Raising the Bar: Legal Education Reform in Iraq

A collaborative project between OCLC Online Computer Library Center and the International Human Rights Law Institute of DePaul University College of Law recently brought together 12 Iraqi librarians for a training workshop on cataloging standards and technology in Amman, Jordan.

WorldCat Adds Its Billionth Holding

At 2:21:34 p.m. EDT on August 11th, 2005, Anne Slane, a cataloger for Worthington (Ohio) Libraries, entered holdings information for the book The Monkees: The Day-By-Day Story of the 60s Pop Sensation, becoming the one billionth holding record in the WorldCat database.

The wording on this confused me a bit, but I'm thinking that they are saying WorldCat has 1 billion holdings records, and not 1 billion unique bibliographic records. (It's over 61 million bibliographic records now.) Impressive, nonetheless. Congrats, Ms. Slane!

GOLD/ GALILEO Annual Meeting

gpclibrarians
Originally uploaded by decatur library.

A good group of GPC folks attended the 2005 GOLD/ GALILEO Annual Users Group Conference in Athens last Friday. Here's a picture of some, but not all, of us. It was a very enjoyable day, featuring lots of yummy snack foods.

In addition to the eating, there were several interesting sessions. The previously mentioned presentation by Ross Singer of GA Tech on WAG The Dog was very informative. There was also a GALILEO update which covered the implementation of SFX and federated searching of GALILEO databases in the not too distant future.


The Digital Library of Georgia session included information about their newly redesigned website, some featured collections, and a great look at an exhibit about the Gold Rush in Dahlonega. Pete attended it too!




Hopefully many of the presentations will be online soon for folks who didn't get to attend. All in all it was a very fun and informative Friday.

Web Access to Works in the Public Domain

Interesting blurb from LC Cataloging Newsline, Volume 13, no. 10, August 2005:

This project makes links from the LC catalog to full
electronic texts of items for which LC has an exact match in print
represented in the LC collections. The project depends on the
cooperation of "trusted" partner institutions such as research
libraries and other organizations that are digitizing freely
available works. LC provides links to the electronic versions from
its catalog records for the print versions. Two new collaborators
are the RAND Corporation and the Thurgood Marshall Law Library,
University of Maryland. In the case of the former, over 680 links
have been made to RAND publications through the RAND Web site http://www.rand.org/publications [August 2005]. In the second,
over 140 links have been made to publications of the United States
Commission on Civil Rights digitized by the Thurgood Marshall Law
Library, University of Maryland at
http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/index.asp [August
2005].

The Secret History of Librarians

An interview with Rex Libris creator, James Turner.

Thought that this might be a nice diversion for everyone from my usual "Blah, blah, blah, Open WorldCat, blah, blah, LCSH ..." Someone posted this link to AUTOCAT last Friday (the day we catalogers set aside for non-cataloging-related discussion and general humor, which must be properly tagged before posting, of course). I've only had time to skim the article, but it looks like a pretty cute little series, sort of Mr. Bookman the Library Cop (my favorite Seinfeld character) travels through time and space to track down overdue library books. I would have liked to have seen a female protagonist, but oh well. I still have Bunny Watson from Desk Set and that’s not too shabby. Besides, it sounds like Mr. Turner really has his heart in the right place.

What do you personally like about libraries? And in what ways have your feelings toward libraries influenced this particular piece of work.

I like being able to go in and read books for free, without the staff glaring at me or throwing me out. A good library system is to be treasured, as it gives you access to tens of thousands of books. The sum of human knowledge available at our finger tips. The work of academics, poets, artists, philosophers, scientists... all at our beck and call. It's amazing. We sit atop a mountain of knowledge. It seems a pity to ignore it. … We just have to take advantage of it. As Andrew Carnegie said, "It is the mind that makes the body rich." He believed education was vital, and while I can't help build 1,700 libraries as he did, I can certainly help promote them.

Open WorldCat: Book Buying Pilot and Virtual Reference Links

Some more information is starting to filter out regarding the Open WorldCat book buying pilot. An announcement posted to OCLC-CAT refcently had a bit more detail than that link. Here's an excerpt.

Each time a Web searcher purchases a book through Open WorldCat, a portion of the proceeds will be shared with Open WorldCat libraries in one of two ways. The purchaser decides online whether to apply a credit directly to the account of a selected Open WorldCat participant library or to redirect the credit to support the ongoing development of Open WorldCat for the benefit of all participating libraries.
In the introductory phase of book purchasing through Open WorldCat, Baker & Taylor is the single supplier of books. Baker & Taylor will sell books from its current inventory of over 500,000 titles. The book buying option will be visible initially to users in the United States. OCLC hopes to expand this feature to other content formats and additional partners, and to libraries outside the United States in the future. OCLC will pursue the best prices and discounts available for consumers, who will identify their library as part of the transaction.

Like I said in a comment to another post, I've always been a little iffy about the marriage of business transactions and libraries, but we'll see what happens.

Now, onto something I'm not iffy about, virtual reference. Everyone take a peek at this and let me know if there is interest in listing our virtual reference services. I'm our Open WorldCat contact, so I can get the necessary changes made. We'd need to have a single access page, so it would probably have to wait until the Web site re-design, but it's definitely something to think about. I've seen the links in Open WorldCat records and I'm thrilled by the visibility it could afford us.

ISBN-13 Is Coming, Dummy

If anyone is a little concerned/interested/confused by the impending 13-digit ISBN, the Book Industry Study Group has teamed up with our old pals at Wiley Publishing to offer ISBN-13 for Dummies. (By the way, does anyone else still bristle at being called a "dummy" when reading about MySQL or Robert's Rules of Order?) The pdf is just 21 pages and it appears to be geared more towards publishers than librarians, but the first few pages offer a nice overview of what's in store with ISBN-13. You may have noticed them lurking around a few versos already, and we can expect them to be fully rolled out around January 2007. My favorite bit of all this is that ISBN-13 for Dummies has, yep, you guessed it, a 13-digit ISBN!!! (978-0-555-02340-2, to be exact. You knew I'd check.)

I'm not really concerned about the 13-digit ISBN itself, it's the prospect of OCLC squeezing it into their existing 10-digit 020 field that gives me the willies. I'm sure that OCLC knows what it's doing and pretty soon everything will be fine, but at the moment we have to put it in the 024 field; which I have some reservations about, rather like wearing my sister's hand-me-down bell bottoms in 1986.

Project Muse full text searchable through Google

From College & Research Libraries News, July/August 2005, p. 507 or online:

Project MUSE, an online collection of scholarly journals in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, is collaborating with Google Inc. to enable researchers to use the Google Web site and the Google Scholar interface to search the Project MUSE Web site. Individuals at Muse-subscribing institutions will be able to search the full-text content from any of the more than 270 scholarly journals hosted by Project MUSE and access the articles in HTML or PDF format. Those unaffiliated with a MUSE-subscribing library will be able to view abstracts or excerpts of articles found through a Google search of MUSE journal content. Currently, MUSE subscribers can search and browse the collection’s journals through the subscribing library’s catalog and traditional abstracting and indexing databases.

BIG Meeting

The next meeting of the Atlanta Area Bibliographic Instruction Group (BIG) will be held on Wednesday, July 27th at the University of West Georgia in Room I-301 of the Technology Learning Center. That sounds like a cool place! The meeting is free but if you want to go, RSVP to Christy Stevens at cstevens(at)westga.edu by July 21st.

See this handy announcement for more info, including speakers and directions and such.

Freakonomics website

If you or a patron liked Freakonomics, there's a great companion website that includes an Authors' Blog. Levitt and Dubner post all the blog entries, and they accept public comments (and comment themselves).

And in case you're wondering who has the Decatur copy checked out, it's me.

Another Google Trick

I accidentally stumbled on this cool Google search today: if you type in an airline and a flight number the first result will be links to flight tracking sites. Very cool!

Here's an example: delta 824.

Have a great weekend.

eBook of the Month

Speaking of NetLibrary, I just read about their eBook of the Month campaign. Pretty neat. This campaign might be good content to highlight in our Web site redesign.

The eBook of the Month campaign is a monthly content promotion designed to showcase new and noteworthy titles available from NetLibrary and encourage patrons to visit your eBook collection. Each month, NetLibrary selects a new featured title and provides free, unlimited access through the authenticated homepages of more than 12,000 public, academic and special libraries.

The eBook of the Month for July is National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer by Stefan Szymanski and Andrew Zimbalist. Looks pretty interesting, even to an unapologetic sports-phobe like myself.

Audiobooks from NetLibrary

NetLibrary now offers audiobooks. (This might not be very new, but I just found out.)

Have GPC Libraries considered offering audiobooks? Or, is that too public library?

Update one hour later: I mean downloadable audiobooks, rather than CDs or cassettes.

Yahoo MyWeb

Has any one seen this yet? And, if so, have you considered the possibilities for its use in the library environment, in conjunction with virtual reference or not? It's still in Beta, so we probably have a bit of time to mull it over, but I'd think that it would be a good way to get even more mileage out of our well-selected Internet resource lists and play to the younger generation's unconditional love of All Web Things Social. Am I nuts, or is it so crazy it just might work?

In case you're visiting Clarkston soon...

Beginning July 5, parking lot #2 at Clarkston (the one next to the library) will be closed due to construction of the new student center. Try the lots off Memorial College or lot #1 next to A and B buildings. Here's the campus map if you need a reminder.

BIG Call For Proposals

It's kinda short notice but there's a call for presentations out for the next meeting of the Atlanta Bibliographic Instruction Group (BIG). The meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 27th at the Univ of West Georgia in Carrollton.

We are looking for presenters to give 40-45 minute presentations/discussions on the current state of instruction. Let others know what you are doing, what's working and what's not, and what we have to look forward to in the future.
Possible topics include:
Online tutorials
Assessment of instruction
ACRL standards
Information Literacy credit courses
Faculty collaboration
If you would like to present, or if you would like to suggest a presenter,
please contact Michael Aldrich, president of BIG, at maldrich@westga.edu or
678.839.6357, or Christy Stevens, Program Chair, at cstevens@westga.edu or
678.839.6355.