I'm not sure how many folks reading this have an interest in foreign libraries,
but in case there are some of you out there, this is for you.
The IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records
is pleased to announce that a draft of "Functional Requirements for Authority Records"
is now available for worldwide review. The draft in English and French is on the IFLA
web site at http://www.ifla.org/VII/d4/wg-franar.htm
Comments can be sent to:
Glenn Patton
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.
6565 Frantz Rd.
Dublin, OH 43017-3395
USA
Fax: (614) 718-7187
E-Mail: Pattong@oclc.org
Blog
Update and Replies
Reply to Lisle: No, I’m not in jail, and in all honesty, nothing happened last week. I sent the note from my cell phone for the coolness factor, intending to follow up later in the day. When the incident took place, I was on my way to meet my boss to drive to New Rochelle for the 2005 New England Endeavor User Group meeting.
At any rate, the NYPD had six huge police officers stationed at the 63rd Drive subway stop in Queens that morning, and were basically searching anyone who a) had a backpack or briefcase and b) had a swarthy, sweaty, ("foreign") suspicious look to them, and I apparently qualified. Lots of white and Asian guys were walking through the turnstyles and going down to the platform, but not us olive skin types. And that neighborhood has tons of south Asians (Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, etc.) so the traffic was slow. I was surprised mostly because while I’ve been kicked out of places of business and had police stop me for being White before, I’ve never had it happen in NYC. For the record, neither my wife nor my sister were at all surprised–to them it was a matter of time before I got picked up for something. (But the NYPD does NOT racially profile. Really.)
Yesterday, I walked out of the 103rd Street stop on the 6 train in Manhattan so se another trio of gigantic NYPD cops ready to pull off any suspcious ("swarthy, sweaty Jews") characters off to the side to have their bag searched, but they ignored my that time. Maybe they weren’t interested in people coming out of the train, or maybe they figured seatrching a white guy in a blavk/hispanic neighborhood made no sense. I can’t figure it out, myself. But then I didn’t vote form Bloomberg and am not a NYPD cop.
You tax dollars at work, y’all.
Just got stopped by nypd.
Just got stopped by nypd. I look dangerous! I am a threat to the state! yeah! I’m e-mailing you from my cell phone! Buwahaha!
From ResourceShelf.com
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
"Our resource for you this week is a European-based research portal for economic and financial data. Sites like this are very handy, especially when a reliable academic source has taken the time to select and organize the available information."
Cataloging Grey Lit In the Trench
I know, I’ve been away for a while. Between work, sickness (both mine and in my family) and deadlines for delivery of a hellish number of catalog records to the National Library of Medicine, it’s been both busy and distracting.
But it’s important to have fun while you’re cataloging a document. It doesn’t matter what it is. An example from this morning:
It’s a bit of fun to catalog the following grey lit document: “Marijuana and Methamphetamine Trafficking on Federal Lands Threat Assessment” from the U.S. Dept. of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center. I don’t have a template for this one so we go with a new “Books” workform in Connexion Client (which I’m still getting used to, although I’ve decided from the experience I’ve taken from it over the past three weeks that I like it.)
The local item number is easy, so that’s my 099 $a NQ 15732. No problem. The title and statement of responsibility is more tricky. There’s no actual author mentioned anywhere in the text, so I settle for a 245 0 0 $a Marijuana and methamphetamine trafficking on federal lands threat assessment / $c National Drug Intelligence Center, and then before anything else, I drop down to the bottom of the form and get my corporate name/added entry out of the way: 710 2 x $a United States. $b Dept. of Justice. $b National Drug Intelligence Center.
Okay, now what? A couple of general notes : 500 x x "Product No. 2005-Q0317-007.", and "February 2005." take care of that. Whoops, forgot my publication statement and physical description, so let’s do that now:
260 x x $a Washington, D.C.: $b National Drug Intelligence Center, $c [2005]
. . . whereupon it occurs to me that there’s no real way to be totally sure of any publication date when dealing with non-copyrighted works like anything the the GPO is going to produce. Ah, well. Now to the physical description:
300 vi, 14 p. $b ill., maps ; $c 28 cm.
Gotta make sure the fixed fields match all that of course. No sweat. Okay what next? I’m still looking at the bottom of the page so of course I need an electronic resource trace:
856 41 $u http://www.usdoj.gov/ndic/pubs10/10402/10402.pdf (yes, that’s a live link)
followed by a 949 which I’m not going to put here (it’s on my constant data list anyway) and scrolling up to see what else needs to be here, I notice I still need a bibliographic resource statement. That’s easy, because it’s just one short page of (poorly cited, IMO) ‘sources’:
504 x x Includes bibliographical references (p. 13).
And a brief table of contents entry:
505 0 Executive summary — Background — Marijuana — Methamphetamine — Sources.
I miss the Clinton bunch–those guys could write heavy duty bibliographic reference lists. They loved research, they produced tons of it over eight years. This current bunch writes position papers that sound like they’re talking to a bunch of friends in someone’s living room–Sources? We don’t need sources. Those are for that reality-based crowd, you know like that asshole Ron Suskind talks to. Cretins.
Okay, after I save this to the local file, I have the real fun open in front of me. How to figure out what the heck MESH heading I can use for this.
Hmm. Marijuana seems pretty straightforward: "Cannabis" is all I get for the substance itself, although if people were smoking it, addicted to it, or dealing with the chemistry of the plant I’d have more choices. "Pot" doesn’t work (I get thousands of responses all with those three letters in them); neither does "reefer". "Weed" gives me a choice between "Dill weed", "Jimson weed", "Mayweed, Crown", or "Pineapple weed", which is instructive but not really helpful. "Grass" and "Herb" gives me every kind of plant known to modern gardening but no drug references, so I stick with what I have.
650 12 Cannabis $z United States.
I’d stick a qualifier in there if I could find one that had anything at all to do with moving the stuff from place to place. Actually, while I’m on the subject let’s stick 650 12 Federal Government $z United States in there as well.
Now for the second major subject: "Methamphetamine" is a MESH heading in its own right, but "Crank" is not (go figure.) Neither is "Crystal", which gives mostly chemistry terms, and "Meth" gives the same list as the full term. Still no qualifiers having anything to do with moving the stuff.
But . . . "Trafficking", it turns out is a valid search term but the list doesn’t give me anything I can use (I get twenty or so types of protein transport terms though). "Drug and Narcotic Control" helps a lot and it’s a valid search term. I think we’ll stick with that.
That’s a half hour out of my morning. I need seven more of these things to hit quota, after which I get to work on the serials databases, which is good, because there’s a few problems with the XML file that Serials Solutions is supposed to send us that need to be resolved. Work, work, work.
Technology, Time and Archives
Occasionally the internet drops something totally suited to librarianship-oriented wiriting into my lap. This happened this morning as I cleared out the past week’s e-mail from my Yahoo account. It’s an article written by Gary North, whose politics I almost never agree with but who is one of the most prolific writers and researchers I’ve ever encountered. The article in question has to do with how he cleared out his old files and why. He’s not a librarian, but these sort of issues plague all of us, librarian or not. I guess the ultimate point is that we are not the only ones whothik about these sorts of things in our daily work.
I’ve clipped the most pertinent bits and stored them behind the link, but the entire article sits here for those interested in reading more.
Search CNN Video for Free
Gary Price offers a few thoughts on The Digitization of the Library along with abunch of links worth perusing when you have some time to spend on it (you can easily spend an hour reading this, so set time aside.) Also, here is an article on how to Browse and Search CNN Video for Free, which can only be called a major tip.
Doing Data Differently
Take a look at Roy Tenant’s column ("Doing Data Differently") in the latest Library Journal and tell me again that "anyone can catalog". No, sorry, they can’t. If they could, than everybody would be a cataloger. In my cataloging class at Queens College, we had maybe 45 people in the class, a few of whom did "well" (showing a real affinity for the work), some more who were "not bad" and the rest did so poorly that the class literally had to be dumbed down to the point where everyone could master the basic elements in time for the end of the semester. I took a metedata class with the same professor later that year where we had the same problem. People are generally bright, but cataloging is like machine coding or any other kind of intensive detail-oriented work–it’s not an intuitive skill. Certainly it can be taught but matering it takes time, patience and a lot of work. My point is that it’s not for everyone (but neither is reference work, so it goes both ways) –and the overal quality of metadata resources suffers if people don’t have the time or inclination (or imagination) to think about smarter ways of integrating existing data structures into existing access systems. It happens here, too–project deadlines loom and when all the smaller tasks for the week/month/quarter are completed, there’s less time and energy to think about how to improve our ILS at the macro level. Argh . . . reality . . .
Having said that, we’re hip deep in finishing up all the records we’re creating to send to OCLC in CatME because we found out through trial and error last week that MARC records can’t be swapped between CatME and Connexion. The work file database formats are different. So we’re going to do pretty much what the NYC William Hallock Park Memorial Public Health Library did earlier this year . . . code like crazy in CatME, finish the grey lit entries, and then empty out the work files by the switchover date (July 1, 2005 as I write this). Then, we’ll start up a new Connexion database and work from there. It’s probably not the best solution (actually, it’s certainly not the best solution) but it will work and it will make us pull less hair out of our heads than some of the alternatives.
Propganda Posters
This isn’t a proper library website, but it is a very nifty and reasonably cosmopolitan collection of WWII era war posters. Also, I’ve traded email with the author, and read his work on a regular basis. So I figured I’d share this. Enjoy!
House Blocks a Provision for Patriot Act Inquiries
The U.S. House of Representatives appears to have done something positive this year. (Librarians, celebrate!) Now to see what the Senate (which is much less devoted to privacy and liberty these days) does with the bill. The full story from the NY Times is behind the link.
I’m going over my notes from the NYLink class from the day before yesterday–I’ll have that up later today. For the moment, I’ll just note that Connexion 1.3 (which is the current version as of March 2005) works very much like CatME, but rather slower: Connexion scans an Oracle database instead of OCLC’s. Still, if you’re used to CatME, you should have few problems making the transition in the next few weeks.
[Read more…] about House Blocks a Provision for Patriot Act Inquiries
Privacy & Downing Street Memo Part II
I know this is not strictly library news, but this is becoming genuinely disturbing. Actually, it was genuinely disturbing a month ago when the story first broke, but now it’s mind bogglingly insane.
This bit by Ted Koppel is not much better.
Training in the art and science (!) of Connexion Client at the Brooklyn campus of Long Island University. Wish me luck and I’ll let you know how it went.
Real Books vs. Schoolbooks
"One way to see the difference between schoolbooks and real books like Moby Dick is to examine different procedures which separate librarians, the custodians of real books, from schoolteachers, the custodians of schoolbooks. To begin with, libraries are usually comfortable, clean, and quiet. They are orderly places where you can actually read instead of just pretending to read.
"For some reason libraries are never age-segregated, nor do they presume to segregate readers by questionable tests of ability any more than farms or forests or oceans do. The librarian doesn’t tell me what to read, doesn’t tell me what sequence of reading I have to follow, doesn’t grade my reading. The librarian trusts me to have a worthwhile purpose of my own. I appreciate that and trust the library in return.
"Some other significant differences between libraries and schools: the librarian lets me ask my own questions and helps me when I want help, not when she decides I need it. If I feel like reading all day long, that’s okay with the librarian, who doesn’t compel me to stop at intervals by ringing a bell in my ear. The library keeps its nose out of my home. It doesn’t send letters to my family, nor does it issue orders on how I should use my reading time at home.
"The library doesn’t play favorites; it’s a democratic place as seems proper in a democracy. If the books I want are available, I get them, even if that decision deprives someone more gifted and talented than I am. The library never humiliates me by posting ranked lists of good readers. It presumes good reading is its own reward and doesn’t need to be held up as an object lesson to bad readers. One of the strangest differences between a library and a school is that you almost never see a kid behaving badly in a library.
"The library never makes predictions about my future based on my past reading habits. It tolerates eccentric reading because it realizes free men and women are often very eccentric. Finally, the library has real books, not schoolbooks. I know the Moby Dick I find in the library won’t have questions at the end of the chapter or be scientifically bowdlerized. Library books are not written by collective pens. At least not yet.
"Real books conform to the private curriculum of each author, not to the invisible curriculum of a corporate bureaucracy. Real books transport us to an inner realm of solitude and unmonitored mental reflection in a way schoolbooks and computer programs can’t. If they were not devoid of such capacity, they would jeopardize school routines devised to control behavior. Real books conform to the private curriculum of particular authors, not to the demands of bureaucracy."
—From "An Underground History of American Education", by John Taylor Gatto