A few CUNY+ suggestions

A couple of quick ideas about making CUNY+ a richer experience for our users.

1. Give users viewing an item record a “text me the details” link that would send the call number and title as a text message to the user’s cell phone. Once the link is clicked, the user types in his/her cell phone number and receives a text message that is less likely to be lost than the scraps of paper our patrons usually rely on. Idea courtesy of Ryan Eby of the Ann Arbor District Library (MI).
2. Offer users a link to chat reference (or a chat widget) on the “no results found” pages. The link/widget would only appear in your local catalog. For those of CUNY libraries with a QuestionPoint subscription (Baruch, BMCC, Brooklyn, Graduate Center, Hunter, and John Jay), we’d offer the Qwidget (the QuestionPoint chat widget). I’ve already floated this by Roland Samieske, who is looking into it. Idea courtesy of David Lee King of the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library (KS).

Good summary of Mann article on why librarians are needed

David Weinberger of Everything is Miscellaneous wrote a nice summary of Thomas Mann’s big-picture article, “The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and Scholarship in Research Libraries”
http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/2007/06/25/why-we-need-librarians/

The original article by Mann, a response to the Calhoun report, is located at http://guild2910.org/Pelopponesian%20War%20June%2013%202007.pdf

Blogs about catalogs and cataloging

I’d like start a series of posts here to spotlight some of the best blogs written by (mostly) and for librarians. In this inaugural post, I’ll focus on some of the blogs that are mostly or entirely about cataloging issues or about library catalogs.

Catalogablog
David Bigwood from the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, covers “library cataloging, classification, metadata, subject access, and related topics.”

Cataloging Futures
Christine Schwartz, a cataloger from the Princeton Theology Seminary, has only just launched her blog this April but has gotten off to a great start by linking to key documents and blog posts relating to the debates over RDA and the future of bibliographic control.

Coyle’s InFormation
A digital libraries consultant, Karen Coyle launched her blog in 2006. She frequently weighs in on the RDA debate and on digital books.

Digiblog: The ALCTS Blog
The official blog of the ALCTS division of the ALA.

The FRBR Blog
This is William Denton’s laudatory effort to gather in one spot news and links to all notable developments in the world of FRBR.

Hectic Pace
Best known for his monthly column in American Libraries, Technically Speaking, and for his role in the creation of the brilliant catalog at North Carolina State University, Andrew Pace covers the more newsy stories that used to be in his monthly column.

Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog
A member of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control and a researcher at OCLC, Dempsey frequently writes about metadata.

Outgoing
The chief scientist at OCLC, Thom Hickey has lately been writing a lot about WorldCat Identities.

Panlibus
Richard Wallis, who works for the ILS vendor, Talis, has been blogging here since August 2004.

Thingology
Billed as “Thingology is LibraryThing’s ideas blog, on the philosophy and methods of tags, libraries and suchnot,” the posts frequently touch on the debates over what the next generation catalog should look like.

“Self-plagiarism is style”
Davey Pattern is the Library Systems Manager at the University of Huddersfield (UK). He made a splash in the blogosphere recently with his survey of what librarians think of their catalogs and what they’d like to see those catalogs begin doing.

Weibel Lines
Stuart Weibel is a senior research scientist at OCLC who not only writes well on the issues of Internet standards (including metadata) but also adds nice photos to each blog post.

In future posts in this series, I’ll turn to blogs that focus on reference services, web design, library marketing, and more. Please add your comments about any blogs I’ve neglected here.

LC group to discuss future of bibliographic control

(as posted by Marsha Clark on CULIBS-L) Advances in search-engine technology, the popularity of the Internet and the influx of electronic information resources have greatly changed the way libraries do their work. To address those changes, the Library of Congress has convened a Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control to examine the future of bibliographic description in the 21st century.

Libraries are looking at ways to catalog the avalanche of both print and digital materials that come to them for classification and control, and library managers worldwide recognize the need to examine critically the role of the catalog and its relationship to other methods of finding
information. Building on the work and results of the Library’s Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium (2001), the new group will: Present findings on how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices can effectively support management of and access to library materials in the evolving information and technology environment, Recommend ways in which the library community can collectively move toward achieving this vision, and Advise the Library of Congress on its role and priorities.

José-Marie Griffiths of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill serves as chair of the group.

“I agreed to chair this group because these issues are facing all libraries. It is an important opportunity for different sectors of the information profession to examine a common problem and recommend solutions that will benefit librarians and users,” she said.

Deanna Marcum, associate librarian for Library Services, hosted the first meeting and thanked the Working Group members for volunteering their time and expertise. Marcum is the convener of the group and will receive its recommendations.

“The Working Group will provide extremely valuable insight and guidance to the Library of Congress and the entire library community in an area critical to the future of librarianship and the continuing role of libraries in American society,” Marcum said.

During its inaugural meeting at the Library of Congress Nov. 2-3, Working Group members concluded that, rather than planning a single summit meeting on the future of bibliographic control, it would schedule three regional meetings during 2007. The venues will be in or near
large airports in different regions of the United States to make it easier for a broad range of participants to travel to the meetings.

The Working Group also organized issues and affected parties into three broad categories: Uses and Users, Structures and Standards, and Economics and Organization. Each category will be the focus of one regional meeting in 2007. The meetings will be preceded by distribution of a background paper that gives an overview of the current environment in which bibliographic control operates.

In July or August, after the three meetings have taken place, the Working Group will meet again to draft a report and recommendations by Sept. 1 for public comments, which will be taken into account in the group’s final report, to be issued by Nov. 1, 2007.

Members of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control

• José-Marie Griffiths of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (chair)
• Richard Amelung for the American Association of Law Libraries
• Diane Dates Casey, Janet Swan Hill, and Sally G. Smith for the American Library Association
• Brian E.C. Schottlaender, Olivia M.A. Madison, and Judith Nadler representing the Association of Research Libraries
• Gary Price for the Special Libraries Association
• Robert Wolven for the Program for Cooperative Cataloging
• Daniel Clancy for the Google Company
• Jay Girotto for the Microsoft Corporation
• Clifford A. Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information
• Lorcan Dempsey of OCLCAssisting the Working Group from the Library of Congress is Library Services Executive Secretariat Beth Davis-Brown.

  More information on the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control will be available beginning Dec. 11, 2006, at a special public Web site, www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/.

Automating an online display of new books in your collection

There are number of ways that you can manually update a web page on your library’s site to include not only a list of newly acquired books but also the jacket art for them. Thanks to the wonders of RSS feeds, librarians are finding many ways to harness their library catalog’s “new books” feed so that it can automatically update a web page listing new titles. A series of posts on the NGC4LIB list (subscription required to view the original post) in early August highlighted several ways of accomplishing this clever feat:

• The Cambridge Public Library (Canada) has a New Mystery Carousel that allows you to scroll through new mystery acquisitions. Click a jacket to get to the record for that item. The creator of this, Mike Cunningham, explains how he did it here and here on his blog.

• Ed Vielmetti, who refers to himself as a “superpatron” of the Ann Arbor District Library created this display of new acquisitions from the catalog’s feed. You can read Vielmetti’s explanation of how he created the page from a post on his blog.

Recently, the Travelin’ Librarian blog mentioned how the Shenandoah Public Library (Iowa) is using the jacket art available in LibraryThing to present on the library’s home page a list of newly acquired items. From what I can tell, the librarians at the Shenandoah Public Library have created an account in LibraryThing where they only add new books from the library’s collection (items that are presumably fully cataloged in their “real” catalog). If you’re familiar with LibraryThing, which allows you to create an online catalog of your own personal collection, you’ll know that your LibraryThing collection has a feed associated with it so that others may subscribe to it to see what items you’ve been adding to your collection. The Shenandoah Public Library took their LibraryThing feed of newly added items and made it display on their library’s home page. It’s a bit clunky, but it is also a clever, very low-tech and vey affordable way (i.e., free) to automate the process of displaying jackets for newly acquired books.

I don’t know if our version of Ex Libris Aleph here at CUNY allows us to create feeds of items, but it would be great if it did. For an interesting example of what you can do with RSS feeds from your catalog in a way that doesn’t involve jacket art but just title/author info, check out this page from the University of Alberta Libraries. Anyone know whether our catalog is capable of such things?