Experimental ISBD Tool

We have added an experimental tool to the CCR Wiki: a search tool that works with Adobe Acrobat. If you go to the ISBD Outline, you will now see a search box. This will use the PDF Open Parameters to search the word(s) inside the current ISBD.

It takes a moment to download the ISBD, but then it works very well.

FW: [RDA-L] www.rdaonline.org

Christoph Schmidt-Supprian wrote:

<snip>
A very interesting project - and one I've told all my colleagues to watch. But as long as there are no detailed AACR2-type rules (so far only the various rule interpretations seem to be available), this is not a replacement for AACR2 or RDA. It strikes me that, at least so far, this site is rather an alternative to Cataloger's Desktop than to RDA. In other words, it's an aggregator of rule sets, not a replacement of any one set of rules.
</snip>

The Cooperative Cataloging Rules initiative is not designed as a replacement for anything. There are two separate parts to it.
First, it is a continuation of what we have been doing and second, a common meeting-ground with other metadata communities for discussion of bibliographical concepts.

1) The sections at: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/library-of-congress-rule-interpretations and http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/isbd-areas
To use this site correctly, catalogers need to retain their copies of AACR2. Then, the rule interpretations from the Library of Congress, which your library, and any library, follows every time anyone accepts a record with 040 $aDLC$cDLC or from any other library that follows LC cataloging. These rule interpretations are now more widely available, and you can interact with them, through the CCR. AACR2 is under copyright. Therefore, you need to keep your copy of AACR2, while the supplementing rules (in many cases, rules that are far more readable, more understandable, and more useful) are available online for everyone.

The ISBD is available on the web to everyone and it serves as the basis for AACR2. Therefore, there are links into the ISBD because we can't put AACR2 online.

The CCR can provide new resources for catalogers, e.g. a page made by Becky Yoose on cataloging kits at: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/kits. Even though it is still a work in progress, it is useful already, and for others in the Wiki, it can be built cooperatively.

RDA is intended to replace AACR2 and the LC Rule Interpretations and this will involve costs of retooling and retraining, plus subscription costs. The reason for the CCR initiative is that many libraries simply cannot do this since we are going through the terrible budget cuts, and my library is one of those. There can be no discussion about this. In addition, I have brought up very serious theoretical questions as to the correctness of the RDA/FRBR model, and that it is highly probable that this model is obsolete. So, it is not wise to spend lots of money and resources to make a better horse & buggy which will be ignored in our modern information society, at a time when we need to provide something genuinely useful for our public. What our public needs from information and how they interact with it is highly unclear because we are in a transitional moment, although much research is going on right now.

Therefore, I feel that options are absolutely necessary for libraries today. Cataloging rules need to continue to develop when work on AACR2 and the LCRIs ceases, and now the CCR will be able to continue to follow and develop the rules we already use. In this way, libraries have the simplest option to *continue doing what we have done* until there is some kind of clarity on how we should best prepare ourselves for the future and how best to spend our resources. For instance, it is a no-brainer that MARC21/ISO2709 format absolutely must change, and I believe it is only after some real experiments have been made in sharing our records with the public, how they accept them and what they do with them, that we can begin to decide how we should continue.

If this is a revolution, it is probably one of the most conservative revolutions I can imagine. While I think we can all agree that we desperately need basic, fundamental changes, in my opinion, RDA provides only cosmetic changes. As I have written in other posts, RDA does not attempt to solve the fundamental problems faced by libraries, catalogs, cataloging, or our users. While I have great respect and admiration for those in this effort, someone must take a stand at this highly important juncture and proclaim: This is the wrong road to choose. And thus the Cooperative Cataloging Rules.

This leads me to the second part of the CCR.

2) The sections at: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/conceptual-outline and http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/cataloging-ru
To help determine what needs to be done, the CCR also attempts to bring different rules and practices together. If we are to cooperate with other metadata communities as everyone says we must, it cannot be a case of: everyone else can change everything they do to follow our rules, and then we can cooperate. Cooperation means change from everyone concerned, and that can only come from a common understanding of what everyone means, and what everyone does. Therefore, we must begin to understand the rules and practices of others, and the CCR attempts to provide this common meeting ground in an open and cooperative fashion.

This dual purpose may not be very clear in the CCR as it is now. During the Christmas break, I will try to redesign the main page to make this clearer.

Jim

James L. Weinheimer
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
Rome, Italy

FW: Open Reply to Thomas Mann

Here is a message I posted to several lists. In it, I mention the Cooperative Cataloging Rules initiative.

To those interested, I have just made available another of my "open replies" to Thomas Mann's report (http://www.guild2910.org/Future%20of%20Cataloging/LCdistinctive.pdf) on the E-LIS database (once again) at: http://eprints.rclis.org/17331/
"An Open Reply to Thomas Mann's report 'What is Distinctive about the Library of Congress In Both its Collections and its Means of Access to Them ...'"

Regards,
James Weinheimer
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy

Re: [NGC4LIB] FRBR WEMI and identifiers

Jonathan Rochkind wrote:

<snip>
Ah, you're right. Current practices make it difficult or impossible to tell (in an automated fashion) whether a uniform title authority record represents a Work, an Expression, or a Manifestation, and exactly what 'headings' correspond to which as well.

Jim, does this help you at all see why _some_ change of our cataloging practices is required? What we do is just too ambiguous for the machine world.
</snip>

This question concerns me because I don't believe I am against changes in our cataloging--I think it's quite to the contrary. It's just that I don't think that RDA is a productive way of going about it. This colors the project I have initiated with the Cooperative Cataloging Rules, so I feel I must explain.

What do I think needs to be changed? Let's look at the same examples I gave before:

100 1_ |a Shakespeare, William, |d 1564-1616. |t Sonnets. |l German & English. |k Selections

The suggestions I have seen, and the project of subject headings at http://id.loc.gov/ does the same, is that this heading must be turned into a URI to be useful. I disagree since I don't think that even if this headings were turned into a URI, it would be very useful at all. What would be extemely useful however, is to link what can be linked, and there is an awful lot here: separate links to Shakespeare's authority record (an extremely rich source); to the Name/title record of the Sonnets; to the different German/English versions, and to different Selections. As a result, this single heading is extremely rich in linked data. So, this text-based string should be dismantled and linked wherever possible, and it is very possible here.

Therefore, the above heading would be (in very poor XML):

<uniformTitle>
<name>[link to Shakespeare's heading]</name>
<title>[link to record for the Sonnets]</title>
<language>[link from list of languages]</language>
<version>[link to record for selections]</version>
</uniformTitle>

Therefore, the above should all be separate links when it becomes very useful.

Let's examine the other heading I gave before:
130 _0 |a Bible. |p O.T. |p Genesis. |l Catalan. |s Clascar. |d 1914

Again, when viewed *not as a text string* but as an entire number of separate linked data, this is extremely rich. I can imagine in both cases, that the OPAC would present the user with different possibilites depending on where you clicked, using various onmouseovers to display the options. Someone would see the incredible NAF heading for the Bible, and would run the mouse over Genesis, and would get all kinds of links about the book of Genesis, going into the authority file, but it could be enriched with links into Wikipedia, into versions, into online webpages, and so on. With subjects, you could run your mouse over the main heading and get all the cross-references and scope notes immediately.

Now, from the point of view of *cataloging* i.e. what the actual work that the cataloger does, exactly what needs to change here? Are the rules for constructing the name heading for Shakespeare going to change? No, because they don't need to. How about for determining the title "Sonnets"? No. Or Selections? No. Any changes for the Bible heading? No. For individual books of the Bible? No. And this is what AACR2 and RDA deal with, not with coding.

Now, let's consider the |l in the Shakespeare heading. Here I could see a change in that |l could be made repeatable, thereby simplifying both the cataloger's and the user's tasks (no need to learn the order). From these simple examples, I think it's clear that our formats must change substantially, but the standards for cataloging do not, or not all that much. Still, I submit that deciding to "link what can be linked" would constitute a huge advance in the catalog and that our users would love it.

Do we need WEMI and RDA for this? I don't see why. First, I don't think that WEMI fits the world of information very well and to me, such an abstruse theoretical/philosophical argument is far less important at a moment when we should be concentrating on *linking wherever we can*. There are lots of places for links in all of our records, and so I see it as primarily a systems problem that can be implemented *right now.* Certainly the models that FRBR and WEMI present are at the least far too dubious for the library world to focus its diminishing resources on at this very difficult moment, as the "Study of the North American MARC Records Marketplace" makes very clear. (I'm still reading and considering it, by the way)

Ultimately, we may discover that changes in cataloging procedures are necessary or useful in some cases, e.g. the multiple languages in the uniform title I showed, but these types of changes will make themselves clear as experience is gained.

I hope this makes my own ideas clearer: I am not saying that the current situation should not change, I am saying that FRBR, WEMI and their RDA version do not provide the changes that either we or our users need. At the same time, there's a lot that can be done right now, if people are willing to open up their data for experimentation by the general information community.

Jim Weinheimer

Support for the Research Process: An Academic Library Manifesto

Here is a manifesto issued by the RLG Partnership Research Information Management Roadmap Working Group. It looks like there are some great ideas here. Each of their points are well considered, but I think these two merit special interest:

• Design flexible new services around those parts of the research process that cause researchers the most frustration and difficulty.
• Embed library content, services, and staff within researchers’ regular workflows; integrating with services others provide (whether on campus, at other universities, or by commercial entities) where such integration serves the needs of the researcher.

To accomplish these goals means a sea change in the library mind-set: creating tools that work in tandem with other tools our patrons need, instead of expecting everyone to learn the special ways of the library; and always keeping the needs of the user uppermost in mind. Libraries have always claimed to do just those things, but many of our patrons would disagree.

I would only add that there are additional needs that a library has for its internal purposes, but these should not overshadow the goals of this manifesto.

Give it a read!

Updates to the Wiki

We have added some additional links and a page to the Cooperative Cataloging Rules Wiki.

1. There are now links to cataloging rules for specific materials, i.e. Online Books Electronic Editions, Online Books Reproductions, and Cataloging Online Integrating Resources, all from Yale.
2. We have also added a new page Reports on the Practice of Cataloging, where we can place links to reports of special interest to the practice of cataloging in a modern environment. So far, we have just made primarily links to the major sites, but this can become much more specific.

Please think about joining and helping your colleagues!

New Post in NGC4LIB

I discussed some the Cooperative Cataloging Rules Wiki in the NGC4LIB email list. You can read it at https://listserv.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=NGC4LIB;Ml0AuQ;20091030150755%2B0100, and the copy on my own blog at http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/2009/10/fw-ngc4lib-tim-berners-lee-on-semantic.html