To buy, or not to buy–that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the end to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous vendors Or to take up coding against a sea of problems And by opposing end them. To code, to commit– No, more–and by a bug fix to say we end The heartache, …
A book that a few of our colleagues have been working on for quite some time has now been released: Library Linked Data in the Cloud: OCLC’s Experiments with New Models of Resource Description. You can also preview it on Google Books. OCLC Research has been working with linked data for years, and we have developed …
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. – Antony, in The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare My esteemed colleague Thom Hickey, who knows the MARC format more intimately than I ever will, has penned a defense of that venerable metadata format. He was kind enough to cite a column I wrote in 2002 …
Science uses the art of observation to unearth truth. Sometimes the observation is minutely focused on a small constituent of a much larger ecosystem. By doing this, it can be possible to detect larger truths from such minutely focused observation. This brings me to my latest metadata investigation, which is about as minutely focused within …
I just finished updating my “MARC Usage in WorldCat” web site that summarizes and reports on how MARC elements have been used in the 333,518,928 MARC records in WorldCat as of 1 Jan 2015. Not surprisingly, the totals for new fields such as 336, 337, and 338 have shot up, from some 9-10 million occurrences in …
As we have said before, the Library of Congress and OCLC have been sharing information and approaches regarding library linked data. In a nutshell, we have two different use cases and strategies that we believe are compatible and complementary. Now, in a just co-published white paper, we are beginning to share more details and evidence that …
As we announced earlier in the month, we have been communicating and collaborating with the Library of Congress over our different approaches to library linked data. The Library of Congress is developing BIBFRAME, which is slated to eventually replace MARC by providing the added benefits that will accrue to using a linked data solution for …
Some of you may already know about my “MARC Usage in WorldCat” project, where I simply expose the contents of a number of MARC subfields in ordered lists of strings. The point, as I state on the site itself, is to expose “which elements and subfields have actually been used, and more importantly, how? This work …
It has been no secret that we are using a vocabulary developed by Google, Microsoft, and others for exposing structured metadata on the web. Documented at Schema.org, this vocabulary is important because all of the major search engines are primed to look for it and will use it when they find it. Therefore, simply by …
Yesterday the San Mateo, CA office of OCLC Research hosted the first Code4Lib NorCal regional meetup and mini-conference. About 35 people attended from Stanford, UC Berkeley, CSU Chancellor’s Office, UCSF, CSU San Luis Obispo, CSU Fresno, Sonoma State, San Jose State, and other colleges (no public libraries unfortunately). Code4Lib NorCal joins the growing ranks of regional groups that …