Lis News

Sometimes I like to check lisnews.org for library-related info. Every-so-often I find some strange articles there, keeping things interesting. Recently a poor little kitty was found after someone dumped it in a book drop-box at a library. In other news, a statue of Frank Zappa was situated in front of a Baltimore library. His wife said Zappa would have approved of the location, as his mother was a librarian.

Libtypos Regroups

After losing its host from organizational changes in NELINET, the Libtypos forum has regrouped in a new location at Google Groups. The forum is now found at http://groups.google.com/group/libtypos/. This project, now more than 10 years old, tracks typographical errors found in library catalogs and encourages other librarians to maintain clean databases. The unfortunate part is that the content cannot be viewed until you are approved as a member, which I am not.

Librarian Hypnotizes Lobsters

Apparently in the early 20th century librarians did much more than their desk job required. Here is an article I stumbled upon from 1921 that describes F. Martin Duncan, librarian to the Zoological Society, in his attempt to hypnotize a "wild, uneducated female lobster...selected at random from a fish monger's slab."He was able to put the lobster in a trance long enough to stand it on its head for about five minutes.

Just goes to show librarians are jacks of many trades. What will we do next?

Faceted Classification

While reading a chapter by Vanda Broughton on faceted classification, I couldn't help but relate it to another reading in LIS2000, Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, in which he describes the relationships of items to each other and how they become linked in a network. He used a great classification system example to highlight how things must first take on many characteristics before they can be classified in a scheme that is categorically efficient; the periodic table of elements. Before it was created the elements needed defined by various characteristics, such as atomic number and weight. I think this is what Broughton is saying in that "faceted schemes are composed of all these little bricks and building blocks which must be put together to achieve the end result." I recommend the chapter for anyone interested in classification schemes.

Broughton, Vanda. “Faceted Classification.” Chapter 20 from her Essential Classification. New York: Neal Schuman, 2004.

American Notes

This is my American Notes fragment that I inline styled using Kompozer. I found the exercise to be fairly easy, once I figured out that I needed to create my own html folder in the public space of the server. I also found some basic ftp info here for anyone who still needs help with the assignment.

LC Subject Headings

Library of Congress subject heading results per OPAC searches can be an easier way to get more relevant search results than with Boolean keyword searches. An article that gives a great example of Boolean vs. OPAC search results can be found here.

Another related article describes algorithmic relevancy in subject heading searches.

Semantic web

For LIS2000 we had an online discussion that dealt with the web and it's effects on librarianship and scholarly communication. From the discussion, what interested me most was how the emergence of the Semantic web might impact cataloging. Clearly new standards for metadata will have to be established as "data about data" will increase ubiquitously. What is unclear is whether or not librarians will have a role in determining a new language for such standards, or web administrators will use an open access model or user data-seeking behavior to come up with a meaningful system.

"The Nature of Meaning in the Age of Google" by T.A. Brooks is an interesting take on this topic and can be found at http://informationr.net/ir/9-3/paper180.html.