Social tagging can help people find educational resources in digital repositories that are filled with millions of learning materials, says Open University of the Netherlands PhD candidate Riina Vuorikari. She says that adding free, non-hierarchical keywords to the digital learning materials would bring self organization, flexibility, and robustness to learning resources portals. The user, item, and tag allow for more cross references between content from heterogeneous repositories, which can enable users to discover more learning resources across language, country, curriculum, repository, and other contexts. Moreover, future applications for learning resources should make better use of social recommendation systems that work in multiple languages, which is especially relevant to Europe, Vuorikari says.

Access the Complete Article

Source: AlphaGalileo

Today, the wonderful Tara Calashain has an excellent post about how The NY Times making all of the their controlled vocabulary (subject headings) available to the public. Eventually 30,000 of them will be available. As of today, approximately 5,000 personal name headings (aka tags) are online.

Tara also points out that each of the 5,000 names have direct links to RDF and XML data at DBPedia* and Freebase. She also explains that you can download the complete file of names (something a developer is likely to do) or browse and view each recrord one at a time.

Given that we’re not developers we’re going to browse them (in HTML format) online. You can view the 5000 names here. Just like the LC Authorities file has reference value by sometimes providing birthdates, when a name was first used, or a snippet about a heading the NY Times files do much the same thing.

More after the Click

The entry for Colin Powell includes:

+ A definition. A brief backgrounder about the person. Reference value.

+ There are three variants of his name (a guess)

+ The heading has been used 398 times

+ The heading was first used on October 15, 2001 (a guess, when the Times Topics pages went live)

+ The heading was last used on August 4, 2009 (a guess)*.

Here are a few other people we found in the personal name headings list:

+ Ansel Adams

+ Anne Rice
Not much info here. *But for this and all other entries looking in the record and clicking the link that goes to dbpedia.org can show you the content along with the structure of an entry in the dbpedia knowledgebase. Here’s theentry for Anne Rice.

* We’ve asked the NY Times for some help.

Sources: NY Times, ResearchBuzz
Hat Tip: S.C.

In a nutshell, OpenCalais uses semantic technology and natural language processing to analyze text and add metadata by drawing out entities from documents, blog posts, news stories, etc. In some cases, ths type of data can identify or help identify relationships between people, businesses, etc.

A visualization tool might make OpenCalais even more powerful. For example in might be interesting for visualization tools like Muckety or NNDB Mapper and to quickly “see” relationships that might go unnoticed without OpenCalais or other services.

Sure, it would be wonderful if all web content could be analyzed by a human and then have high quality metadata associated with it.

However, that’s far from possible given the massive amount of content generated each minute of each day.

You can try OpenCalais yourself by typing or pasting text into the viewer box.

We entered the full text of last Saturday’s Weekly Presidential Address and got back lots of stats and commentary.

+ Topic (Labor) Worth noting that we did not put the title of the address in the viewer box. The title is, “President Obama Says Recovery Act Creating Jobs and Strengthening Economy”

+ Social Tags Labor, Unemployment, Presidency of Barack Obama, etc.

+ Entities including: Cities (Arcadia, FL) is mentioned in speech Holiday (He ends by wishing everyone a Happy Halloween

+ Continent America (well we’ll got it some slack, close but incorrect) +Industry Terms Clean energy, Less Energy (Good)

+ Province or State Florida, again accurate Finally, Events & Facts

+ Generic Relations (announce, Florida,United States, the largest set of) First we were puzzled. Then, by cursoring over the entry, we see that it’s Florida having the largest set of clean energy projects.

Btw, if you cursor over any of the entities you’ll find additional info.

For example, with Florida we find a relevance score and the lat/long for Arcardia, FL, the town mentioned in the address.

Although we did see it in our document, OC might also provide direct links to Wikipedia, CIA World Factbook, etc.

Overall, very good. But, it’s just one example and one example search does not make a service.

One question that we would we would like to get an answer to is why ThomsonReuters is providing free access to OpenCalais? Does it plan to charge for additional services in the future?

UPDATE: Krista Thomas from OpenCalais sent along the following goals in a Twitter message.
1) Better software faster.
2) Connect all the worlds’ business information.

For bloggers, OC offers a WordPress plug-in, a service for Drupal users and more. The WordPress tool analyzes blog postings, suggests, and even images from Flickr.

Other services have technology that draws out indexing terms, descriptors, etc. but OpenCalais appears to be much more sophisticated. Somewhat similar is Silobreaker news search Silobreaker’s algorithm draws out entities from stories and then make them clickable or searchable. It also offers a couple of cool visualization tools.

Krista Thomas from OpenCalais recently gave a presentation to the San Diego Software Industry Council. Krista’s slides are available online. The charts on pages 4 and 5 are difficult to read so we’re trying to get copies to share..

At the present time

+ 18,000 Developers
+ 20+ Publishers
+ 50 Apps and Services Created
+ 4 million docs processed daily

Again, you can try OpenCalais yourself by typing or pasting text into the viewer box.

Finally, here’s one more OC example using the content from this post.

Overall, it’s easy to see how this service could be of value to both the individual blogger but even more so to publishing companies with a non-stop stream of of content.

From the Announcement:

Barbara Tillett, chief of the Library’s Policy and Standards Division, said “To help users make the most of the new product enhancements, the Library of Congress staff has been busy creating an array of helpful documentation.” A battery of learning aids and practical tips will be accessible shortly online, to help subscribers optimize their use of Cataloger’s Desktop 3.0. The aids include a series of webinars in both English and Spanish, free online training files, PowerPoint presentations and at-a-glance, how-to handouts.

Desktop 3.0 incorporates cutting-edge searching and navigation techniques, including fuzzy matching; finding/excluding similar resources; dynamic drill-downs; contextual analysis; search relevancy; remembering search histories; query federation; faceted search drill-downs; and a search engine that adapts to a user’s search behavior.

See Also: Learn More About Catalogers Desktop 3.0
You can also register for a 30 day free trial.

Source: Cataloging Distribution Service of the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is releasing today the results of its analysis of the creation and distribution of bibliographic data in U.S. and Canadian libraries.

The Library commissioned R2 Consulting LLC of Contoocook, N.H., to search and describe the current marketplace for cataloging records in the MARC format, with primary focus on the economics of current practices, including existing incentives and barriers to both contribution and availability. Paired with the study online is a report of an internal working group indicating how recommendations from “On the Record: Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control” may be implemented at the Library. Both reports are available at www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/.

R2 summarizes its 10 findings concerning Library of Congress cataloging and how it supports bibliographic-description needs across the U.S. and Canada. The report indicates there is adequate cataloging capacity in North America, but distribution channels and cooperative use of the records have not achieved their full potential. It also describes the market for cataloging records as “conflicted,” meaning that it faces demands to be commercially solvent as well as freely accessible and open.

See Also: New Report & Study Available

The Library commissioned R2 Consulting LLC to research and describe the current marketplace for cataloging records in the MARC format, with primary focus on the economics of current practices, including existing incentives and barriers to both contribution and availability. [Our emphasis] In addition, a new report from an internal working group indicates how recommendations from On the Record may be implemented at the Library.

Source: LC

We’ve blogged about Article Skimmer, an innovative, useful, and cool way to browse the NY Times several times since it first launched in February, 2009 and now we have a new service to try.

Earlier this month “Custom Times Feeds” went live via the First Look blog on NYTimes.com. It’s a free service.

Access Custom Times Feeds

From the Blog Post by Tom Jackson:

Our new custom RSS tool is intended for all Times readers — not just developers. It provides a simple way to query the Times Article Search API and a standard way to consume the results.

Jackson goes on to provide detailed instructions (read them!) on how to get the most out of “Custom Times Feeds” tool. Here are a few highlights:

To use it [Custom Times Feeds], simply start typing something into the text field at the top. As you type, the application will try to match your words to our normalized list of terms. You can then either add one or more of the normalized terms to your feed (which will result in more targeted results) or add your original search phrase. (To add a term, click the arrow next to it to move it to the list of Your Feed’s Terms. To remove a term from your list, click the X next to it.)

[Our emphasis] Alternatively, you can paste the URL of an NYTimes.com article into the field at the top. You’ll then see a list of the terms our indexers used to describe that article, so that you can create a feed of similar articles.

Once you add a term to your feed, you’ll see a preview of the results, along with a message indicating the feed’s “strength.” The feed strength is determined by the number of articles published about your topic(s) within the past 30 days.

You can continue to add terms and refine your feed until you’re happy with it. At that point, it’s simply a matter of naming the RSS feed and subscribing to it with your favorite reader.

[Snip]

[Our emphasis] The tool also incorporates the TimesTags API, which draws its power from a practice that is very rare nowadays: human meta-tagging. All New York Times articles are assigned keywords by real, live people, rather than by computers and search algorithms. And that means all the articles included in a custom feed are truly relevant to the topic specified.

Wow, what a great and practical mention of a skill that’s part of the info pro toolbelt. Lately, we’ve been hearing more and more about the power of human data curation and in the case of The Times, metadata generated by people not machines.

Another tool that comes to mind that uses both human data curators and a massive amount of computing power is Wolfram|Alpha. For a growing number of fast fact queries along the ability to compute just about anything quickly, this interactive and computable almanac is a welcomed resource and so is the “Custom Times Feeds” prototype.

Access Custom Times Feeds

Source: NY Times

Everyone involved with digital images shares the challenge of tracking and managing their rapidly expanding collections. Images with embedded information about their ownership and content are easier to find and harder to misuse. Metadata is the key to better protecting copyrights, promoting licensing, improving workflow, and managing assets. Unfortunately, it is under-used and under-supported.

It’s time we all got meta-smart.

In partnership with the Library of Congress, the Stock Artists Alliance created the Photo Metadata Project to promote industry wide use of standardized photo metadata in every digital file. Through live events and online resources, we are committed to helping make this happen.

+ META 101
Classes, types, and structures of metadata.

+ META Resources
Glossary of terms, Metadata field, Metadata History, Metadata Q&A

+ Metadata Manifesto, Copyrights, Infringements Report

+ Tutorials

+ Meta News

+ Meta Events

Access Photometadata.org

Source: Stock Artists Alliance

Metadata is loosely defined as “data about data.” More specifically, the term refers to the embedded stratum of data in electronics file that may include such information as who authored a document, when it was created, what software was used, any comments embedded within the content, and even a record of changes made to the document.

While metadata is often harmless, it can potentially include sensitive, confidential, or privileged information. As such, it presents a serious concern for attorneys charged with maintaining confidentiality — both their own and their clients. Professional responsibility committees at several bar associations around the country have weighed in on attorneys’ ethical responsibilities regarding metadata, but there is no clear consensus on the major metadata issues. To help track current views on metadata and ethics, we’ve assembled the following chart.

Source: American Bar Association Legal Technology Resource Center

The Cataloging Section of the National Library of Medicine is pleased to announce the availability of an e-learning course called Fundamentals of the NLM Classification. It is available as a link from the Cataloging Section homepage, as well as the Distance Education page. The course is a free set of modules and interactive exercises that students may take at their own pace without an instructor.

This course covers the principles and applications of the NLM Classification in the cataloging environment. The course is divided into nine modules:

1. Overview of the NLM Classification
2. Using the Online NLM Classification
3. Components of NLM Call Numbers
4. General Principles
5. Table G (Geographic Notations)
6. Form Numbers
7. Bibliographies and Related Materials
8. Classification of 19th Century Works and Early Printed Books
9. Continuing Resources

See Also: Using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in Cataloging
Another e-leaning course organized into eight modules.

See Also: Make sure to visit the Distance Education page.
Numerous training videos for a variety of NLM products and services are available at no charge. From searching the Redesigned PubMed by Author to LinkOut for Libraries Tips and Tricks.

Source: National Library of Medicine Technical Bulletin
Hat Tip: P.W.

The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at UMass Amherst, the Perseus Digital Library Project at Tufts, and the Internet Archive are investigating large-scale information extraction and retrieval technologies for digitized book collections. The NSF has awarded a grant of $2.7 million for a project to apply advanced OCR, topic modeling and metadata extraction techniques to over one million books at the Internet Archive.

Source: IA

See Also: NSF Grant Document

See Also: Scanning: Internet Archive Text Collection Passes 1.5 Million Titles (August 10, 2009)
Note: The Internet Archive is constantly adding new content so these numbers are a bit out of date.

OCLC and ABES [in English] (l’Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement Supérieur), in France, have signed an agreement to load 9 million records from [in English] Système Universitaire de documentation (Sudoc), the cataloguing system for French academic libraries managed by ABES, into WorldCat. As a result of this agreement, collections of 110 participating Sudoc institutions that represent over 1,000 libraries will be visible to searchers worldwide through WorldCat.org.

The addition of Sudoc records in WorldCat, planned for the first quarter of 2010, will increase visibility of collections from the French academic world.

The agreement to load Sudoc records into WorldCat follows that of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), which signed a similar agreement in June of this year. Since 2002, ABES has been cataloguing with Sudoc, which is based on OCLC’s Central Bibliographic System (CBS). Loading CBS records into WorldCat makes possible the option for real-time updates from CBS into WorldCat, via SRU update, which is currently being used effectively for the Dutch union catalogue and the union catalogue of Australia.

Source: OCLC

The OCLC Board of Trustees has convened a Record Use Policy Council, which will draw upon the fundamental values of the OCLC cooperative and engage with the global library community to develop the next generation of the WorldCat Record Use Policy. The intent is to recommend to the OCLC Board of Trustees a new policy that is aligned with the present and future information landscape. The new policy will replace the Guidelines for Use and Transfer of OCLC Derived Records that was developed in 1987.

The formation of this council was one of the recommendations contained in the final report www.oclc.org/us/en/worldcat/catalog/FinalReport_ReviewBoard.pdf of the OCLC Review Board on the Principles of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship formed in January 2009 to represent the membership and inform OCLC on best practices for sharing library data.

[Snip]

Over the course of the next seven months, the Record Use Policy Council will:

* Review key values and principles underlying the current guidelines developed in 1987
* Develop success criteria for a revised policy or guidelines
* Conduct and disseminate the results of an environmental scan of data-sharing policies
* Evaluate findings from the environmental scan and draft a new policy and recommendations for implementation
* Develop a formal, transparent and well-managed process for vetting the new draft policy with the OCLC Regional Councils and the OCLC Global Council as the representatives of the OCLC membership.

The Record Use Policy Council will begin its work soon. The group will define an approach and timeline to carry out this important charge. The Council will submit a new draft policy and recommendations for implementation to the Chair of the OCLC Board of Trustees and OCLC President and CEO, for review and approval by the OCLC Board of Trustees in midyear 2010.

Much more in the media release.

Source: OCLC

Expanding its Semantic Web technology stack, the W3C (World Wide Consortium ) announced this week a standard to bridge knowledge organization systems like classifications, thesauri, and taxonomies to linked data.

The Semantic Web is intended to make it easier to search for relevant documents and information on the Web. With the W3C SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) standard, enterprises, social networking applications, government portals, and others managing large collections of items, such as books, news reports, and blog entries, can leverage linked data capabilities. SKOS provides a model for expressing basic structure and content of concepts, such as thesauri, subject heading lists, and taxonomies. Different communities can use SKOS to link vocabularies to the Semantic Web.

Source: InfoWorld

OCLC today announced four new agreements have been signed with European national libraries and affiliated institutions which significantly increase the coverage of records in WorldCat and the visibility of libraries in WorldCat.org within the Europe and Middle East regions. These latest agreements in Denmark, Switzerland, Slovenia and Israel show that libraries from around the globe are responding very positively to the opportunity that WorldCat offers to streamline workflows and increase visibility in WorldCat.org, a global destination web site for libraries, which surfaces to a worldwide community the collections they hold and the services they deliver.

You can read the details of the news below.

In Denmark, OCLC and DanskBibliotekCenter (DBC) have agreed to load the Danish National Union Catalogue (DanBib) with holdings into WorldCat. DBC is responsible for providing the Danish national digital infrastructure as well as managing its national union catalogue. The agreement is the result of a year-long pilot coordinated with the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media (DALM), the governmental administrative and advisory body responsible for public and research libraries. The pilot took place with the participation of academic and public libraries from across Denmark and will add approximately 10 million Danish records in WorldCat. In addition, a connection between WorldCat.org and bibliotek.dk will be orchestrated. Bibliotek.dk is a national service managed by DBC to enable Danish citizens to request and receive items from any library in Denmark, free-of-charge via the web.

Jens Thorhauge, director general, Danish Agency for Libraries and Media said of the agreement, “We feel that our valuable national service, bibliotek.dk – will benefit from increased site visits and requests as Danish users of WorldCat.org are directed to the service.”

In Switzerland, OCLC and the Informationsverbund Deutschschweiz (IDS) have signed an agreement to load the records from the five IDS consortia to WorldCat. IDS, which also includes the National Libraries of Luxembourg and Liechtenstein in their number, will be loading approximately 10 million bibliographic records and 16 million holdings records. IDS want to get a higher visibility for the libraries of Switzerland through WorldCat.org as well as gaining access to the 130 million records in WorldCat for cataloguing purposes.

In Slovenia, OCLC have finalised an agreement to load 3 million records later this year with IZUM, an organisation which represents the interests of over 380 academic, public and other libraries. The activities of IZUM are mainly engaged in the development and operation of the COBISS system and services (Co-operative Online Bibliographic System and Services), which represents the core of the library information system along with shared cataloguing and many other library automation applications in Slovenia. IZUM also provides users in Slovenia with free access to different foreign databases and services, including OCLC FirstSearch.

Tomaž Seljak, director of IZUM: “In Slovenia, we are interested in bibliographic data on published works of Slovenian authors being available in WorldCat, and also through WorldCat.org, COBISS.SI will become even more visible to Internet users.”

And finally in Israel, Malmad a consortium of over 30 academic institutions has just secured as part of their OCLC cataloguing subscription a complete retrospective batch load of holdings data into WorldCat, which will ensure that all holdings will be visible through OCLC Connexion, OCLC FirstSearch and WorldCat Resource Sharing.

Dr. Sigal Scher, director of the MALMAD Consortium, said “The academic libraries in Israel are looking forward to making their holdings more visible and accessible through membership in OCLC and WorldCat”.

The timing of this announcement comes as the 75th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, which OCLC sponsors, takes place in Milan. Rein van Charldorp, OCLC Managing Director, Europe, Middle East and Africa said of the agreements, “At OCLC we are uniquely placed to help libraries operate at a network-level, and realise even greater efficiencies and visibility on the web. The scale and richness of WorldCat and WorldCat services is proving to be an increasingly attractive proposition for libraries in this region.”

In many respects, the most important question for the library world in examining semantic web technologies is whether librarians can successfully transform their expertise in working with metadata into expertise in working with ontologies or models of knowledge. Whereas traditional library metadata has always been focused on helping humans find and make use of information, semantic web ontologies are focused on helping machines find and make use of information. Traditional library metadata is meant to be seen and acted on by humans, and as such has always been an uncomfortable match with relational database technology. Semantic web ontologies, in contrast, are meant to make metadata meaningful and actionable for machines.

Source: go to hellman
Hat Tip and Commentary: eFoundations

+ An Introduction to Tags and Tagging

+ What Makes A Good Tag?

Source: UKOLN

Let’s jump ahead 50 years. Imagine your grandchildren are rummaging around in your attic, looking through old boxes and trunks. They discover laptops, hard drives wrapped in cloth, DVDs, and maybe even a real antique: A floppy disk.

What will become of all the data you’ve stored on these devices? Will any of them still work? Will your heirs have any devices that will allow them to read these treasures?

Here’s the really big question: Have you ever once even stopped to think about this scenario? If you’re like me, the answer is a resounding, “Nope.” For all but a few, the issue of how to maintain personal digital archives is nowhere on the radar.

[Snip]

However, all is not lost. There are some strategies for storing your digital archives. But you’ll have to do a lot of work. You will need to start thinking like a librarian and become an active curator of your files. That means relentlessly organizing, labeling and tagging, backing up and deleting.

Source: San Jose Mercury News
Hat Tip: Digital Curation Blog

The University of Michigan Special Collections Library needs help cataloguing its vast Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

But the library doesn’t plan to hire an expert. Instead, almost all of its 1,250 pieces are being scanned in-house to put the work on the Internet.

And the library hopes interested scholars will get involved.
[Snip]
“It will be presented to the public in Wiki or blog-type interface, so people can comment on what they see. In that way, we hope we can get help from scholars all over the world in identifying the manuscripts and cataloguing them properly,” said Peggy Daub, director of Special Collections.

Source: AnnArbor.com

Historically, the notational system of the Dewey Decimal Classification provided for non-institution-specific, relative location shelf arrangements, thus substantially reducing bibliographic classification effort. Today its decimal notation continues to provide the classification scheme with flexible granularity, is hospitable to expansion, expresses relationships, interfaces well with modern retrieval systems, and is internationally understood.

Access the Complete Paper by Rebecca Green (9 pages; PDF)

Source: Proceedings 2009 North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization Vol. 2 (via DLIST)

From the Article:

Think it’s impossible to truly harmonize data from multiple countries, given the variations in barcodes, brand names, packages, products and sizes involved? While meeting the challenges of global data differences is daunting, it can be accomplished with a unique combination of local data access, global understanding and a design and implementation plan that delivers action-oriented applications.

Source: Nielsen