First posted in 2002.

The Library of Congress, Free Web Access to the LC Authority Files
At the beginning of July the Library of Congress began providing FREE “trial” public access to the LC Authority File via the LC Authorities site. For the cataloging community access to these files can serve many purposes. Four files (Subject, Name, Title, and Name/Title Authority Headings) are available for searching/browsing.
A Few Details
According to the faq, “authority records cannot be searched by keyword(s). are “left-anchored” — search words must be entered in order starting with the leftmost word (omitting initial articles and initial punctuation).” Records are available in a labelled display and MARC format. The only caveat, according to the faq, is that authority records may only be saved, printed or emailed one at a time.
Reference Use?
Although in NO way are these files primary ready-reference tools but they can assist in answering some “fast factual” questions. Here’s one example using the Names file. This file contains about 5.3 million entries including data on 3.8 million personal, 900,000 corporate, 120,000 meeting, and 90,000 geographic names. After running a few searches I found that you can learn “real names” and for birthdays for authors, entertainers, and other celebrity types I was also able to access some basic corporate name info. For example, info on company name changes. Most entries include a citation to the source of the information.
Sample Name File Searches To Try
Select Name Authority Headings and Enter Name
*Comedian Albert Brook’s name file. You’ll learn that his birth name is Albert Einstein
*Rock Music legend Pete Townshend’s Name File. Learn his full name, birth date, and birth location.
*Name file for Metra (the commuter railroad service in Chicago). Learn that Metra is a service name for the Northeast Illinois Regional Commuter Railroad Corporation.
*The often used example, because of the many spelling variations, of Muammar Qaddafi’s authority record.
Final Notes
For those of you out there who are not familiar with authority work, here are several definitions from ODLIS to assist. You probably already realize that these concepts have applications outside the traditional library database as more and more organizations build databases where control and uniformity of material in the database is necessary. The LC Authority file is one of many authority files that exist. OCLC, other libraries, and database providers all build and maintain their own files. Btw, the LC Authorities file is Invisible Web data. These records cannot be accessed from general web engines like Google and AltaVista.
CORRECTION
Anna Della Porta from LC informs me that the above statement about other authority files is incorrect as it relates to OCLC and other services. Anna writes, “In fact, the copy of the LC Authority File (or national authority file) that users view in OCLC or in RLIN is the same “file” that resides at LC. We maintain the master copy of the LC Authority File at LC. Each day we receive authority record contributions from NACO participants via OCLC, RLIN, and the British Library. Those three sites are known as the NACO “nodes” as they maintain copies of the LC Authority File. We then distribute these contributions on a daily basis back to the nodes, along with the records produced by LC catalogers. In this way, the three sites keep their copies of the LC Authority File synchronized with the master copy at LC.
Direct to LC Authorities
See Also: The LC Authorities FAQ

From the Announcement:

Ever wondered what newspapers reported in the late 1800s? Read all about it in Papers Past.

Papers Past contains 1.3 million, now fully searchable, pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection ranges from 1839 to 1932 and includes 52 varieties of New Zealand publications.

We added seven new titles this week, including the Ellesmere Guardian, Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle, Oxford Observer and Canterbury Democrat, Victoria Times, NZ Truth, Kai Tiaki: the Journal of the Nurses of NZ and more issues of the Poverty Bay Herald.

“It’s great to see New Zealanders and people from overseas exploring Papers Past. A variety of audiences are using it including hobbyists, teachers, drama students and anyone interested in New Zealand’s past.” explained Penny Carnaby, CEO and National Librarian, National Library of New Zealand.

Direct to Papers First Web Site

Source: National Library of New Zealand

From the Announcement:

Mass digitisation has become one of the most prominent issues in the library world over the last 5 years, with a number of experienced libraries in Europe already scanning millions of pages each year. To help establish some standardisation over the course of the project, the British Library’s team will lead work on a set of ‘Decision Support Tools’ in an effort to focus on practical implementation support, providing guidance on digitisation workflow, the capturing of material and the organisation of metadata based on the real world experiences of project partners. These measures, announced at the first IMPACT conference in April will help ensure new material can be digitised successfully and feed into existing workflows.

Source: British Library

Two items from two of the major search players.

First, Bing is now including Twitter results from “more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres” for certain types of searches. Learn more via the Bing blog and Search Engine Land.

Second, word from Google Book Search that they’ve added tag clouds for some titles in their database.

From a Blog Post:

Starting today, you’ll find a cloud of “Common Terms and Phrases” on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.

Here’s an example.

See Also: Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” program continues to provide a concordance/tag clouds for some titles. They’re found under the heading “concordance” on a book overview page. Here’s an example.

UPDATE: Want More Web Search News? We’ve got it!
++ Google Blog and News Search has added several new features (via Search Engine Roundtable.

++ Google Blog Search Sees Twitter Trends & Raises With Blog Search ‘Hot Queries’ (via Search Engine Land)

++ Bing gets a favorable review from USA Today.

See Also: On a related note, if you’re a Firefox user you can now create tag clouds from Twitter, Google, and Yahoo results via a tool named Search Cloudlet.

From the Abstract

For centuries the archival community has understood and practiced the art of adding contextual information while preserving an artifact. The question now is how these practices can be transferred to the digital domain. With the growing expansion of production and consumption of digital objects (documents, audio, video, etc.) it has become essential to identify and study issues related to their representation. A cura­tor in the digital realm may be said to have the same responsibilities as one in a traditional archival domain. However, with the mass production and spread of digital objects, it may be difficult to do all the work manually. In the present article this problem is considered in the area of digital video preservation. We show how this problem can be formulated and propose a framework for capturing contextual infor­mation for ephemeral digital video preservation. This proposal is realized in a system called ContextMiner, which allows us to cater to a digital curator’s needs with its four components: digital video curation, collection visualization, browsing interfaces, and video harvesting and monitoring. While the issues and systems described here are geared toward digital videos, they can easily be applied to other kinds of digital objects.

Direct to Complete Article (18 pages; PDF)

Source: The International Journal of Digital Curation

Direct to Issue (4 pages; PDF)

Articles Include:

+ Project MUSE announces new titles and prices for 2010

+ MUSE and Social Technology

+ New Features and Functionality Enhance MUSE Experience

+ Using MUSE to Your Advantage: More By an Author

See Also: Project Muse Facebook Page

Source: Project Muse

From a Post:

The Library of Congress has developed new tools to transfer large quantities of digital content. During 2008, the Library used these tools to add approximately 80 terabytes to its digital collections.

As described in the Library of Congress’s video, Bagit: Transferring Content for Digital Preservation, the sender of a digital collection prepares for the transfer by packaging the collection and making it accessible for the Library to download. The Library prefers data packaged into standardized “bags,” a means of organizing and containing data for transfer as described in the BagIt specification.

Direct to Video

See Also: Read more about the Library’s bag-related data transfer tools.

Source: National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program / Library of Congress

An Information Today NewsBreak reports that the Library of Congress is now making available the entire archive [31 years] of the LC Cataloging Service Bulletin (CSB) available online at no charge.

The CSB is a quarterly bulletin that includes current, new, and revised information about the library’s cataloging and classification practices and policies. The CSB lists revised Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 2; Library of Congress Rule Interpretations of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules 2; changes to the American Library Association/Library of Congress Romanization Tables: Transliteration Schemes for Non-Roman Scripts; changes to the Library of Congress subject headings; and includes “Cataloging Publication News,” “News of Cataloging Projects,” and more.

“The Library is committed to providing its products and services in a way that is sustainable, accessible and provides the greatest benefit to its customers,” said Eugene Flanagan, chief of the library’s office of business enterprises, which oversees the Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS).

Direct to CSB

Source: LC & InfoToday

Word from Charles W. Bailey, Jr that a new version (#4) of his Google Book Search Bibliography is now available online.

Direct to Bibliography

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

Source: Charles W. Bailey, Jr. (via ERIL-L)

NASA Announces Request For Information On Von Braun Collection

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the historic first moon landing, NASA is seeking ideas from the public, academia, and industry about how to analyze and catalog notes from spaceflight pioneer Wernher von Braun into an electronic, searchable database or other system.

Von Braun was the first director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and a key figure in the development of the Saturn V rocket and NASA’s Apollo program. NASA has a full collection of “Weekly Notes” von Braun wrote during the 1960s and 1970s. These notes were used to track programmatic and institutional issues at Marshall, and are considered by many historians to be a valuable source of data.

NASA has issued a request for information and is looking for concepts that will provide an innovative resource for agency engineers and scientists, as well as researchers in academia and industry.

+ Request For Information (PDF; 1.9 MB)
+ Appendix 1 (PDF; 1.9 MB)
+ Biography — Dr. Wernher von Braun

Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

From an E-Mail Announcement:

The Library of Congress has recently launched a series of “topic guides” to the newspapers included in Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ ). Each topic guide (e.g., Baseball’s Modern World Series, Ellis Island, or the Russo-Japanese War) includes subject-specific terms (including name usage, historical language, unusual spellings, etc.) and dates that can be readily used to search this topic in Chronicling America, as well as a list of sample articles found in Chronicling America. These topic guides are presented by the Library’s Newspaper and Current Periodicals Reading Room. More topics will be added over time as the Chronicling America site continues to make new mat

Direct to Topic Guides

Source: LC

See Also: Milestones: Library of Congress, National Endowment for the Humanities Celebrate Millionth Page in Chronicling America Program

From the OCLC News Release:

The Review Board on Principles of Shared Data Creation and Stewardship, convened jointly by the OCLC Board of Trustees and Members Council to represent the membership and inform OCLC on matters concerning shared data, has issued its final report [Our Emphasis] recommending that the proposed Policy on Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records be withdrawn and a new policy drafted.

In May, Jennifer Younger, Review Board Chair, and Edward H. Arnold Director of Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame, presented a report to OCLC Members Council recommending that the proposed policy be formally withdrawn and a new policy should be drafted. “We affirm that a policy is needed, but not this policy,” said Dr. Younger.

The dialogue and debate surrounding OCLC’s record use policy have demonstrated some of the great strengths of the OCLC cooperative—that we are indeed a membership organization, that our members are vocal, and that we listen to the membership,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO. “Soon we will announce a new initiative to develop a record use policy that reflects both the rights of individual libraries and the needs of the cooperative to sustain and grow WorldCat for future generations.

Direct to Full Report (17 pages; PDF)

Source: OCLC

From the Article:

Northwestern University has put online more than 7,000 rare photographs of East Africa that document the European colonization of the area from 1860 through 1960.

The images made available to the public today in the Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs were purchased by the university in 2002 for an undisclosed price.

Direct to Humphrey Winterton Collection

Source: Wired Campus

From the Announcement:

Portico (www.portico.org) is pleased to announce the signing of an agreement with Emerald Group Publishing Limited to preserve its entire online journals collection. Established in 1967, Emerald Group Publishing Limited is the world’s leading publisher of management research. In total, Emerald publishes over 700 titles, comprising 200 journals, over 300 books and more than 200 book series as well as an extensive range of online products and services.

Source: Portico

From the Web Site

A publication that discusses the importance of federal judges’ papers as a documentary record of judges’ careers and the work of the federal courts. The guide describes how students of the federal courts use judges’ papers and offers guidelines for judges’ selection of a repository to house a collection. The guide also offers recommendations for the management of documents in chambers.

Direct to Full Text (89 pages; PDF)

Source: Federal Judiciary History Office (via Federal Judiciary Center)