Outgoing

More FAST Clouds

A few days ago Lorcan showed a cloud of terms derived from his blog.  We've just brought up a new version of WorldCat Identities, and are creating clouds of FAST headings found in records associated with each Identity.  Here's an image of the cloud on Lorcan's Identity page:

Clicking on the cloud above takes you to Lorcan's Identity page where the cloud lives, and clicking on the terms in the live cloud there takes you to pages such as this one on Digital libraries.  We're still working the bugs out of some of these pages, so they may change over the next few days.  We currently have about 1,800 pages for genre clouds (e.g. Love stories) and over a million subject cloud destinations.  There is some overlap between the 'subjects' and the 'genres' which we are still trying to understand and rationalize.

--Th

Changing MARC

I haven't been involved much at all in the discussions of RDA (Resource Discovery and Access earlier called AACR3), but I do have a few ideas about what should change in MARC-21.

1. Reduce redundancy
2. More explicit coding
3. More authority control

Redundancy: In terms of reducing redundancy, the first thing I'd get rid of is superfluous punctuation, especially ISBD.  Don't try to mark-up information in two different ways, just use MARC tagging.  My understanding is that RDA discussions have concluded that it is 'too late to change'.  I disagree, and certainly hope that there is going to be more cataloging done in the future than in the past.

I remember looking at ISBD documents back in the 1970's and being intrigued (light-weight mark-up for citations), but puzzled as to where it would be used.  I'm still puzzled.  The inclusion of ISBD punctuation in MARC-21 is a major obstacle in not only getting the rest of the library world to adopt it, but a continuing problem in terms of interoperability with other formats inside and outside libraries.

Explicit coding:  A lot of information in MARC-21 is semi-free text, such as author dates.  Again, this makes interoperating with other formats more difficult.  There is a fine line between over and under tagging, but there are places where MARC-21 is under tagged.

Authority control:  For our FRBR and VIAF projects, the first thing we do after getting a WorldCat snapshot is to control as many headings as possible.  Authority control is one of the basic things that libraries are doing in cataloging.  We should do more of it and share more of it.

--Th