Cataloging Service Bulletin gratis en PDF!

La Biblioteca del Congreso ha facilitado la publicación de Cataloging Service Bulletin (CSB) sin costo alguno en pdf. Esta disponible desde 1978 hasta el presente y se actualiza cada cuatro meses. La misma incluye informacion sobre clasificaciones, políticas y prácticas, materias revisadas, etc. Otro recurso importante para permanecer al tanto de los cambios en Catalogación, para acceder haga un clic aquí.

LCSH goes Web 3.0

I was having so much fun seeing "my old friends," the Library of Congress Subject Headings, in their new home: Library of Congress Authorities & Vocabularies that I almost forgot to get ready for work this morning!

LCSH as a linked data service, to quote Jonathan Rochkind, "is AWESOME."
Richard Wallis writes:

Overnight this uri ‘http://id.loc.gov/authorities/sh85042531#concept’ has now become the globally available, machine and human readable, reliable source for the description for the subject heading of ‘Elephants’ containing links to its related terms (in a way that both machines and humans can navigate). This means that system developers and integrators can rely upon that link to represent a concept, not necessarily the way they want to [locally] describe it. This should facilitate the ability for disparate systems and services to simply share concepts and therefore understanding – one of the basic principles behind the Semantic Web.

Vía: Cataloging Futures

¿Cuán grande es la Biblioteca del Congreso?

I want to preface this post by reiterating one of our general disclaimers up front, to wit: “This blog does not represent official Library of Congress communications.” Because this post will edge slightly closer to “editorializing” than most of my previous posts.

Working in the Office of Communications as I do, I’m aware of the lion’s share of news coverage about and references to the Library, whether via Lexis-Nexis, Google News, or any number of other monitoring services to which we have access. This is a rough approximation — and perhaps a bit hyperbolic — but I would guess that somewhere between a quarter and a third of the general references I see to the Library are along these lines: “Our servers can store the equivalent of the Library of Congress,” or “our network is fast enough to download the entire Library of Congress in a millisecond.” You get the drift.

So it begs the question, just how “big” is the Library of Congress, in terms of our content, but especially if one tried to equate it to the digital realm?

I won’t go into any of the specific claims that are being made, but they’re easy to find out there in the ether, and suffice it to say that the Library would stand behind very few if any of them. There are certain things we can quantify, but far more that are purely speculative.

For instance, we can as of this moment say that the approximate amount of our collections that are digitized and freely and publicly available on the Internet is about 74 terabytes. We can also say that we have about 15.3 million digital items online.

Some may be tempted to extrapolate that those digital items represent a precise percentage of the nearly 142 million items in the Library’s physical collections, and then estimate some kind of digital corollary. But comparing digital and physical items is apples and oranges, at best. A simple example of that fallacy would be represented by a single photograph online depicting several physical objects.

Another source of digital estimates is likely based on the number of books and printed items in our collections, which is currently about 32 million. One could attempt to establish the average length of those items (pages, words, characters, etc.) and extrapolate the digital equivalent of those 32 million physical items.

Assuming one could do that with any degree of accuracy — and that’s a big assumption — it overlooks the fact that those 32 million books represent only about one-quarter of the entire physical collections. The rest are in the form of manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps, globes, moving images, sound recordings, sheet music, oral histories, etc. So how does that other three-quarters of the Library equate digitally? Can one automatically assume the digital resolution at which all maps or photographs, for instance, would be scanned? Those are major wildcards indeed.

And then there are our motion pictures, videos and sound recordings alone — around 6 million items stored at our new Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va. What is their digital equivalent? Most people who record television programs onto a computer or DVR know that a hard drive with hundreds of megabytes or even a terabyte or more can quickly fill up.

One more thing we can quantify or at least estimate: The folks at the Packard Campus say that when their systems are fully online, they expect to be able to digitize between 3 and 5 petabytes of content per year. (That is to say, 3,000 to 5,000 terabytes, for those who are playing at home. Put another way, a single petabyte stored on CD-ROMs would create a stack of discs more than a mile high.) And even at that rate, it would still take decades to digitize the existing content.

So at this point, we’re talking about potentially mind-boggling amounts of data — we’re into the territory of angels and heads of pins. And while it is a bit of a tangent, it points to the continued importance of libraries as places (and librarians) when too many people assume that “everything is online.”

While it is certainly flattering that the Library of Congress is used as a typical benchmark against which others measure their content or data capacity, we would do well to take these claims with at least a shaker of salt. We are far “bigger” than many of them might think.

Vía: Library of Congress Blog

Free cataloging and metadata training manuals from LC

Last year I mentioned how much I'd learned taking the cataloging and metadata training programs developed by the Library of Congress. Well, now the training materials for these workshops are free via the Cataloging and Distribution Service (CDS)! Here's a list of what's available:

Cataloging Skills (CCT)
* Basic Creation of Name and Title Authorities
* Basic Subject Cataloging Using LCSH
* Fundamentals of Series Authorities
* Fundamentals of Library of Congress Classification

The Digital Library Environment (Cat21)
* Digital Project Planning & Management Basics
* Metadata and Digital Library Development
* Metadata Standards and Applications
* Principles of Controlled Vocabulary and Thesaurus Design
* Rules and Tools for Cataloging Internet Resources

Continuing Resources (SCCTP)
* Advanced Serials Cataloging
* Basic Serials Cataloging
* Electronic Serials Cataloging
* Integrating Resources Cataloging
* Serials Holdings

Vía: Cataloging Futures

El futuro de LC Subjects Headings

Library of Congress sigue experimentando nuevas fuentes de datos. Ahora en una etapa inicial y experimental LC ha realizado unos vínculos de datos para los LC Subject Headings en el formato SKOS.

lcsh.info es un esfuerzo para una versión más actualizada de los encabezamientos de materia y la utilización de los mismos a través de la web.

Vía: Cataloging Futures

Tu colección personalizada en Library of Congress con MyLoc.gov

Por mis búsquedas en la Web encontré algo que me pareció bien interesante para el bibliotecario extrovertido. La Biblioteca del Congreso (Library of Congress) cuenta con MyLoc, un servicio en el cual tu personalizas tu propia colección dentro de los recursos electrónicos que ofrece la biblioteca. Creando así, tu propia colección virtual dentro de la biblioteca.

A través de MyLOC.gov, los usuarios pueden realizar su exploración en la colección más grande del mundo. Los visitantes pueden marcar áreas de interés en línea y continuar las mismas dentro de las colecciones en la biblioteca mediante la conexión con los contenidos digitales en su visita personal. El sitio también cuenta con versiones interactivas de recursos de la biblioteca, recursos educativos, información para los visitantes y una página donde los usuarios pueden crear su propia colección virtual de la biblioteca. Solo tienes que crear tu cuenta y ya te adentrás a tener tu colección personal en la Biblioteca del Congreso.

Vía: myloc.gov

Norayma Celpa

Bibliotecaria Auxiliar II

UNE-SUAGM

Library of Congress Subject Heading Suggestion Blog-a-Thon

Do subject headings still matter? We say they do.

Does the Library of Congress always identify accessible and appropriately named headings and implement them in a timely manner? We say not always. All you have to do is spend one day behind a reference desk to see examples of biased, non-inclusive, and counterintuitive classifications that slow down, misdirect, or even obscure information from library users. As librarians and library workers, providing access to information is important-and classifying it in ways that are inclusive and intuitive strengthens our egalitarian mission.
Between now and Sunday, April 27, Radical Reference invites you to suggest subject headings and/or cross-references which will then be compiled and sent to the Library of Congress. You can either choose one previously suggested by Sandy Berman (pdf or spreadsheet) or propose your own.

This is a chance to positively impact the catalog of the de facto national library of the United States, which also impacts cataloging all over the world! Here's how...

The planSome time between now and Sunday, April 27 at 6pm Eastern:

1. Select one or more subject headings or cross-references to suggest
2. Provide material to support your suggestion (in the form of a link and excerpted text/image)
3. Blog it somewhere (your own site; Radical Reference--if you're a registered and authenticated user on the site, you can create your own blog post, if not, just make it a comment to this post; an online file sharing service like Google Docs or Zoho)
4. Tag it for del.icio.us: rr_lcsh2008 and for:radical_reference. If you don't have a delicious account email me, and I'll tag it for you.
5. If you are suggesting a subject heading not previously submitted to LC (e.g. not on Sandy's scorecard), also submit your proposal to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging.
6. For discussion and help, join the Meebo and/or Skype chat,which will be active on Sunday from 4-6 ET for sure, and other times, as staffed.
7. If you are in the NYC area, you can come to the ABC No Rio Computer Center on Manhattan's Lower East Side for some in person collaboration.
8. We will email a link to the tagged items to LC, print out a copy of each blog post and mail it to Sandy, and we're kinda hoping that the members of the RADCAT (radical cataloging) discussion list will consider entering some of the suggested headings properly into the proposal form


Example of a new subject heading request.
Example of a new cross-references request.

Fuente: http://radicalreference.info/lcsh/2008/blog-a-thon