Riot Librarian

Category: cataloging

  • More on Serials and Linked Data

    Last year I wrote an article on serials, FRBR, and linked data in the Journal of Library Metadata. My main goal was to re-think how libraries can make connections between articles and the journals in which they’re published using linked data. I used the FRBR model to link the article and the journal together at…

  • Goals (NISO BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting, Part 3)

    Over the course of the two-day NISO BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting last week, I kept circling back to thinking about our goals. There was a discussion subgroup that focused on Goals and Strategies, and they raised some very important issues, but I didn’t come away feeling that we had a strategy for addressing them. There were…

  • What’s Wrong with MARC? (NISO BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting, Part 2)

    Librarians have been talking about what’s wrong with MARC for so long, at this point it seems like you shouldn’t even have to ask. It was 11 years ago that Roy Tennant published his now infamous article, MARC Must Die in Library Journal. But MARC is far from dead. At the NISO BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting,…

  • NISO BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting, Part 1

    April 15th and 16th, I attended NISO’s BIBFRAME Roadmap Meeting in Baltimore. The meeting was intended to bring together different people working in the information space, not just librarians but publishers and organizations involved in scholarly communication, to talk about a path forward as we begin to move beyond MARC. The Library of Congress has…

  • The Catalog is Dead

    In the five years I’ve been a part of libraryland, one conversation seems never to die: How can we improve our online catalogs? There are so many ways to approach this question, from a user-interface perspective or a metadata perspective, a software architecture perspective or a task-based perspective. But there is an assumption at work…

  • The Infinite Library and Linked Data

    This week I read an excellent article by Stacy Allison-Cassin in The Journal of Library Metadata, “The Possibility of the Infinite Library: Exploring the Conceptual Boundaries of Works and Texts of Bibliographic Description.” Allison-Cassin explores the ways that library discovery and cataloging are bound to notions of “the work” and texts that are solidly grounded…

  • The Library of the Future?

    During the closing keynote speech at LITA National Forum this year, Sara Houghton encouraged us to engage in a little thought exercise. She wanted us to imagine the ideal library of the future, without the limitations of what we believe is possible or what we’re currently doing. We should, she suggested, set aside some time…

  • Thoughts after ALA Midwinter

    I got back from ALA Midwinter on Tuesday night, and after taking a day to ponder all the things I heard and discussed over the long weekend, I wanted to quickly write up a few observations and thoughts. I’m trying to take an overall approach, rather than detailing each session I attended, as I have…

  • Know Your MARC

    I’m deep in the midst of a project that involves dealing with a lot of MARC records, and I know I’ve said it many times before, but seriously? How is it possible that this “standard” involves so many un-standard elements? Sure, a lot of the core data really is in the same place in every…

  • The Big Picture

    Since I got back from ALA, I’ve been thinking about how to tie together everything I saw and thought and learned while I was there. I’ve been looking for the big picture. Throughout the week, in a variety of sessions, a few phrases kept popping into my mind: Re-think the ILS, re-think the bibliographic record.…