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Barcodes revolutionized the way goods or materials are processed in stores. They've also changed the way librarians process books.

Here's a powerpoint on barcodes for libraries: www.icast.org.in/staff/barcode.ppt

This pdf document outlines the types of barcodes used in libraries: http://www.aurorabarcode.com/PDFs/Primer%20on%20the%20Use%20of%20Bar%20Code%20Technology%20in%20Libraries.pdf

Let's take a look at this video that outlines the history of barcodes.

Video #1 -- Ag Minute - History of the Barcode

ibrarian?

Data junkie? Obsessive compulsive? Come to the Freebase hack day on July 11, 2009 here in SF. There’s food, drinks, an excellent network, plenty of powercords, and a nice room full of geeks to chat with.

It’s a fun way to dive a bit deeper into making cool data mashups, relationally documenting your brain contents, and getting your questions answered by actually standing in front of Metaweb developers and staring at them until they make go.

Drop me a note if you are going. :)

-Erica

am a librarian. I am not a librarian.

I have an information science degree. I’ve been working for fourteen years, my entire adult life. Most of my jobs have been in libraries.

I am a librarian. I am not a librarian.

photo by emdot

As a student at Michigan State University, I learned Library of Congress serials cataloging.

I walked through secluded aisles surrounded by rare books, incunabulum, alternative newspapers, and gay pornography.
I cataloged comic books in the world’s largest archive of comic art, radicalism, and popular culture.

In the course of my work, I learned that Spiderman serials change their volume as often as many Spiderman readers change their underwear. By graduation, I could walk into any comic shop in the country and pick a fight about whether X-Men film adaptations should be considered canon.

When I went to graduate school (Michigan ‘02), my program had recently transitioned from “Library Science” to “Information Science.” In the process, they picked up a bunch of renegade computer science professors and expanded to include information architecture, information economics, archival theory, and a bunch of crazyass dot com bubble refugees like myself.

photo by sh0dan

We discovered that the term Digital Library can be used to describe an entire array of cool shit, including the Internet itself.

One of my professors, Sue Davidson, tells the story of how Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang called to ask about the subject guide to the web she had created for the Michigan Electronic Library. Sue answered: “that’s what librarians do, we organize information.”

Librarianship, defined as the act of organizing information, is a broad and inclusive field. Librarianship as a profession, is not. There are strict professional guidelines determining who is and is not technically a “Librarian,” but there is also a strong case to be made for the authenticity of self-identification.

There are librarians who work in libraries, and there are librarians who just Are.

It’s the difference between being a Jew by Religion, and being a Jew by Ethnicity. Both groups contribute to the cultural whole.

While a Librarian by Profession is inherently a Librarian by Ethnicity, the opposite may not be true. A trained librarian can sport a different job title, but  her clarity and understanding will still contribute to her work.

photo by Syntopia

I’m a librarian by ethnicity.

Right now, I work as a user experience designer on a software team. I wrestle with ship dates, dependencies, conflicting user requirements, and engineering constraints. I design interfaces and help identify how the software should behave.

But somewhere, deep in my soul, I am doing the work of the Library.

I’m a librarian by ethnicity, regardless of the job I take. I don’t make my living as an ALA going, patron-helping organizer of resources, but I’ll be damned if I don’t use Librarian skills to battle confusing groupings of information.

Librarians bring order to chaos, and so, with a little luck, do I.

Back in October, I wrote about ways to improve library service to GLBTQ youth. Here, again, are some of the suggestions and how my library has been working on them this fall:

• Bolster your collection with recent and high-quality books and increase visibility with paperback copies. On top of our usual collection development based on new book reviews, we purchased a number of backlist titles to round out our collection, especially in the junior high paperback section.
• Make a recommended reading list of GLBTQ books. Our "Gay and Lesbian Books for Young People" list is now available in the library and on our website.
• Make queer books visible in a non-stigmatizing way. In addition to making more of an effort to include GLBTQ books in our junior high fiction displays, we made two special displays highlighting our offerings: "Different Families/Same Love" and "Just Be Yourself."
• Improve access through the library catalog. That's what we're starting to work on now, in what I'm calling My Big Fat Queer Cataloging Project.

In my original post, I described some of the problems with current catalog subject headings for GLBTQ materials. I won't rehash them now, but instead I'll describe the basic steps I'm following.

1. Print out the catalog records for all books on the GLBTQ list.
2. Study current Library of Congress queer subject headings, identifying those most applicable to the books in our collection. I found two very helpful lists of headings, a (slightly older) alphabetical list from Dartmouth and a (more recent) topical list from Emory.*
3. Identify specific headings that apply to each book and would improve access through library catalog searches.
4. When in doubt, read the book to make that determination.
5. Suggest additions to our cataloging staff.

Parsimony is a huge deal in cataloging, sometimes to the point of stinginess, in part because time was you could only assign a set number of subject headings to an item. This is no longer the case, fortunately, so we can add subject headings without taking any of the current ones away.

Still, you don't want to dump a bunch of headings on an item. At least, I don't. Which means you need to try and pick the best headings, the ones that are just the right level of generality or specificness, the ones that best match what patrons are searching for with what they actually want. The additional headings I've most frequently suggested so far are "gay youth," "lesbian youth," and "children of gay parents."

My assumption is that patrons looking for these books are more likely to search for "gay" than "gays" (yes, the catalog search engine really is that picky) or "homosexuality," which is how most of these items are currently cataloged. A subject search for "gay" will turn up a crapload of books, including those about "gay youth," "gay teenagers," "gay high school students," "gay parents," and gay everything else. But at least the books won't totally fall through the cracks.

I'm less sure about "lesbian youth," and I would love people's opinions on this one. Should a book about "lesbian youth" also get a "lesbians" subject heading (same picky search engine problem)? Should it get a "gay youth" heading as well?
 

*For those of you who don't know much about cataloging, the Library of Congress is continually creating new official subject headings. If a new book comes along that doesn't fit the current subject headings, they'll create a new heading that does. (It's not quite that simple, but that's the general idea.)

Anyway, sometimes you'll be frustrated that there isn't that "perfect" subject heading for the book at hand. Other times you wonder what-the-heck book prompted the need for such a weird and specific subject heading. Some examples I turned up today:

• Astrology and homosexuality
• Gay labor union members
• Lesbian Girl Scouts
• Lesbians on postage stamps (also Gay men on postage stamps)
• and, near and dear to me, Bisexual librarians.

While cataloging today, I came across an old copy of Time Magazine from November 19, 1945. This ad amuses me to no end. And now you can enjoy it too. Moral of this blog: Happy National Coming out day. (even thought that's not today, but soon enough)

I’ve always thought that one of the troubles with librarianship was that there are always more great ideas and projects than anyone has time for or can get funding for. As a result we outsource projects to the people who have time and money and thus lose control over the end product. I have no idea if Library Thing’s open source Open Shelves Classification Project is going to wind up looking like a library product or a vendor product, but I’m curious to find out. As Tim Spalding says “You won’t be paid anything, but, hey, there’s probably a paper or two in it, right?” I haven’t seen much chatter, blog or otherwise, about this just yet but I’ll be keeping my eyes open. Whether or not this project it ultimately successful, I think it’s an interesting grass rootsy way of looking at ideas of authority and rejecting the top down let-us-have-you-contribute-and-then-sell-it-back-to-you models we’ve been working under.

love Freebase. Here’s a list of people who died via vomit inhalation. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

This is my new book wagon! I'm so jazzed. Moral of this blog: Hot librarians need hot accessories.

took a stab at writing a Wikipedia stub on one of my favorite Second Life locations, Caledon, the steampunk/Victorian sim. I’m a Wikipedia n00b, and my stub got flagged for deletion (rightly) due to a lack of notable references.

Any of you SL-lovin’ librarians out there wanna take a crack at improving it?

Link to deletion discussion

Notability guidelines

Link to Caledon Stub (fictional places???)

http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/ For the meta data specialist in all of us. Moral of this blog: Community cataloging is here. Deal with it.

Someone asked me during one of my talks if I knew of any projects that were actually trying to open source cataloging records and the idea of authority records. I said I didn’t, not really. It’s a weird juxtaposition, the idea of authority and the idea of a collaborative project that anyone can work on and modify. I knew there were some folks at the Internet Archive working on something along those lines, but the project was under wraps for quite some time. Now, it’s not. Its called Open Library and it’s in demo mode. You can examine it and I encourage you to do that and give lots of feedback to the developers. Make sure to check the “about the librarianship” page

Imagine a library that collected all the world’s information about all the world’s books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We’re building that library.

You know it’s true. I’ve known Eli Jacobowitz since before he was born and now he’s a smartie techie type with a newish blog about technology and education. Though he admits “IANAL”, he has written a nice post about why cataloging both sucks and rules and talks about the future of cataloging in a world where there is much much more information than there is “trained professionals” to help people make sense of it. Ultimately, the answer lies in standards, and this librarians already know.

Eventually, robots might catalog for us. (Librarians shudder.) What we now know is just how far away that is - bot catalogers will need much better AI than currently exists. But in order for this project to even be possible, we have to make our data bot-readable. That means implementing some of the cataloging technologies invented and refined by librarians over the centuries.

We need to standardize meta-data format and content. Digital resources need not only meta-data but also meta-meta-data describing the standards they conform with. Catalog and search solutions need to read this information and pass it on when communicating with other systems.

I read a lot of blogs, but I don’t always follow through and read their links. I appreciate it when people whose opinions I trust can summarize long things for me. Sometimes I sumarize those things for other people. Tonight I am reading the twenty-four page report More on What is Going on at the Library of Congress prepared for AFSCME 2910 by Thomas Mann. You can find it linked off of this page, if you really like reading these sorts of things.

He makes a lot of interesting points that other scholarly types have been trying to make in more clunky fashion for quite some time. In short, libraries that still exist for the purpose of furthering scholarship are having a harder time doing it, both because of the shift towards electronic reources and the “it’s all on Google” mentality but also because our own institutions (LoC I am looking in your direction) seem to want to actively dismantle some of the better tools we have for organizing and accessing knowledge. I’m just pulling out a small part of this, but really you should go read the whole thing. Some peopel might take umbrage, but one of my favorite things about this particular presentation of the issues is that Mann really seems to have a well-researched opinion that he wants to get across without insulting anyone, having a hissyfit, or saying that other people are losers or idiots. It’s clear that he has a take on things, one that others would disagree with, but he lets his metaphors and ideas speak for themselves, even as he’s responding to people who I assume were disagreeing with his last paper on the subject.

The Continuing Need for Reference Librarians

What catalogs and portals cannot do, however, what classified bookstacks cannot do, what Internet search engines cannot do, what federated searching cannot do–these things can be done by reference librarians who, far beyond the capacity of any “under the hood programming,” are able to provide researchers with expert guidance on the full range of options available to them for their particular topics, in an intelligent sequence of use, with the best search options and sources segregated from thousands of blind alleys, dead ends, and mountains of unwanted irrelevancies.

Reference work, in other words, is not just a nice “add on” optional service; in its dual function of providing point-of-use instruction and overview classes it is integral to the efficient use of research libraries and to the promotion of scholarship in general. It cannot be replaced by “under the hood” programming improvements in library catalogs or portals, especially when such programming dumbs down multiple complex systems to a lowest common denominator of keyword searching–and also fails to search the vast arrays of resources that are not digitized at all.