Tim Spalding started us off by talking about LibraryThing, which he created. He spoke about how personal data ties into global data. One example is how everyone’s personal data on say Steve Martin feeds into the Steve Martin tag. Also there are people who edit the tag and combine works. Their actions are recorded like when changes are made to Wikipedia. “On LibraryThing every piece of data is it’s own little wiki.” It’s all about common knowledge, but like Wikipedia people check the edits made by other people. “There are rules it’s just not enforced in the software. Everybody’s a policeman.”
Next someone named Jeanne from Civica came up. I think they do software consulting. She talked about how they have incorporated librarything into library catalogs. Very interesting how they can be linked at the MARC level, especially matching tags with subject headings. Differing headings are set aside for the librarian to approve, disapprove, edit, or merge as they see fit. The Civica technology also allows librarians to change tags to maintain authority tags, fully UNICODE compliant.
Next was Michael Kreyche from Kent Sate presenting Spanish Equivalents for LCSH. This perked me up a lot because I did a 25-page paper for a class last fall about the Biblioteca Nacional de Espana, and a couple of the articles I read in my research talked about the difficulties in merging LC subject headings from language to language. He made a database of the Spanish LC subject headings that allow you to search English to Spanish and Spanish to English. Kinda like Google Translate for catalogers. V. cool. He actually harvested the BNE catalog as one of his sources. He is now working on a service to work the database in with OCLC Connexion. He is also hoping to make it more into an open source project to get more people contributing.
Karen Smith-Yoshimura from OCLC research was next to the podium. She started off by speaking about the difficulty in distinguishing between different people with the same name in a catalog. In most library catalogs you distinguish by date of birth and death. She showed alternative examples like in IMdB and Wikipedia and how universities have tried to index their faculty names with the articles they produce. OCLC did research with several different types of users and then came up with the Cooperative Identities Hub. She also talked about Worldcat Identities. She said they have a prototype they’re working on to make Worldcat Identities available for social editing, so that, for example, someone can merge two of the identities.
Then someone named Tom from OCLC got up and talked about the VIAF: Virtual International Authority File. I didn’t stay for him (despite the lure of the cake) because there was another session I wanted to catch some of.
