LISNews: Librarian News

The Semantic Web envisioned by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila in 2001 was a grandiose vision that involved the use of agents to book doctor appointments and to find the best driving routes with the least hassle. The envisaged system was built upon formal ontologies that had already achieved a large following of scientists and agent developers. Although they raised some important issues and put forward interesting connections between technologies, they missed one thing: the fact that the Web had turned into a web of documents. Therefore, a middle way needed to occur between the formalism of ontologies and the informalism of documents. This is known as Linked Data. Linked Data coupled with agent technology is an ideal way of dealing with Semantic Web data. This article provides an overview of the Interlinked Semantic Web, agent technologies, and an example of the two combined.

From a photography trade show comes the announcement that The Metadata Working Group, an alliance among a half-dozen major digital camera manufacturers, “has published its first guidelines on the use of image metadata. The guidelines suggest methods to increase interoperability and storage of shooting settings and other associated data in digital images. It aims at standardizing the availability of metadata across all applications and devices, making it easier for users to create, organize and share their pictures.”

Here is an article which discusses whether it's a copyright violation to display a book cover on library web sites.

Here is the.effing.librarian's opinion of the broader issue:

For years, librarians have been looking at books and telling people what the book is about: Gettysburg, Battle of, Gettysburg, Pa., 1863 -- Fiction.

And for years, people, including competing authors, have been able to riffle through these collections of book records, or "card catalogs," to see what other authors are publishing. Visiting the stacks to examine these texts is time-consuming, but librarians have been bypassing the originals materials to make this very valuable and useful information freely available to competitors for years.

You can argue that the nature of cataloging is necessary to libraries; but is it, really?

Do libraries really need to decide in which subject category to classify a book for someone to find it? Can't people just browse through all the books to find what they want?

And worse yet, libraries have been uploading these catalogs onto the Internet, thus making all of this copyrighted material available to anyone with Internet access. Shouldn't authors and publishers be protected from this blatant disregard for their intellectual property rights?

Is this legal?
Sure, you can argue fair use, but really, what is fair? -- Read More

Southtown Star - Chicago,IL, Dewey overdue for a makeover, librarians say
In the sober, settled atmosphere of a library there is a radical movement afoot that is knocking books off their long established shelves and throwing Dewey out the window.

At 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning, when most library patrons are pulling the covers over their heads, refusing to acknowledge the rising sun, two bold and daring librarians are stirring at the Frankfort Public Library, shuffling books and tearing off those time-honored Dewey Decimal System numbers that no one really understood anyway.