Subject: [NGC4LIB] Linking headings in bib records to other resources

From: Ian Fairclough <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 05:41:52 -0700

Dear NGC4LIB readers,

Jimmie Lundgren said in a recent post "Another useful navigation tool ... is the ability to click on headings in displayed records to retrieve other records with those headings."  As is widely known, in OCLC WorldCat you can click on headings in bibliographic records to retrieve the authority record, if the heading has been "controlled."  ("Control" in this context appears to be equivalent to "link.")

Has anyone developed functionality to link headings in bibliographic records, not to an authority record, but to an outside source that provides further information?  For example: A personal name heading might be linked to an online biographical resource about that person.  

- Ian

Ian Fairclough
George Mason University
[email-masked]
703-993-2938 (office)
__________________________

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From: Ross Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:18:24 -0400

> Has anyone developed functionality to link headings in bibliographic records, not to an authority record, but to an outside source that provides further information?  For example: A personal name h…

Wouldn't it make more sense to "link" to the authority (via the $0) or
some surrogate for identity and provide the capacity to link to
resources there?

Why would you want to do this for every single record?

-Ross.

---

From: Ross Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:20:21 -0400

Btw, VuFind does something like this (although fairly primitively):

http://vufind.org/demo/Author/Home?author=Serra%2C%20Richard%2C%201939-

-Ross.

---

From: "Mitchell, Michael" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:24:21 -0500

I'd much rather have the headings link to browse lists of authorized headings, and ultimately resources, in our catalog (which our Horizon system does). I'd also like to be able to display scope notes in those lists (I suppose some systems do that). I do like the idea of adding 856 tags leading to useful biographical info for personal names, etc.

Michael Mitchell
Technical Services Librarian
Brazosport College
Lake Jackson, TX
michael.mitchell at brazosport.edu 

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Ian Fairclough
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 7:42 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [NGC4LIB] Linking headings in bib records to other resources

Dear NGC4LIB readers,

- Ian

Ian Fairclough
George Mason University

---

From: Till Kinstler <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:50:32 +0200

> Has anyone developed functionality to link headings in bibliographic records, not to an authority record, but to an outside source that provides further information?  For example: A personal name h…

My colleague Jakob Voss has developed a protocol to enable linking of 
resources based on identifiers: 
http://www.gbv.de/wikis/cls/SeeAlso_Full_Specification.
We are running some services on top of that 
(http://ws.gbv.de/seealso/services/?), for example to link person names 
in our catalogs with corresponding Wikipedia articles (using the PND 
number, that's the identifier in the German person authority file PND), 
or to link book cover images into catalog record displays...

Till

-- 
Till Kinstler
Verbundzentrale des Gemeinsamen Bibliotheksverbundes (VZG)
Platz der Göttinger Sieben 1, D 37073 Göttingen
[email-masked], +49 (0) 551 39-13431, http://www.gbv.de

---

From: Karen Coyle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 06:59:52 -0700

> Why would you want to do this for every single record?

Because in most catalogs the name heading is a bibliographic field,  
not a link to the authority record. And in many catalogs, there is no  
direct link between them. You could get the user to the authority  
record eventually, but it would take a couple of clicks -- a couple of  
clicks that users probably wouldn't have the patience for.

BTW, the VuFind example is quite nice. For all that some folks  
consider wikipedia to be complete anarchy, their opening descriptive  
paragraphs seem to work well in a lot of different contexts.

-- 
Karen Coyle
[email-masked] http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet

---

From: Karen Coyle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 07:03:43 -0700

Quoting "Mitchell, Michael" <[email-masked]>:

> I'd much rather have the headings link to browse lists of authorized  
>  headings, and ultimately resources, in our catalog (which our   
> Horizon system does).

Beth Jefferson of BiblioCommons does user studies for all of their  
catalog functionality, and reports that users uniformly dislike browse  
lists. I know from catalog stats that they uniformly do not use them.  
Unfortunately, those lists are often where catalogs put some necessary  
information, like see references. The fact that those references are  
there, however, does not motivate users to go to the browse. We need  
to find another way to present that information to users.

kc

> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries   
> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Ian Fairclough
> Jimmie Lundgren said in a recent post "Another useful navigation   
> tool ... is the ability to click on headings in displayed records to  
>  retrieve other records with those headings."  As is widely known,  
> in  OCLC WorldCat you can click on headings in bibliographic records  
> to  retrieve the authority record, if the heading has been  
> "controlled."   ("Control" in this context appears to be equivalent  
> to "link.")
>
> Has anyone developed functionality to link headings in bibliographic  
>  records, not to an authority record, but to an outside source that   
> provides further information?  For example: A personal name heading   
> might be linked to an online biographical resource about that person.
>
> - Ian
>
> Ian Fairclough
> George Mason University

---

From: Bryan Baldus <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:28:48 -0500

On Wednesday, April 28, 2010 9:04 AM, Karen Coyle wrote:
>Beth Jefferson of BiblioCommons does user studies for all of their catalog functionality, and reports that users uniformly dislike browse lists.

Do the users explain why they dislike the browse lists? Could the lists be given in a better format while still retaining the usefulness they offer to some? Even if they aren't used by all, or even a majority of users, it seems like a disservice to those who do find them useful to dispense with them or not implement them, as appears to be the case with many of the current ILS (open source projects and some newer versions of existing systems).

If browse lists are unavailable, then it seems like it would be difficult to determine whether something with a fairly common term exists in the catalog/collection. Examples would include whether anything exists by someone with the last name "Shakespeare", first name "William" but not the one who was relatively prolific; or finding all of the works of a specific "John Smith" or someone similar without knowing at first which is the authorized heading (though at that point, finding which one could be improved by having more information than just the heading--for example, a brief list with the heading (in full, so it is clear what it is) and titles of works for each heading).

Thank you for your time,

Bryan Baldus
Cataloger
Quality Books Inc.
The Best of America's Independent Presses
1-800-323-4241x402
[email-masked]

---

From: Ross Singer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:17:34 -0400

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Karen Coyle <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Because in most catalogs the name heading is a bibliographic field, not a
> link to the authority record. And in many catalogs, there is no direct link
> between them. You could get the user to the authority record eventually, but
> it would take a couple of clicks -- a couple of clicks that users probably
> wouldn't have the patience for.

Well, some ILSes use authorities if they're there.

I guess my point was more that I'd rather see more and more of this
abstracted away from our legacy ILSes and OPACs and think about this
sort of functionality as part of the design of the discovery
interface.

That is, how stuff is stored in the ILS doesn't have to reflect how
it's stored and used in the public interface.
>
> BTW, the VuFind example is quite nice. For all that some folks consider
> wikipedia to be complete anarchy, their opening descriptive paragraphs seem
> to work well in a lot of different contexts.
>
Indeed!  I wish they'd take this further (VuFind doesn't do much to
break out of a MARC mindset, really) and actually model some of this,
but it's definitely a start.

For my Code4lib presentation in February, I modified a "stock" VuFind
instance slightly, adding a bit of RDFa to the views, to show how it's
relatively simple to contribute to the linked library data cloud just
by using the stuff we already know:

So take:
http://dilettantes.code4lib.org/vufind/Author/Home?author=Serra%2C%20Richard%2C%201939-

which translates into:

http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/extract?uri=http%3A//dilettantes.code4lib.org/vufind/Author/Home%3Fauthor%3DSerra%252C%2520Richard%252C%25201939-

or

http://dilettantes.code4lib.org/vufind/Record/5316261

which translates to:
http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/extract?uri=http%3A//dilettantes.code4lib.org/vufind/Record/5316261

It's crude, but a start.

-Ross.

---

From: Karen Coyle <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:21:02 -0700

> sort of functionality as part of the design of the discovery

Absolutely.

I've had this idea for a while that the "authority" record should  
become a real "person" record -- something along the lines of WorldCat  
Identities or the author pages in the Open Library  
(http://upstream.openlibrary.org/authors/OL22022A/Barbara_Cartland).  
Or perhaps even like the entry in wikipedia. Included would be a list  
of or link to all of the books (etc) by the author, which also would  
make it easier to disambiguate persons with similar names. And if  
there were a good source for this data, then library catalogs could  
choose from among the available fields which ones they want to  
include. To me, this would be an encouragement for catalog software  
developers to include some new features, while not breaking current  
catalogs.

Essential to this, and something that I don't think wikipedia does  
quite as well as it should, would be providing source information for  
individual data elements. You may want to select name variants from US  
libraries, but not from non-US; or you may prefer the publisher's  
author bio over wikipedia's.

kc

---

From: Jonathan Rochkind <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:33:16 -0400

Mitchell, Michael wrote:
> I'd much rather have the headings link to browse lists of authorized headings, and ultimately resources
My impression, and the user studies I've seen, suggest you are not a 
typical user in this regard.

Jonathan

---

From: Todd Puccio <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:01:57 -0400

Jonathan wrote :

Mitchell, Michael wrote:
I'd much rather have the headings link to browse lists of authorized
headings, and ultimately resources
My impression, and the user studies I've seen, suggest you are not a 
typical user in this regard.

Jonathan

That's because some people have an information seeking behavior that
includes the "journey" along with the "destination" as part of the learning
and knowledge process.

By which I mean that many people want to see the browse list as a method of
learning more about the person/topic.
Other folks just want to get to the result they were searching for; any
additional screens and clicks are an inconvenience.

It is the kind of philosophy and worldview difference that applies in many
aspects of life.

--
Todd Puccio

---

From: Jonathan Rochkind <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:15:17 -0400

Maybe I'm a hopeless optimist, I think that there are better ways of 
letting people explore our catalog than our traditional 'browse list', 
ways that will make people happier whether or not they want some 
"journey" or just the "destination". (And I suspect if you divide people 
like that, then 90%+ of all of our users are "destination" users.)

The 'browse list' is simply taking the best display for this kind of 
exploration in the _print_ environment and translating it exactly to a 
computer screen. We have so many more options now.  It's time to start 
exploring them.  The 'browse list' is, I suggest,  unlikely to be the 
optimal interface for the computer environment with so many more options.

But no doubt SOME people will continue prefering the "browse list" same 
as it's always been. My impression, and the studies I've seen, suggest 
that almost all of those people are librarians.

Jonathan

---

From: "Lundgren,Jimmie Harrell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:53:43 -0400

In another direction, (it's not exactly a heading or a bibliographic record), but the FAST (http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/fast/default.htm ) authority records for places link from the geographic coordinates of the place to GoogleMaps for maps and aerial photographs of those coordinates. 

I thought it was pretty cool when I saw Ed O'Neill demonstrate it in January. It made me also hope the API could be used to link from the geographic coordinates fields on our bibliographic records for maps to GoogleMaps to show the users the coverage areas. 

In the future I would hope to connect from place names in subject fields of bibliographic records through their authority records that have geographic coordinates to GoogleMaps or something like it and in reverse to search by geographic coordinates for works about a place.

It's exciting to read about and see options that are becoming available! This is why I stay on this list. Thanks,
Jimmie

Jimmie Lundgren 
Associate Chair & Contributed Cataloging Unit Head 
Cataloging & Metadata Dept. 
Smathers Library 
PO Box 117004 
University of Florida 
Gainesville, FL 32611-7004 
352-273-2725 
352-392-7365 (fax) 
[email-masked] 

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Ian Fairclough
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 8:42 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [NGC4LIB] Linking headings in bib records to other resources

Dear NGC4LIB readers,

- Ian

Ian Fairclough
George Mason University

---

From: Ed Jones <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:16:29 -0700

Possibly even more useful would be the ability to click on a map and retrieve the set of political and geographic entities corresponding to the various areas containing those coordinates.  But I suspect this would require a more sophisticated way of storing geographic extent in records for such entities (perhaps tracing a boundary with a stylus and somehow storing the string of connected coordinates).

Ed Jones  

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Lundgren,Jimmie Harrell
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 11:54 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Linking headings in bib records to other resources

Jimmie Lundgren 

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Ian Fairclough
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 8:42 AM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [NGC4LIB] Linking headings in bib records to other resources

Dear NGC4LIB readers,

- Ian

Ian Fairclough
George Mason University

---

From: Jonathan Rochkind <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:35:46 -0400

I have a dream of drawing a polygon on a map, and retrieving all items 
from the catalog that are inside those coordinates.

"Inside" could be "about" from LCSH or other subject headings (or even 
the magical 043)  (geo-coordinated), or published in, from 260 (again, 
geocoordinated, this time from uncontrolled text).

Jonathan

---

From: George Oates <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:57:29 -0700

Jonathan,

You might be interested in Flickr's shapefiles for geolocations. On Flickr, the 
shapefiles are used to retrieve photos within a polygon, but the shapes 
themselves have been released under a CC license, so can be repurposed:

http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/05/21/flickr-shapefiles-public-dataset-10/

Cheers,
george

Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
>> Possibly even more useful would be the ability to click on a map and 
>> retrieve the set of political and geographic entities corresponding to 
>> the various areas containing those coordinates.  But I suspect this 
>> would require a more sophisticated way of storing geographic extent in 
>> records for such entities (perhaps tracing a boundary with a stylus 
>> and somehow storing the string of connected coordinates).
>>
>> Ed Jones 
>> [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Lundgren,Jimmie Harrell
>> In another direction, (it's not exactly a heading or a bibliographic 
>> record), but the FAST 
>> (http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/fast/default.htm ) authority 
>> records for places link from the geographic coordinates of the place 
>> to GoogleMaps for maps and aerial photographs of those coordinates.
>> I thought it was pretty cool when I saw Ed O'Neill demonstrate it in 
>> January. It made me also hope the API could be used to link from the 
>> geographic coordinates fields on our bibliographic records for maps to 
>> GoogleMaps to show the users the coverage areas.
>> In the future I would hope to connect from place names in subject 
>> fields of bibliographic records through their authority records that 
>> have geographic coordinates to GoogleMaps or something like it and in 
>> reverse to search by geographic coordinates for works about a place.
>>
>> It's exciting to read about and see options that are becoming 
>> available! This is why I stay on this list. Thanks,
>> Jimmie
>>
>> Jimmie Lundgren Associate Chair & Contributed Cataloging Unit Head 
>> Cataloging & Metadata Dept. Smathers Library PO Box 117004 University 
>> of Florida Gainesville, FL 32611-7004 352-273-2725 352-392-7365 (fax) 
>> [email-masked]  
>>
>> Jimmie Lundgren said in a recent post "Another useful navigation tool 
>> ... is the ability to click on headings in displayed records to 
>> retrieve other records with those headings."  As is widely known, in 
>> OCLC WorldCat you can click on headings in bibliographic records to 
>> retrieve the authority record, if the heading has been "controlled."  
>> ("Control" in this context appears to be equivalent to "link.")
>>

---

From: Ed Jones <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:06:47 -0700

I was thinking more in terms of a switching service that libraries could tap into.  I wouldn't expect libraries to develop such a service, but I would be surprised if one weren't eventually developed by some agency.  It's already being done with ZIP+4 codes (e.g., on the Census Bureau site) to retrieve data for corresponding political jurisdictions, census tracts, and Congressional districts.

Ed

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 12:36 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Linking headings in bib records to other resources

Jonathan

---

From: Warwick Cathro <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:00:07 +1000

Ian,

Here is something possibly relevant to your question which we have developed at the National Library of Australia.

In this example an authority record for the ornithologist John Gould has been linked to three online biographical services: 
http://nla.gov.au/nla.party-478003

(click on the little arrow heads to open up all three links)

Warwick Cathro

Warwick Cathro
Assistant Director-General, Resource Sharing and Innovation
National Library of Australia
Ph: 02 6262 1403
Fax: 02 6273 1133
Mob: 0411 868 411

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of Ian Fairclough
Sent: Wednesday, 28 April 2010 10:42 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: [NGC4LIB] Linking headings in bib records to other resources

Dear NGC4LIB readers,

- Ian

Ian Fairclough
George Mason University