Rolling 2011 librarian/library assistant thread

xpost -- I have been expressly forbidden by my girlfriend from participating. Not that I was going to were it not for a couple of friends on Twitter somehow thinking me posing like Fabio by a book drop was a good idea.

That said, Loren Morrissey, who the calendar is dedicated to, was a UCI librarian for a few years -- didn't really deal with him much but he seemed a good sort, and his passing was mourned by many here.

How do I shot peer reviewed journal articles?

Possibly of interest to cataloguers and library data-wranglers (hey, that's me):

The Working Group of the Future of Bibliographic Control, as it examined technology for the future, wrote that the Library community's data carrier, MARC, is "based on forty-year-old techniques for data management and is out of step with programming styles of today." The Working Group called for a format that will "accommodate and distinguish expert-, automated-, and self-generated metadata, including annotations (reviews, comments, and usage data."

Interested to see where this goes. MARC does seem fundamentally slightly ill-suited to modern database design or vice versa. On the other hand we had to turn off all our user tagging because the data quality was, uhhh, slightly lacking, so not sure about this "self-generated metadata" business.

This is interesting, but potentially yet another metadata standard. They proliferate like anything, it seems.

Yeah, that's true. Our building is pretty much split down the middle between the people who work in MARC on the OPAC database with all its cruddy old legacy data (us) and the people at the other end who work with technologies of their own choice to set up new repositories (them), and those folks seem to have a new favourite standard every other week.

Makes me glad to work on the unglamorous old system in a way, I always feel I can't keep up with their shiny new toys and buzzwords.

(Also if you work on the old system you might actually get a permanent contract, whereas TPTB like to hand out year-long contracts for new all-singing one-developer web projects, and then look surprised when nobody has the time or understanding to maintain them after the developer leaves. Only downside is you get paid less because you're just "support" and not a developer, even if you spend all your time coding interfaces and magic data glue just like the developers. Sorry, seem to have strayed offtopic a bit here...)

Meantime, of interest:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/11/st_thompson_searchresults/