"There are few things librarians enjoy more than frequent,
extensive and inconclusive discussions." — Maurice B. Line,
"Librarianship As It Is Practiced: A Failure of Intellect,
Imagination and Initiative." Interlending & Document
Supply (2005) vol. 33 no. 2.
Rafael Ortega cleaned up the audio of Ranganathan's Monologue on
Melvil Dewey and got rid of the static that made the first two
minutes so difficult to hear.
Anyone reading FRBR and Fundamental
Cataloguing Rules should look for an improved version of that
paper in a book edited by Arlene Taylor, Understanding FRBR:
What It Is and How It Will Affect Our Retrieval Tools,
forthcoming this spring from Libraries Unlimited.
Two of my FreeBSD boxes didn't notice the time zone had changed, so I
changed it
by hand.
14 March 2007
I have created an Atom feed for the site. If you want to keep up with
changes here, put my Atom 1.0 feed
into your RSS reader, news aggregator, Bloglines, Google Reader, or
whatever you use. For now I'm making it by hand, in Emacs.
IA Voice, "The First IA
Podcast Channel in Europe," is a podcast series about information
architecture. They're using my 2003 paper How to Make a Faceted
Classification and Put It On the Web as the basis for a series of
four podcast episodes! The first is IA
E-Learning: Faceted Classification (1 of 4). Very exciting! I'm
delighted the paper is still useful, and I never dreamed it would be
translated into another language. While you're at IA Voice's site be
sure to look through their archives, which have interviews with many
interesting people in the field. I'll post links to the next three
episodes as they come up, but if you start following IA Voice's site
or feed you'll be sure not to miss anything.
14 February 2007
Another update to the footnotes
list. I haven't added much here lately, but The FRBR Blog is updated several times
a week.
Last month at the Access 2006 library conference I had a chat with Dan Chudnov as part of his
Library Geeks podcast series. Library
Geeks 008 - FRBR and OpenFRBR has the show notes with some links
and a correction to a mistake I made about Canadian history (the Last
Spike wasn't gold and it was placed in 1885). You can subscribe to the
podcast feed to get all the shows, or just listen to our
talk about FRBR and OpenFRBR (38.5 MB MP3, 85 minutes). I really
enjoyed meeting Dan and having the talk.
1 November 2006
I announced OpenFRBR, a
new project to write a full free implementation of FRBR.
26 October 2006
Updated the footnotes list with
Gaiman's Anansi Boys and Thackeray's Vanity
Fair.
Over on The FRBR Blog, I posted an abbreviated audio
recording of a lecture I gave about FRBR to a cataloguing class in
December 2005. Also available are my slides and the handout. (The
recording is abbreviated because the batteries in the recording gizmo
ran out of juice after 17 minutes.)
Quite a few additions to the Fictional
Footnotes and Indexes page, thanks to people who e-mailed me. Of
course, there's no way to tell which are the new ones ... though I
could footnote every entry with its addition date.
This fall I'm teaching a course at the Professional Learning
Centre at my alma mater, the Faculty of Information Studies at the
University of Toronto: Taxonomies
and Metadata. Denise Bruno (who taught it in the spring, too) is
my co-instructor. It's an introductory course about, as you'd expect,
taxonomies and metadata. The PLC is, I believe, the largest
continuing education program for librarians in North America. They
have some very good instructors, and I'm delighted to be doing a
course for them.
Made all of the RARA-AVIS pages match
the rest of the site, except for the archives, which are another
matter. I made them as XHTML-compliant as I could, though.
27 August 2005
Added a search tool that covers everything here except the
RARA-AVIS mailing list archives, which has its
own search tool. I used Swish-e, and had to do a bit of
fiddling to get it working the way I wanted with the Template Toolkit
files, but it worked out nicely.
13 August 2005
I redid the site so that I could add the old left-hand nav to
each page. I'm using Template Toolkit and it
seems to be just what I was looking for. I've removed the Linux page,
the Prisoner's Dilemma stuff, and the list of books I bought from
1995-2000.
Today I created the FRBR Blog.
The web needs a reliable place that tracks FRBRish happenings, and
I intend this to be it.
23 June 2005
A quote from Tempest-Tost, by Robertson Davies
(1951): "Freddy recognized the truth of what he said. She herself was
victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon,
and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful
acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful,
than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people
to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But
there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as
wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his
drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all: they
want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at
command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want
concubines—not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their
master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality."
