I Just Created a Local Installation of WordPress!

I have given myself a summer project to create a video catalog using WordPress and either the Dublin Core metadata scheme or a subset of the scheme created by Rutgers University for their OpenMIC cataloging software. I'm working with Kinetic Illusions to catalog both their raw video files and their completed project files to describe the raw files based on subject matter, geographic location, time of year, etc and describe which raw files were used in which completed projects.

So one step of the project is to figure out how Kinetic will use the database and what metadata elements are of upmost importance.

As Kinetic is planning to create a WordPress version of their website, and is the software of choice for their web services, and as I saw that Library Technology Reports published the Using WordPress as a Library Content Management System report, I thought creating the catalog using WP would be a good project. Only problem is... I don't do WordPress.

So I'm reading Lisa Sabin-Wilson's WordPress All-in-One for Dummies and the steps are very clear, however she doesn't cover creating a local installation, meaning on my computer, rather than on the web, which is her assumption. So I had to go find software which would recreate the online environment that WordPress requires. Namely I needed a database and a server. As I use a Mac, I discovered MAMP: Mac Apache mySQL PHP. (I don't remember exactly how, I must have googled "wordpress local installation Mac.")

Now, I'm seriously superstitious about getting things to work, so I desperately searched for some step by step instructions for installing said MAMP 1.9.6 and WP 3.2.1. The following youtube video was created using slightly older versions of the software, but it was mostly the same.

I followed these instructions step by step and successfully installed WordPress! Needless to say, much celebration insued as I am not tech architecture savvy, but that's why they created the helpful software. Thanks, local community for sharing your resources and your knowledge!

Now back to the for Dummies book.

Stuff I Saw I Thought was Cool in the ALA11 Stacks

Here is a list of the stuff that I picked up information on in the Stacks, so that I may now recycle the paper and keep the list electronically in perpetuity!!!!!

• iimageretrieval
• e-scan scanning station
• CopiBook scanning station
• Open Repository- a commercial consultant/ service provider for customizing the open source product DSpace
• The Horn Book Magazine- yeah, I've seen it on magazine stands, but never looked at one.
• Library Advocate's Handbook- put together by the Office of Library Advocacy OLA
• Unshelved- the comic about libraries
• the Knowledge Imaging Centers (scanners) at Image Access- these things are amazing! They typically use a V cradle to hold the book by the cover/spine rather than have the customer put the book pages down and smash the spine. The particular model you choose depends on the application, from the size of the document scanned to whether it is for library users to scan documents.
• KIC Bookeye 4, Bookeye 2
• KIC Rebel (B4C6 Color Scanner/ Copier ? I wonder if this is its technical term)
• KIC BookEdge Color Scanner/ Copier
• G. T. Labs Comics about scientists. The cover art looked great, which is what induced me to pick up the the handout:
• T Minus
• Levitation
• Wire Mothers
• Bone Sharps, Cowboys, and Thunder Lizards
• Suspended in Language
• Fallout
• Dignifying Science: Stories about Women Scientists
• Two Fisted Science
• Academic Video Online by Alexander Street Press

This is the list thus far. I'm a bit tired looking through these, so I'll do a part two later.

Book Review: Introducing RDA: a Guide to the Basics

The book's title tells it all. This is a very general introduction to RDA and at times I felt it was repetitive in the information. (Such as using the example of the cataloger no longer abbreviating words when transcribing information from the object to the record. This one was used a lot!) But, if you're a student in grad school, haven't taken a MARC class and just want to inform yourself of the future in cataloging, this book is a good start.

The seven chapters are:

1. What is RDA?
2. RDA and the International Context
3. FRBR and FRAD in RDA
4. Continuity with AACR2
5. Where Do We See Changes?
6. Implementing RDA
7. Advantages, Present and Future

The book mainly talks about the foundation and concepts behind RDA, which is basically to support the user in her search for information by seperating descriptive elements from each other and making relationships explicit so that the user could do this sort of search: "this item was created by that person who also created these things, one of which was published by this company, which specializes in audiobooks." Katrina Clifford also reviews the book for Ariadne and probably does a much better job than I could.

As I'll be returning the book to the library (not the sort of book you'd want to buy), I'm going to take a moment to list some of the resources in no particular order that I'd like to read for further, perhaps more concrete, information:

• Coyle, K. (2010). RDA vocabularies for a twenty-first century data environment. Library Technology Reports. 46(2).
• Delsey, T. (2008). RDA, FRBR/FRAD and implementation scenarios. 5JSC/Editor/4; www.rda-jsc.org/doc/editor4.pdf
• Delsey, T. (2007). RDA database implementation scenarios. 5JSC/Editor/2; www.rda-jsc.org/docs/5editor2.pdf
• JSC presentations: www.rda-jsc.org/rdapresentations.html
• Beacom, M. (2007). Cataloging cultural objects (CCO), resource description and Access (RDA), and the future of metadata content. VRA Bulletin 34(1), 81-85.
• IFLA Study Group on the FRBR's Function Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Final Report. Munich: Saur, 1998. www.ifla.org/en/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records.
• Tillett, B. (2004). What is FRBR? A conceptual model for the bibliographic universe. Washington, DC: Cataloging Distribution Service, Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/cds/downloads/FRBR.PDF
• Curran, Mary. (2009). Serials in RDA: A starter's tour and kit. Serials Librarian 57(4), 306-324.
• Hitchens, A, & Symons, E. (2009).  Preparing catalogers for RDA training. Cataloging & Classificiation Quarterly 47(8), 691-707.

All in all a good resource to get you started. It certainly helped me to understand the structural differences between AACR2 (anglo bias, bias on container of information object) and RDA (entity relationship based) and it provided some good resources for further study. I'd like more (free) info on FRAD and FRSAD (authority and subject authority data), but alas, I've not stumbled upon it. I'll share it here when I do.

RDA should be called RAD

On my last day at ALA '11 I attended a session with no knowledge of the topic. I sat down at a table and was immediately greeted with, "How do you know RDA?" To which I replied, "I don't. But I keep seeing the acronym and thought I should probably learn something."

The session was titled Education and Training for Using RDA and moderated by Kathryn La Barre and Marjorie Bloss. There were many other acronyms tossed about (FRBR, FRAD, PCC, RDA) and I waited and took notes until I heard one I recognized: MARC. Ah, this has to do with cataloging.

As it turns out, the American Library Assoc. (ALA), Australian Committee on Cataloguing, British Library, Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, Chartereed Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) (UK based), and the Library of Congress (LOC) all got together (from 2003 to the present) to develop a new cataloging standard called Resource Description and Access (RDA) to replace the Anglo American Cataloging Rules (AACR2). This I learned from reading Introducing RDA: a Guide to the Basics by Chris Oliver.

Essentially what is going down is the community recognized that the way AACR2 was structured made it hard to describe new types of resources such as online multimedia (apparently AACR2 is structured around the container that an information resource is housed in such as a book or a music CD) and that it was created for the print environment, not for the digital environment. So AACR2 doesn't easily allow for descriptions of new types of resources nor does its structure emphasize relationships between objects or between objects' creators so that data can be used outside of the environment in which it is created, which is what a networked environment excels at.

Back to the session: I came away with the idea that RDA is a MEGA-schema. It lists all the elements to describe an information object and tells you how to fill the data values, from something as "minor" as don't include the article "The" for title information to which controlled vocabularies to consult for specific elements to detailing the relationships between items that share the same name and concept (a work), but not the same expression of the content (book, translation of book to another language, audiobook, adapted movie, etc). This is nothing new for experienced catalogers- the old rules AACR2 did just that. There is a core element set which defines the minimum information to describe an object and the rules leave it up to the individual library to decide how to display the information in the catalog.

I think the radical change is that so many people have invested so much time learning the MARC format, which is a metadata schema that is not easy to learn and they are waiting to see when the big institutions will begin using RDA before they charge forward. Vendors will need to change their databases, people will need to be trained in the new structure. It is a costly business to change standards.

As the point of the session was how institutions (whether academic teaching students or actual service libraries with catalogers) were were handling training, a representative of the Library of Congress shared that their training materials could be found on the Library of Congress Documentation for the RDA (Resource Description and Access) Test and among other LOC educational podcasts on iTunesU is a set of five talks on RDA which introduce the listener to the history and context of RDA's development, the principles it is based on and the implications of its implementation. (You may need iTunes installed to access, but it's free to download.)

There was also a representative of Minitex who said that he broke down RDA training for copy catalogers by media. Those trainings are only in person, but  if you make the trip, I'm sure they'd be able to include you. (Minitex also has a load of interesting trainings that are self paced or webinar based besides the RDA trainings.)

Two things I'm excited about:

1. Not having to be an expert on MARC. I did not take a cataloging course because it was so book focused and focused on MARC. I don't like MARC's lack of granularity (the more granular an item, the easier it is to create filters and to reuse data elements) and I don't like MARC's weird rules about where to put things based on where other things were put. Me, I'm a describe the resources using a form and let the computer put the items into the proper fields. And I wanted to learn about describing all sorts of things, such as digital objects, multimedia objects, etc.
2. Freeing the data. If the Library of Congress is paid for by the American people, then the data in the databases should be easily accessed, easily harvested and easily re-purposed. Either by other libraries or by people creating a database of their personal library. Also, by describing an information object by its relationships, we are creating ways to link that object to other, related objects outside of the library. In this way a person's exploration is unbounded so that they link into the library's description of an object then could link out to a museum's related items.