2006

Standards, Identifiers, and all that Good Stuff

LITA Standards IG, Saturday, June 24, 2006 Managing Identifiers Moderator, Pat Stevens Pat told a story about attending an ISO meeting in Asia where one topic was the international trade in ring tones. She pointed out that public identifiers are critical to link heterogeneous services, they require support—technical and social infrastructure. The presenters were asked to talk about what went on behind the scenes to support identifiers. Regina Reynolds, US ISSN Center, Library of Congress “The ‘Business’ of ISSN: What Does it Take?” The center has been around since the early ‘70s. The ISSN is undergoing a major revision, has 80 centers all over the world, the International center in Paris. Governed by a board and has a User Group which had its first meeting in 2005. New centers need training and documentation. A unique key title and metadata record backs up every ISSN assignment. Decisions are made at the…

2006

Figgy Formats

The MFIG meeting, as is its custom, was focused on a particular issue for its meeting: “Authorities: What’s the Future?” The speaker, Mary Mastraccio, Cataloging and Authorities Manager, MARCIVE, Inc., approached her topic with the assumption that her audience was varied, and aimed at the middle of the range.

2005

MARBI Matters

In the old days, MARBI was the ALA home base for the data geeks, and there were often three half-days of meetings every six months. The agendas were full and the documentation for the meetings, when printed out (we didn’t bring laptops then) often approached an inch or more piled up. That was in the days before the distractions of MODS, METS and such, when MARBI was still lively and fractious. Now the issues are generally a bit niche and often ho-hum, and there are few in the room below the age of forty.