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A Chrismash Carol
Shurely Shome Mishtake?

Wednesday, 4 December 13

The Ghost of
Chrismash Past


http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/ppl_ri_images/4019188259

ChrisMash past
Standardised format
Expert knowledge needed, but easily understood by anyone who has used the system before
Card catalogue - it’s hard to mash http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/ppl_ri_images/4019188259

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/68103485@N05/6197933357/

Structured, but designed to be interpreted by humans
Severely limited mashup potential ... although that doesn’t stop the dedicated masher
Card catalogue - sort of human readable http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/68103485@N05/6197933357/

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jazzmasterson/3916495432

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/coralinetheblue/6320905396

The brave few have tried to mash the card catalogue http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/coralinetheblue/
6320905396

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/eskene/4606709761

The Ghost of
Chrismash Present


http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/annarbor/4349878303/

Chrismash present?
We’ve successfully managed to build a system where anyone can view a card from the
catalogue at any single point

http://bit.ly/vgeLGB

We now have the opportunity to share our catalogue card information more quickly than ever
before. While losing any subtleties in it’s interpretation that might have previously been
understood (or not) by the human reader
The 21st Century, schema.org powered card catalogue http://bit.ly/uzmYwx

020

## $a0877790086 :$c$10.00
020

## $z0877790105 (Fabrikoid) :$c$12.00
020

## $a0877790019 (black leather)
$z0877780116 :$c$14.00
020

## $a0877790124 (blue pigskin) :$c$15.00
020

## $z0877790159 (easel binding) :$c$16.00
[Five numbers associated with one catalog record.
Two are valid; one has both a valid and invalid (or
cancelled) form; two are invalid (or cancelled)]


“Today, I’m turning my attention to a concrete example that drives me absolutely batshit crazy: taking a perfectly good unique-id ﬁeld (in this case, the ISBN in
the 020) and appending stuﬀ onto the end of it.” Bill Dueber http://robotlibrarian.billdueber.com/isbn-parenthetical-notes-bad-marc-data-1/

MARC can drive you ‘absolutely batshit crazy’ http://bit.ly/fJNqSM


At least our data is more hackable than the card catalogue http://libraryhack.org/


‘Composed’ was a hack I did for a developer competition http://bit.ly/pyDiNx


”What’s about” was a winning entry in the #discodev competition http://bit.ly/l7TEZc


Warwickshire County Council ran ‘Hack Warwickshire’ competition - and the winner was
http://bit.ly/cIavTK

The Ghost of
Chrismash Future



In the future their are no mashups :(

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/27718575@N07/4308584630

Legal issues around copyright and IP have become so complex that no-one risks remixing
anything for fear of being sued
see http://bit.ly/cosyTn for information about releasing open bibliographic data

SuperMARC


sadly SuperMARC is a genuine suggestion for the future of bibliographic data
http://bit.ly/nhz6t7
Complex data formats
"1. Record Length.

We'll need to adjust the Leader positions of

00-04, and move it to something much higher.
further out.

Perhaps push bytes 05-23

So we can reserve bytes 00-12 for record length (and

bytes 05-23 become bytes 17-31)
That's one hell of a record.
for that large of a record?

That give you up to 9.999999 TB.
Do you think you have enough content

You can now include the actual printed

book.
"2. Expand the MARC record to have a 4 character numeric tag, starting
with

0001 and continue to 9999.

That too is quite big, many fields

repeated, and more fields to define.
"3. Indicator count.

Oh boy can we define fields.

Again, expand it to 3.

We may not use it, but

let's get rolling.
"4. Subfield code count.

Again, expand it to 3.

You can then tell

the computer that after the "delimiter" ($), you have either a 1 or 2
byte subfield.

I can see us using $aa $ab $ac

(or if you go to 4

character count you could do something like $a-b $d-a or even $a$b
$d$a.

Or even a different delimiter sign as a secondary delimiter."

020

## $a0877790086 :$c$10.00
020

## $z0877790105 (Fabrikoid) :$c$12.00
020

## $a0877790019 (black leather)
$z0877780116 :$c$14.00
020

## $a0877790124 (blue pigskin) :$c$15.00
020

## $z0877790159 (easel binding) :$c$16.00


“Today, I’m turning my attention to a concrete example that drives me absolutely batshit crazy: taking a perfectly good unique-id ﬁeld (in this case, the ISBN in
the 020) and appending stuﬀ onto the end of it.” Bill Dueber http://robotlibrarian.billdueber.com/isbn-parenthetical-notes-bad-marc-data-1/

0020

### $aa0877790086 :$ac$10.00
0020

### $az0877790105 (Fabrikoid) :$ac$12.00
0020

### $aa0877790019 (black leather)
$az0877780116 :$ac$14.00
0020

### $aa0877790124 (blue pigskin) :$ac$15.00
0020

### $az0877790159 (easel binding) :$ac$16.00


This doesn’t help!

The Web
Library data

Lack of connections, and difficulty of linking library data to the rest of the web means it
always stays in it’s own silo.... leading to
The only way to avoid the Zombie Apocalypse is to follow my advice http://bit.ly/th1ylr

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/lukeroberts/1355846096/

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jemimus/5162042101/

when the zombie apocalypse comes, this will be the only record left to mash http://bit.ly/
w4ebCV
(may not be the zombie survival guide shown]

Lets face it, buying Bob Cratchitt and his family a turkey
isn’t going to cut it this time


• Clearly license your data (or demand that
others license theirs) for reuse by others

• Engage in discussions on the future of

metadata - with cataloguers, developers and
users

• Look at how engaged users are really using
data


don’t listen to me, just go read http://bit.ly/vbQIBB
Look at the JISC Guide to Open Bibliographic data
Join the Library of Congress bibframe list, follow tags like #lodlam on twitter
Look at the work @wragge is doing - read stuff like
http://discontents.com.au/words/conference-papers/it%E2%80%99s-all-about-the-stuffcollections-interfaces-power-and-people
http://discontents.com.au/shoebox/digital-humanities/extracting-editorials-1

Eat, drink and be
merry, for tomorrow,
we mash


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A Chrismash Carol

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