Re: update on lcsh??

Hi Jonathan and All,
Thanks for your interest.

The point is not another gazetteer, but to deliver available library
resources more effectively and efficiently to patrons based on a place
of interest. Many dusty old books hide data valuable to researchers.
There generally are records with geographic subjects for them. Deriving
coordinates from GNIS and other sources and inserting them in the
authority records that can connect with those subject terms can enable
retrieval based on coordinates. This is thus independent of language
used in the catalog. (Easy on the catalogers, harder on the LC persons
doing the loading and on the systems developers). For various reasons,
it will likely be center point data rather than attempts at bounding
boxes used for this purpose. 

For more, see MARC Proposal 2006-06 at
http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2006/2006-06.html 

Would love to talk with some of you more about this at the MARC Formats
Interest Group where Naomi Young and I are speaking on "Courage to
Change MARC." This will be at the ALA meeting in Anaheim, Calif., June
28, 2008 at 1:30 PM in the Doubletree Hotel, Tuscany F room. 

Thanks,
Jimmie



-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 12:22 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] update on lcsh??

There are a variety of services that let you look up a human language 
place and return a best-guess gazateer entry with coordinates. It's not 
perfect of course, but works reasonably well.

One entirely free and non-commercial source of such a lookup is:

http://www.geonames.org/

There's both a web-service there, and also their entire data set is 
downloadable (not sure if the software that heuristically guesses from 
query-entered place name to formal specified place is open source, but 
certainly this is software that can be developed if someone cares to put

resources behind it.)

So a reasonable approach to me would be machine connecting LCSH place 
names to formal coordinates, and then human-entering coordinates only 
for such places that does _not_ work for, on an as-discovered basis.

But the larger question is: Who would do even this?  Is the cataloging 
community capable of any change whatsoever, or has it been so 
deprofessionalized and under-staffed that there's nobody left to do any 
change at all? OCLC maybe?

Jonathan

Jimmie Lundgren wrote:
> On another front, geographic coordinate data is now able to be entered
> in name and subject MARC authority records for places (OCLC Tech Bull
> 255). 
>
> This brings us to what my colleague Jorge Gonzalez calls "the crisis
> stage of a paradigm shift" in place-related access to library
resources.
>
>
> How quickly can this data be compiled and actually loaded in LCSH and
> name authority records?
>
> Will OPAC developers empower users with GIS capabilities in catalogs,
or
> will this opportunity languish while librarians chant "keyword is all
we
> need"? 
>
> Stay tuned ...
>
> Thanks,
> Jimmie
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Neil Godfrey
> Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 2:50 AM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: [NGC4LIB] update on lcsh??
>
> Hi all,
>
> I have been out of the loop for a little while here, and would greatly
> appreciate it if anyone could point me to where I can bring myself up
to
> date with the current state of play with the debate over controlled
> vocabularies for subjects, please. I recall some time back a fierce
> debate
> raging over the future of the LCSH. Has that been resolved yet? If
not,
> is
> there a best place to search archives? Other sites? for a catch up?
>
> Many thanks,
> Neil Godfrey
>
> http://metalogger.wordpress.com
>
>   

-- 
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886 
rochkind (at) jhu.edu