Virtual Library Studies

Search Databases

2009-03-28T20:13:00.000-07:00

Search databases is a subject course which develops students research skills by learning to search the large verity of online databases. Many subscription only databases, what we might call hidden web, are password protected sites. The major magazine and journal Australian databases are:
1. ANZRC EBSCO Online - search.ebscohost.com
2. DA Direct Info - www.dadirect.com
3. Informit Online - search.informit.com.au
4. Schools Catalogue SCIS - www.curriculum.edu.au/scis
5. Picman database - www.sl.nsw.gov.au/picman

AACR2 Second Edition

2007-03-30T16:41:00.000-07:00

AACR2 stands for the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition. It is published jointly by the American Library Association, the Canadian Library Association, and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. AACR2 is designed for use in the construction of catalogues and other lists in general libraries of all sizes. The rules cover the description of, and the provision of access points for, all library materials commonly collected at the present time.
Despite the claim to be 'Anglo-American', the first edition of AACR was published in 1967 in somewhat distinct North American and British texts. The second edition of 1978 unified the two sets of rules (adopting the British spelling 'cataloguing') and brought them in line with the International Standard Bibliographic Description. Libraries wishing to migrate from the previous North American text were obliged to implement 'desuperimposition', a substantial change in the form of headings for corporate bodies.
Principles of AACR include cataloguing from the item 'in hand' rather than inferring information from external sources and the concept of the 'chief source of information' which is preferred where conflicts exist.
As well as occasional minor amendments, a broader revision is under way with a view to a new edition in which the rules are more consistent and coherent, informed by the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records. This 'AACR3' has the working title 'Resource Description and Access'.
More about AACR2

LCSH Subject Headings

2006-05-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) consist of subject headings, maintained by the United States Library of Congress, for use in bibliographic records. LC Subject Headings are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is the function by which libraries collect, organize and disseminate documents. LCSHs are applied to every item within a library’s collection, and facilitate a user’s access to items in the catalogue that pertain to similar subject matter. If users could only locate items by ‘title’ or other descriptive fields, such as ‘author’ or ‘publisher’, they would have to expend an enormous amount of time searching for items of related subject matter, and undoubtedly misslocating many items because of the ineffective and inefficient search capability.

The Subject Headings are published in five large volumes. They may also be searched online in the Library of Congress Classification Web, a subscription service. The Library of Congress issues weekly updates. Once a library user has found the right subject heading they are an excellent resource for finding relevant material in your library catalogue. Increasingly the use of hyperlinked, web-based Online Public Access Catalogues, or OPACs, allow users to hyperlink to a list of similar items displayed by LCSH once one item of interest is located. However, because LCSH are not necessarily expressed in natural language, many users may chose to search OPACs by keywords. Moreover, users unfamiliar with OPAC searching and LCSH, may incorrectly assume their library has no items on their desired topic, if they chose to search by ‘subject’ field, and the terms they entered do not strictly conform to a LCSH. For example ‘body temperature regulation’ is used in place of ‘thermoregulation’. Thus the easiest way to find and use LCSH is to start with a ‘keyword’ search and then look at the Subject Headings of a relevant item to locate other related material.

Dewey Decimal System

2006-03-18T18:18:00.000-08:00

The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC, also called the Dewey Decimal System) is a system of library classification developed by Melvil Dewey in 1876, and since greatly modified and expanded in the course of the twenty-two major revisions, the most recent in 2004.
The DDC attempts to organize all knowledge into ten main classes that, excluding the first class (000 Computers, information and general reference), proceed from the divine (philosophy & religion) to the mundane (history & geography). DDC's cleverness is in choosing decimals for its categories; this allows it to be both purely numerical and infinitely hierarchical. It also is a faceted classification, combining elements from different parts of the structure to construct a number representing the subject content (often combining two subject elements with linking numbers and geographical and temporal elements) and form of an item rather than drawing upon a list containing each class and its meaning.
Except for general works and fiction, works are classified principally by subject, with extensions for subject relationships, place, time or type of material, producing classification numbers of not less than three digits but otherwise of indeterminate length with a decimal point before the fourth digit, where present (e.g. 330 for economics + 94 for Europe = 330.94 European economy; 973 for United States + 005 form division for periodicals = 973.005, periodicals concerning the United States generally); classmarks are to be read as numbers, in the order: 050, 220, 330.973, 331 etc. Any letter should be read as preceding any number that might have occupied the same character position, so "330.94 A" would come before 330.943. The system uses ten main classes, which are then further subdivided. Each main class has ten divisions and each division has ten sections. Hence the system can be neatly summarized in 10 main classes, 100 divisions and 1000 sections. It is a common misconception that all books in the DDC are non-fiction. However, the DDC has a number for all books, including those that generally become their own section of fiction. If DDC rules are strictly followed, American fiction is classified in 813. Some libraries create a separate fiction section because of the space that would be taken up in the 800s.

DDC is commonly used in public and school libraries throughout the world, although some college and university libraries of all sizes also use Dewey, notably Duke University and Northwestern University. The schedule contains marked geographical biases derived from its 19th century origins: Northern Africa for instance occupies all of 961–965, the rest of the continent only 966–969. It is still more biased towards Christianity against other religions, the former covering all of 220–289, while all others get only 292–299 to share. Recent versions permit another religion to be placed in 220–289, with Christianity relegated to 298, but this is mainly used by libraries operated by non-Christian religious groups, especially Jewish ones. The DDC has also been criticized for its treatment of literature (800). Because primacy is given to language, national literatures get scattered. For example, Canadian literature in English is classed under English & Old English (820) literatures while Canadian literature in French is classed under French literatures (840). The only exception is for American literature (810); a reflection of the Anglo-American bias inherent in the system.

MARC Cataloging

2006-02-18T17:59:00.000-08:00

MARC is an acronym for MAchine-Readable Cataloging. It is a communications standard for exchanging bibliographic, holdings, and other data between libraries. It defines a bibliographic data format that emerged from a United States Library of Congress led initiative that began in the 1970s. It provides the protocol by which computers exchange, use, and interpret bibliographic information. Its data elements make up the foundation of most library catalogs used today.
The MARC Standards Office is part of the Library of Congress.
The record structure of MARC is an implementation of ISO 2709, also known as ANSI/NISO Z39.2.
The future of the MARC formats is a matter of some debate in the worldwide library science community. On the one hand, the formats are quite complex and are based on outdated technology. On the other, there is no alternative bibliographic format with an equivalent degree of granularity.

Authority records -- MARC authority records provide information about individual names, subjects, and uniform titles. An authority record establishes an authorized form of each heading, with references as appropriate from other forms of the heading.

Bibliographic records -- MARC bibliographic records describe the intellectual and physical characteristics of bibliographic resources (books, sound recordings, video recordings, and so forth).

Holdings records -- MARC holdings records provide copy-specific information on a library resource (call number, shelf location, and so forth).

Library of Congress Classification

2006-02-15T18:33:00.000-08:00

The Library of Congress Classification (LCC) is a system of library classification developed by the Library of Congress. It is used by most research and university libraries in the U.S. and several other countries — most public libraries continue to use the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). It is not to be confused with the Library of Congress Subject Headings.
The classification was originally developed by Herbert Putnam with the advice of Charles Ammi Cutter in 1897 before he assumed the librarianship of Congress. It was influenced by Cutter Expansive Classification, DDC, and was designed for the use by the Library of Congress. The new system replaced a fixed location system developed by Thomas Jefferson. By the time of Putnam's departure from his post in 1939 all the classes except K (Law) and parts of B (Philosophy and Religion) were well developed. It has been criticized as lacking a sound theoretical basis; many of the classification decisions were driven by the particular practical needs of that library, rather than considerations of epistemological elegance.
Although it divides subjects into broad categories, it is essentially enumerative in nature.
The National Library of Medicine classification system (NLM) uses unused letters W and QS-QZ. Some libraries use NLM in conjuction with LCC, not using LCC's R (Medicine).

Melvil Dewey

2006-02-12T18:59:00.000-08:00

Melvil Dewey (December 10, 1851–December 26, 1931) was the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification system for library classification.
Dewey was born Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey in Adams Center, New York in the United States. He attended Amherst College, graduating in 1874. It was while working as an assistant librarian at Amherst from 1874 until 1877 that Dewey devised his decimal system.
He moved to Boston where he founded and edited Library Journal, which became an influential factor in the development of libraries in America, and in the reform of their administration.
With his friend and fellow librarian Charles Ammi Cutter, he helped found the American Library Association (ALA); both men spoke at the First Annual ALA Conference held in Boston, Massachusetts in 1876.
In 1883 he became librarian of Columbia College, and in the following year founded there the Columbia School of Library Economy, the first institution for the instruction of librarians ever organized. This school, which was very successful, was removed to Albany, New York in 1890, where it was reestablished as the New York State Library School under his direction; from 1888 to 1906 he was director of the New York State Library and from 1888 to 1900 was secretary of the University of the State of New York, completely reorganizing the state library, which he made one of the most efficient in America, and establishing the system of state travelling libraries and picture collections. In 1890 he helped to found the first state library association - the New York Library Association (NYLA) - and he was its first president, from 1890-1892.
He was an advocate of English language spelling reform and is responsible for, among other things, the "American" spelling of the word Catalog (as opposed to the British Catalogue). He changed his own name from Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey to simply Melvil Dui. He also sponsored periodicals on the Ro constructed language, in which the word structure marked its meaning in a hierarchy of categories.
While remembered for his Dewey Decimal System, Dewey's personal views would be highly controversial today. He was extremely racist against African Americans and other minorities, as well as anti-Semitic and anti-women's rights. He also advocated segregation of races.
Dewey is a member of the American Library Association's Hall of Fame.

Thomas Jefferson

2006-02-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 N.S. – July 4, 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–1809), principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential founders of the United States. Major events during his presidency include the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the Embargo Act of 1807, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806).
A political philosopher who promoted classical liberalism, republicanism, and the separation of church and state, he was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786), which was the basis of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. He was the eponym of Jeffersonian democracy and the founder and leader of the Democratic-Republican Party which dominated American politics for over a quarter-century and was the precursor to today's Democratic Party. Jefferson also served as the second Governor of Virginia (1779–1781), first United States Secretary of State (1789–1795), and second Vice President (1797–1801).

After the British burned Washington and the Library of Congress in August 1814, Jefferson offered his own collection to the nation. In January 1815, Congress accepted his offer, appropriating $23,950 for his 6,487 books, and the foundation was laid for a great national library. Today, the Library of Congress' website for federal legislative information is named THOMAS, in honor of Jefferson.The range of his interests is remarkable. For many years he was President of the American Philosophical Society.

Thomas Jefferson was also an agriculturalist, horticulturist, architect, etymologist, archaeologist, mathematician, cryptographer, surveyor, paleontologist, author, lawyer, inventor, violinist, and the founder of the University of Virginia. Many people consider Jefferson to be among the most brilliant men ever to occupy the Presidency. President John F. Kennedy welcomed forty-nine Nobel Prize winners to the White House in 1962, saying, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Search Engine Class

2006-02-10T21:59:00.000-08:00

It is hard to imagine how people lived in dark times before search engines were developed. Going back to the early 1990s we find the first search tools which where helpful in finding information stored on computer systems. The very first tool used for searching on the Internet was created in 1990 by by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal and was called Archie. This program was able to create database of file names, or index of files, but could not read or search the content of the files.

Few years later first Internet search engine called Wandex was created by the World Wide Web Wanderer, a web crawler developed by Matthew Gray at MIT in 1993. Another very early search engine, Aliweb, also appeared in 1993, and still runs today. The first full text crawler based search engine was WebCrawler, which came into use in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any web page, which became the standard for all major search engines ever since. In 1994 Lycos was started at Carnegie Mellon University, and it became very popular and commercially successful enterprise.

WebCrawler innovative metasearch technology

Soon after, many search engines appeared and started to compete for popularity. These included Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. In January of 1994 Yahoo was started and it was first known as "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web". At first it was a directory of other sites, organized in a hierarchy (rather than a searchable index of pages). It was renamed "Yahoo!" shortly thereafter. Today Yahoo is the most visited website on the Internet with 412 million unique users and has $5 billion in revenues and 11,000 employees.

Search Engine Relationship Chart

Google started as a research project in early 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who were postgraduate students at Stanford University in California. The existing search engines at that time ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page. And that created a situation where someone could manipulate the search results by increasing the number of specific words in order to appear on top of the list. Google was the fist successful attempt to analyze the relationships and links between websites.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 14, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.

The original Google website as it looked in 1996.

All search engines today work by storing information about tens of billions of web pages. These pages are retrieved by a web crawler, called also a web spider — an automated software agent which follows every link it sees. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed. In Google case the indexing of the web pages is performed by a program named Googlebot, which periodically requests new copies of web pages it already knows about. Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. Storing of such large amount of information is very costly. Simply storing 10 billion pages of 10 kbytes each in size requires 100TB and another 100TB or so for indexes, giving a total hardware cost of around $200k: 400 500GB disk drives on 100 computers. By the end of 2005 Google claimed that its index has over 25 billion web pages and 1.3 billion images, 1 billion Usenet messages, 6,600 print catalogs, and 4,500 news sources.

Find what people are searching for with Zeitgeist

Google's popularity has grown as people were attracted to its simple and clear design. Most people prefer not to have visual distractions while entering searches on web pages. This appearance was not an original idea and imitated AltaVista's, but included Google's unique search capabilities. In 2000, Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. This strategy was important for creating a financialy strong company . The ads were text-based in order to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com. However while many companies have failed in the new Internet advertising domain, Google was generating increasing profits.

The key concept behind Google is PageRank which is a method assigning the relative importance of pages on the Internet from value 0 to value 10. Where page with 0 value is least important and page with value 10 is the most important page. PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the Internet about how important the page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it which are called incoming links. A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page. U.S. Patent 6,285,999 describing part of Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on September 4, 2001. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.

Many academic papers concerning PageRank have been published since Larry Page and Sergey Brin's original paper. In practice, the PageRank system has proven to be vulnerable to manipulation, and extensive research has been devoted to identifying falsely inflated PageRank and ways to ignore links from documents with falsely inflated PageRank.

Who manipulates Google and why?

Advanced commands on Google the easy way.

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Access to Literature

2006-02-02T22:11:00.000-08:00

Promote client access to literature subject deals with introduction of the wide range of literature and promoting client effective access to the verity of sources.
Some of the study links below:
1. http://www.amazon.com - online books, CDs, videos, DVDs and more.
2. http://www.bartleby.com - searchable quotations site.
3. http://www.evanston.lib.il.us/library/bibliographies - Evanston library.
4. http://www.genrefluent.com - the world of genre fiction.
5. http://www.libraryspot.com - huge reference collection.
6. http://www.nancypearl.com - books worth calling in sick for!
7. http://www.refdesk.com - one-stop site for all Internet things.
8. http://www.webrary.org - Morton Grove Public Library.
9. http://www.whichbook.net - find books to match your mood.

Library of Congress

2006-01-15T18:13:00.000-08:00

The Library of Congress was established on April 24, 1800, when President John Adams signed an act of Congress providing for the transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington. The legislation appropriated $5,000 "for the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress ..., and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them...." The original library was housed in the new Capitol until August 1814, when invading British troops set fire to the Capitol building, destroying the contents of the small (3,000 volumes) library.
Within a month, retired President Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement. Jefferson had spent 50 years accumulating books, "putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science"; his library was considered to be one of the finest in the United States. Jefferson, who was heavily indebted, sought to use the proceeds of the sale of his books to satisfy his creditors. He anticipated controversy over the nature of his collection, which included books in foreign languages and volumes of philosophy, science, literature, and other topics not normally viewed as part of a legislative library. He wrote, "I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer."
In January 1815, Congress accepted Jefferson's offer, appropriating $23,950 for his 6,487 books, and the foundation was laid for a great national library. The Jeffersonian concept of universality, the belief that all subjects are important to the library of the American legislature, is the philosophy and rationale behind the comprehensive collecting policies of today's Library of Congress.

On December 24, 1851, there was a fire in the Library of Congress. The fire destroyed 35,000 books, an original portrait of Christopher Columbus, portraits of the first five US Presidents by Gilbert Stuart, and statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette.
Main Library of Congress Building at the start of the 20th century.The Library is now spread over three buildings in Washington, D.C.:
The Thomas Jefferson Building (between Independence Avenue and East Capitol Street on First Street SE), opened in 1897, and long the main building of the Library;
The John Adams Building (between Independence Avenue and East Capitol Street on 2nd Street SE), opened as an annex in 1938; and
The James Madison Memorial Building (between First and Second Streets on Independence Avenue SE), opened in 1981 as the new headquarters of the Library.
(Note: Between April 13, 1976 and June 13, 1980, the John Adams Building was known as the Thomas Jefferson Building.)
In late-November 2005, the Library announced intentions to launch the World Digital Library, digitally preserving books and other objects from all world cultures.

As the research arm of the United States Congress it is part of the United States Capitol Complex located in Washington, D.C.
With about 530 miles (850 km) of shelves it is one of the largest libraries in the world. It contains more than 130 million items, second only to the British Library (with over 150 million items). Its collections include:
more than 28 million cataloged books and other print materials in 470 languages;
more than 50 million manuscripts;
the largest rare book collection in North America, including a Gutenberg Bible; and
the world's largest collection of legal materials, films, maps, sheet music and sound recordings.

American Library Association

2006-01-14T19:35:00.000-08:00

The American Library Association (ALA) promotes libraries and library education in the United States and internationally. It has approximately 66,000 members. It was founded in 1876 in Philadelphia and chartered in 1879 in Massachusetts, making it the oldest and largest library association in the world. Its head office is in Chicago. Since 2002, the Executive Director (CEO) of the American Library Association has been Keith Michael Fiels. He is responsible for the day-to-day management of the Association and its staff.
Its mission is "to provide leadership for the development, promotion, and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all." It is open to any person or organization willing to pay dues, though most of its members are libraries or librarians. Most members live and work in the United States; international members comprise 3.5% of total membership.
The ALA is governed by an elected council and an executive board. Policies and programs are administered by various committees and roundtables. One of the organization's most visible tasks is overseen by the Office for Accreditation, which formally reviews and authorizes American academic institutions that offer degree programs in library and information science.
Members may choose to join one or more of 11 membership divisions which deal with specialized topics such as academic, school, or public libraries, technical or reference services, and library administration. Members may also choose to join any of 17 roundtables, that are grouped around more specific interests and issues than the broader set of ALA divisions.
The ALA is affiliated with regional, state, and student chapters across the country. It also organizes conferences, participates in library standards development, and publishes a number of books and periodicals. The ALA annually confers numerous notable book and media awards, including the Caldecott Medal, the Newbery Medal, and the Stonewall Book Award.