In 2000, Eastern Washington University became part of the Cascade Consortium and participated in consortial borrowing through the Cascade Union Catalog. In 2003, the Orbis and Cascade consortia merged into the Orbis Cascade Alliance, which manages the Summit Union Catalog. Since 2000, Cascade or Summit consortial borrowing has increased while…

This article explores ontological principles and their potential applications in the formal description of archival photographs. Current archival descriptive practices are reviewed and the larger question is addressed: do archivists who are engaged in describing photographs need a more formalized system of representation, or do existing encoding…

The article presents a usage-based analysis of color attribution, i.e. the construal of the relation between color property and an entity to which it is attributed in painting descriptions. The study is based on the corpus of 100 catalog entries written for American art museums. It focuses on the two most frequent morpho-syntactic patterns in the…

It's well known that technology is changing at an increasingly rapid pace and that many public libraries throughout the United States are attempting to adopt new technologies to better reach their patrons. In trade journals, blogs, and at library conferences, professionals in the field have continually discussed the best methods for using web…

This article examines the evolution of a national register of the archives of science and technology in Australia and the related development of an archival informatics focused initially on people and their relationships to archival materials. The register was created in 1985 as an in-house tool for the Australian Science Archives Project of the…

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Library, where the author serves as the digital services librarian, is increasingly challenged to make it easier for users to find information from many heterogeneous information sources. Information is scattered throughout different software applications (i.e., library catalog, federated search engine, link…

One of the most exciting developments to occur within the library profession in recent years has been the re-evaluation of library's role in resource discovery in the web environment. This has involved recognition of short-comings of online library catalogues, a re-affirmation of the importance of metadata and a new focus on the wealth of…

To mark its founding in 1558 by Albrecht V., Duke of Bavaria, the Bavarian State Library (BSB) has issued a splendid catalogue (358 pages) with many sumptuous full-page coloured plates, taken from 113 works which were in the Library during its formative period 1558-1599). These works include manuscripts, church and secular music and early printed…

The world of readers' advisory (RA) is embracing many of the tools that collectively are referred to as Library 2.0. RA has long shared many of the beliefs supported by Library 2.0--well before there even was such a thing--including conversations with readers, valuing and empowering the experience of the reader, and near constant reevaluation of…

This article describes the opportunities out of the 2007 turmoil precipitated by the dramatic shifts that redefined the industry in 2006. The turmoil made companies that avoided major business transitions more attractive and sparked explosive interest in open source alternatives. Some companies held a steady course and benefited from the fallout.…

An online questionnaire survey was distributed amongst the Petherick Readers of the National Library of Australia, a user group of scholars and researchers. The survey asked questions about the readers' use and appreciation of the NLA catalogue. This group of users clearly appreciated the library catalogue and demonstrated that there are still…

To bring the library catalog and other online resources right into users' workspace quickly and easily without needing much more than a short XML file, the author, a reference and Web services librarian at Williams College, learned to build and use OpenSearch plug-ins. OpenSearch is a set of simple technologies and standards that allows the…

The Knowledge Bank is The Ohio State University's institutional repository, which houses various works by students, faculty, and staff. One of the text collections in the Knowledge Bank is electronic honors theses. Training students to submit their theses was initially given in the form of in-person workshops. Turnout for these workshops was…

A questionnaire survey conducted at the State Library of Victoria indicates that users in general, and not just scholars, value the standard elements of bibliographic data found in the Library's catalogues, and consider all these elements useful for finding, identifying and selecting items. Rather than making do with less, users wanted more…

The dictionary catalog is described as a logical answer to the inadequacies of the divided catalogs ofthe nineteenth century. The claims in behalf of a return to the divided catalog are challenged. (Author/NH)