gmcharlt
Joined 6 years ago
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Member since
Jan 14
Library hacker
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Comment · 1 year ago
Derek Lowe of "Things I Won't Work With" weighs in: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/hexanitrogen
Comment · 2 years ago
Alternate link since the USPTO site is rate-limiting at the moment: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20110101009A1/en
Comment · 2 years ago
The Internet Archive has a copy: https://archive.org/details/omni-archive/.
Comment · 2 years ago
That inertia is indeed huge. For example, if your library uses RFID but also shares a catalog and their books with other libraries, they'll still need barcode labels (with the same number that's encoded on the tag) so that the other libraries can deal with the items. Barcode scanners are ubiquitous in libraries; RFID readers, not so much.
Also, one of the promises of RFID for libraries has not panned out very cleanly. When a library does an inventory, not only do they want to verify the existence of the books, but that they are _in order_ on the shelf. RFID vendors for libraries promised that you could do this "shelfreading" accurately just by passing the wand across each shelf, but for various reasons the results are imperfect enough that it's not a clear winner over doing it with a barcode scanner. Given the fact that RFID tags have historically been far more expensive than barcode labels, the economics don't pencil out for many libraries to switch to RFID.
Comment · 3 years ago
Fun fact: the MARC format, used for bibliographic metadata by the majority of libraries that have digital catalogs, included supporting the printing of catalog cards as one of its use cases [1]. To this day a properly maintained library catalog based on MARC could, with some effort, be used to generate an equivalent set of printed catalog cards.
However, printed catalog cards as a backup to the digital catalog have practical problems. For one thing, they are heavy. A full card catalog of a large public library could easily weigh tons [2] and take up space that would be better used for other functions. For another thing, the expense would detract from other library services, and many libraries already suffer from budgetary challenges.
A proper backup strategy is the way with the risk of losing the digital catalog. Besides, libraries have more fundamental problems to deal with regarding the permanence of electronic resources. For example, the fact that libraries largely do not and cannot _own_ the ebooks they circulate causes numerous problems.
[1] https://www.allpurposeguru.com/2021/03/henriette-avram-and-t... [2] https://blogs.loc.gov/preservation/2022/10/moving-card-catal...
Comment · 3 years ago
Dunno about Oklahoma, but Kennesaw, Georgia, does have a gun ownership requirement, passed in 1982 in response to Morton Grove, Illinois, banning handguns. Kennesaw's neighbor, Acworth, is the one with the rake ownership requirement -- passed in response to Kenneswaw's gun law -- though it is not immediately clear to me whether that ordinance is still in effect.
Comment · 3 years ago
Near as I can tell, the best that's available is starting with the class(es) you want (e.g., https://id.loc.gov/authorities/classification/H.html for social sciences) and crawling recursively to grab whatever serialization of the RDF you want to consume. There's no SPARQL endpoint for id.loc.gov, alas, but it beats resorting to the PDFs.
Comment · 3 years ago
https://id.loc.gov/download/ offers bulk downloads of many of the vocabularies, including the subject headings. In addition, individual records of various types can be search for.
Comment · 3 years ago
Depending on what you're looking for, a _lot_ more is being published by the Library of Congress as Linked Data nowadays, including LoC classification and subject headings. Check out https://id.loc.gov/.