I read with interest the (draft) Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control, and there are a couple of things that struck a cord with MyLibrary.
First, on page 7 (page 11 of the PDF document) the report discusses the definition of bibliographic control:
…Bibliographic control is increasingly a matter of managing relationships—among works, names, concepts, and […]
We sometimes wonder whether or not the facet/term combinations should be infinitely deep.
As of right now the facet/term combinations are simple two-dimensional hierarchies. Examples include:
Audience/Freshman
Audience/Sophomore
Audience/Junior
Tools/Dictionaries
Tools/Catalogs
Tools/Indexes
Formats/Books
Formats/Journals
Formats/Movies
These two-dimensional hierarchies work, most of the time, but what do you do when it comes to subjects? This works just fine, as far as it goes:
Subjects/Astronomy
Subjects/Mathematics
Subjects/Literature
Subjects/Music
To make a subjects hierarchy […]
Here is a simple command-line program to create a term. It works much like the facets example: 1) prompt for a name, 2) prompt for a note, 3) display the facets, 4) prompt for a facet ID, and 5) commit.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# require mylibrary & practice good programming
use MyLibrary::Core;
use strict;
# scope our variables
my ( $name, $note, $id, […]
Here is a tiny program that can be used to edit facets. To use it you will first need a facet ID number, but you can get that from the script in the previous posting.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# require mylibrary & practice good programming
use MyLibrary::Core;
use strict;
# scope our variables
my ( $id, $facet, $name, $note, $results );
# get user […]
This little program simply lists all the facets in your MyLibrary instance. It does this through the use of the get_facets method:
#!/usr/bin/perl
# require mylibrary & practice good programming
use MyLibrary::Core;
use strict;
# loop through all the facets
foreach my $facet ( MyLibrary::Facet->get_facets ) {
# display this facet’s characteristics
print ‘ ID: ‘ […]
This posting simply includes a short command-line program used to create facets. It is intended to allow the programmer to get their feet wet when it comes to using the MyLibrary Perl API. Assuming you already have a MyLibrary instance installed, just copy & paste the code into your favorite text editor and run it. […]
Think of MyLibrary as if it were a three-layered chocolate cake. One layer is librarians — the people who do the work. The second layer is information resources — the traditional content of libraries. The third layer is patrons — the people who use the information resources. The stuff holding the cake together and makes […]