Eighty-seven librarians joined us for the Dewey Breakfast/Update at ALA. Libbie Crawford kicked things off with an update on Dewey products plus a discussion on how we plan to produce an “abridged view” within WebDewey. Abridged edition users in the audience gave us a thumbs up on the approach—they particularly liked the proposals to show segmentation in Dewey numbers associated with Relative Index entries and to make links to static PDFs from the print version of Abridged Edition 15 available. Michael Panzer continued the WebDewey theme in his first presentation by giving an update on the user contribution / number building assistance feature currently under development and set to be installed in WebDewey within the next three months.
Diane Vizine-Goetz (OCLC Research) gave an update on two of her research projects: Classify (now a service that can be launched from the Connexion command menu) and Kindred Works (the demo version will be out later this month).
Juli Beall presented our latest proposals for the treatment of Islamic law in 340 Law. EPC recently approved distribution of a discussion paper on the proposed extensions—watch this space for an announcement when the paper is posted for comment.
I discussed the history, implementation, and next steps associated with the virtual chronological/regional browser of the Bible and specific religions (the browser is now available on the Dewey web site here, and includes links to Dewey-classified resources in WorldCat.org). We’ve been talking about this alternate view of religion for a long time (see a 2006 post here, and a more recent one here). We encourage users to try out the browser and give us feedback.
Michael closed the program with a quick talk on DDC 23 as linked data, including the relationship between Dewey linked data and the schema.org descriptive mark-up version of WorldCat as linked data (see Roy Tennant’s excellent overview on OCLC’s linked data announcements last week, plus Michael’s and my recent blog posts on Dewey linked data). Once again, we are very interested in use cases for Dewey linked data—let us know about your experiments and ideas!
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