Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Calling all Catalogers

via Open Sesame by Nicole C. Engard on 1/21/09

Fellow catalogers,

I have been spending a lot of time these last few months working on getting a new web-based cataloging tool ready for you all. It's finally time! I'd like to invite you to sign up for free and try out ‡biblios.net a community cataloging tool from LibLime.

So, what the heck is it? ‡biblios.net is a web-based original and copy cataloging tool with built in federated search of any Z39.50 target (via an integrated search registry with over 2000 targets - or by adding your own) and a large (30 million strong) shared database of catalog records. This means that you can visit ‡biblios.net and benefit from the work of other catalogers who have gone before you. You can also edit and contribute to the database without any restrictions.

I have also worked on creating some macros (others can be written by users) to help streamline some of our cataloging processes and templates for common item types to make original cataloging a little bit easier :)

I'm looking for both novice and professional catalogers to give me their opinions of the tools, services and overall user friendliness of ‡biblios.net. I am of course also looking for people to join the community so that this tool and grow and help us all with our cataloging work.

I have worked very closely with the development crew on this new tool and believe very strongly both in it and the ideas behind it. The fact that we all work so very hard on our cataloging makes the fact that the records in ‡biblios.net are freely-licensed under the Open Data Commons all that more appealing.

If you want to learn more you can read through the documentation on the site and/or take a peek at this great write up by Jonathan Rochkind.

Thank you so much! I can't wait to hear what you all think!!