As usual, the Corporate Librarian is late to the party on this, but lately he’s been thinking about microformats. In plain English, microformats are a means of structuring data in a machine-readable open standard format using an extension to HTML called XHTML. The goal is to allow things like event listings, resumes and reviews to be parsed so that interesting applications can be built around them, like Emurse.com or Technorati’s Events Feed Service.
You can read all about microformats here, but the Corporate Librarian is interested in their application to libraries. Daniel Chudnov has been working with others on a bibliographic citation microformat, which could be the building-block of an open standards-based cataloging software. Check out a rudimentary example here. I believe (correct me if I’m wrong on this and I’ll edit the post accordingly) that Superpatron Ed Vielmetti kicked things off here.
Imagine a world where IT worked with librarians to develop microformat-based catalogs (or adopt existing ones), librarians notified patrons of training events which they could subscribe to using the hCalendar microformat, helped build expert networks using XFN and came up with microformats the Corporate Librarian hasn’t even thought of yet!
If you know HTML, you can pick up microformats easily enough - it’s not the same as being a hardcore coder. I really think this is an easy way librarians can:
- Build closer relationships with IT (whom I’d think would go nuts over the opportunity to work on something like this)
- Provide innovative services to patrons
- Raise awareness of librarians within their organizations
November 19, 2006 at 12:12 am
Microformat-based libraries help users to search and retrieve information effectively and sppedily.
November 19, 2006 at 12:16 am
yes
November 19, 2006 at 12:20 am
dds
July 27, 2007 at 5:31 am
I just raised the discussion in Germany: Microformats are gaining success (for instance there will be support in Firefox 3.0) but there is still no microformat for bibliographic data. However people are working on it and if librarians don’t help, then the outcome will be something quite incompatible with library metadata formats (MARC, MODS, MAB etc.). Librarians should collaborate to get the default title view in todays OPACs (based on ISBD) enriched with markup: Just have a look on how title presentation is done in your OPAC software, identify distinct fields and semantic atoms, discuss it on the microformats wiki and implement it in your OPAC. If the library world keeps passive in this issue then Semantic Web and microformat community will reinvent the wheel and make libraries look stupid. This is fundamental work of library science but LIS does not notice. However it is no issue for long meetings of IFLA, ALA etc. but librarians just need to get in contact with microformats community and implement something instead of sitting and talking inside their own closed world.