The Mid-York Library System a nonprofit cooperative library system in New York serving 43 public libraries in Herkimer, Madison, and Oneida Counties each year successfully coordinates a Regional Read. This year’s choice is The Wold is Flat by Thomas Friedman, addressing an issue that should be important to us all, globalization.
They have set up a wonderful website: http://www.midyork.org/regionalread/welcome.htm
Here you can check out their regional read ,connect with some of the great links they have provided as well as get involved in the conversation. Comment to their blog on the eight individual topic blogs. These include: MY Environment, MY Connections, MY Business, MY Health, MY Rights, MY Education, MY Culture and MY Politics.
http://rr2007myglobalization.blogspot.com/

Berkshire publications recommended for academic, school, and public libraries quietly launched some FREE full-text searchable versions of a number of their recent bestselling titles last week. These editions are available through an innovative European company, Exact Editions, and they are offering them completely free for a limited trial period, no login required. A quote from the company said, “This is a new step for a book publisher and we are doing it to show our library customers the richness of Berkshire’s small, high-quality list of reference publications on global topics.”
Here’s where to go: http://www.exacteditions.com/berkshirepublishing.

Did you know statistics on your Local Holdings Maintenance activities are available through the OCLC Usage Statistics web site? Local Holdings Maintenance statistics offer a detailed electronic report of your monthly maintenance of OCLC Local Holdings information. You access the statistics at http://www.stats.oclc.org/
OCLC Usage Statistics for Local Holdings maintenance provides reports which include information about online edits to local holdings records as well as number of records added and deleted.
Two reports are available:
Local Holdings Maintenance Summary Report
and
Local Holdings Maintenance Detail Report
The “summary report” provides the total number of Local Holdings records added, updated and deleted in the period chosen. The “detail report” provides record by record information including OCLC record number, action taken (add, update, or delete) and the date.
Agents: Did you know this site provides information for you to monitor your work done on behalf of your client institutions? Your agent summary reports provide an institution by institution view giving the name of the institution and total number of records added, updated and deleted in the time frame selected. The detail report for agents breaks this information down to the record level giving name of the institution, OCLC symbol, OCLC record number, action taken (add, update, or delete) and the date.
For more information, contact Mary Edgerton (edgertonm@nylink.org) at Nylink.

The plethora of less than full level preliminary records is causing quite a stir on lots of discussion lists, especially on AUTOCAT recently. I’ll be posting a long message from Glenn Patton here soon, but for now, I’d like to remind you that whenever you run across an Encoding Level 3 record in WorldCat, and you have the item in hand, it is an opportunity for you to upgrade the record using “Lock and Replace”. If you don’t remember how to do this, try searching Client or Browser help under the topic “Lock Master Records” and then selecting the subtopic for bibliographic records. Or check out the documentation for Browser, at: http://www.oclc.org/support/documentation/connexion/browser/cataloging/actions_bib_records/#rc-rec-submit

or for Client, at: http://www.oclc.org/support/documentation/connexion/client/cataloging/bibactions/#cat_act_replace_masterbibrec_htm
You can also report duplicates, even for monographs, and if you don’t remember how to report errors (and you can do it by e-mail, fax, in Connnexion…so there is no excuse!) see chapter 5 of Bibliographic Formats & Standards, at: http://www.oclc.org/bibformats/en/quality/#CIAIEEJD

This is your opportunity to be a hero and improve WorldCat not just for your own use, but for everyone!

The Smithsonian Institute hosts Museum Day on Saturday, September 29. Admission for Smithsonian readers or Smithsonian.com visitors to participating museums is free all day. Admission is limited to you and one guest. This is a nationwide program. Area museums participating in the project include the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, The George Eastman House, The Frick Collection and The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. When you visit the site below you can fill out a form and an e-admission ticket is generated for you.
For more information and regional list of museums involved please go to: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/museumday/

Do you know about SERU? If you’ve ever been frustrated by the process of negotiating a license for electronic resources, you are not alone. Publishers and librarians recognize the need for an alternative model to “customer-by-customer, bi-laterally negotiated formal legal contracts,” especially for small sets of resources on the “long tail,” and are collaborating on one with the Shared E-Resource Understanding initiative. There is a draft posted on the NISO website, and the program is in its first trial phase. Publishers who are willing to accept SERU, and libraries who are interested in using it, should register. BioOne and Duke University Press are two of the publishers currently registered, and the University of Buffalo libraries represent New York on the list. To find out more about SERU:
Download a brief summary: the SERU postcard
Find out more about this project: http://www.niso.org/committees/SERU/

Yahoo! MapMixer is an interesting new (as of August) web service that allows you to upload your own maps and superimpose them over Yahoo!Maps. It’s still in Beta, or development, but you can use it. (The screenshot above is of the Golden Gate National Recreation area – a satellite image superimposed with a map of the park, you can control the opacity of the superimposed map.)

Think of the possibilities! One thing that I’m always looking for on web-based maps like Yahoo!, MapQuest and Google are hiking trails, local interest sites, locations inside parks, etc. Now, instead of looking a big green shape for a park (with, if you’re lucky, waterways and a main road or two) you could see the hiking trails, pavilions, zoos, cultural spots, etc.

Imagine all of the map possibilities which reside in the collections of libraries throughout New York State!

Visit the site and see how straightforward the uploading process is or search for New York State tagged uploaded maps (NY is underrepresented at this time).

http://maps.yahoo.com/mapmixer