'Famous people': what to do about personal names?

You may all be aware that personal names have been entered somewhat inconsistently on MICHAEL, as demonstrated by the drop-down menu at http://www.michael-culture.org.uk/mpf/pub-uk/people.html?from1=browsePeople.

The MLA would like to encourage all users to adhere to the following format: Surname, Firstname (dates), for example:

Booth, Charles (1840-1916)

Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)

At a meeting in June, one MICHAEL cataloguer suggested we should further decide between the AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules) or NCA (National Council on Archives) rules for personal names, for example:

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (NCA)
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith) (AACR2)

Puddicombe, Anne Adaliza (NCA)
Beynon Puddicombe, Anne (Anne Adaliza) (AACR2)

(examples taken from http://www.archivesnetworkwales.info/pdfs/Using%20ANW%204.ppt, slides 9 & 13)

Until such decision is reached however, and feel free to share your views on this, it would still greatly increase the quality of the content on the MICHAEL website if the Surname, Firstname (dates) format could be followed.

You may also find the Library of Congress Authorities website http://authorities.loc.gov/ of some use.

Jewish Heritage

I met Lena from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and the European Association of Jewish Culture, and Dov, who is involved in many things including eJewish.info. We were talking about how the MICHAEL project could be used to create a register of Jewish cultural websites and collections, drawn from each of the national projects - as a 'view' of the European service - see this live link into the database. Dov has the Israeli version of the MICHAEL platform up and running, and is busy translating the interface and terminologies into Hebrew, and is also thiking about Russian.

They are thinking about the next steps, which could include a meeting in the Autumn to look at issues such as languages to be used, and targetting some UK collections to show what could be done.

RSS Feed

I have also experiemented with an RSS feed from the European Service on my blog. Again this works well - it should display the latest records that match the search criteria. I have used "film" - but I imagine you could use a region - but haven't tried this yet. Perhaps later ...

A MICHAEL search box on your blog!

I have just used the code generator (see the Tools for Developer link) to put a MICHAEL search box onto my blog. It is easy! Just choose a region (I haven't yet got it to search the whole dataset - but I am sure I will work that out) and generate the code. Copy the HTML code.

Then go to you Blogger account and click on Customise. Add a new page element - and then choose HTML / Javascript 3rd Party code. Just paste the text into the box, give it a title, and click 'save'. Then it works.

You can, of course, do this on any site, bt I hadn't though of putting it on a Blog!

European Digital Library - a call to action for museums

An interesting workshop held today at the EVA Conference. Jill Cousins started off by talking about EDL, and then I followed by talking (amongst other things) about the role of MICHAEL as a service registry. Though the audience was small, there was plenty of discussion, which gave some useful pointers. Nobody wanted a Eu Digital Museum (rather a relief) but there was a lot of support for mediating and interpreting content, rather than just putting more stuff on the web. An interesting afternoon, and, I think, quite helpful to some of our stakeholders.

Welcome to the MICHAEL blog!

Welcome to the MICHAEL blog for the UK user community!

There's been some demand from the community for a place where cataloguers, supervisors and others interested in MICHAEL can share experiences, raise questions, report difficulties or problems with the MICHAEL production module or MICHAEL-UK website.

The MICHAEL team at MLA thus decided to set up an informal blog to try meet this demand. We hope this will be useful to the community. Feel free to share your views on this initiative directly on the blog or by emailing Kate Fernie - kate.fernie@mla.gov.uk.

For posting comments in response to posts, you will have to create your own Google Account, a pretty easy procedure if you haven't already got one. As for writing your own posts, and this of course we encourage you to do, we will have to change your permissions. You should soon receive an invitation to join as blog author..

Finally, please notice the links to the MICHAEL user manual at the top of this page.