BCC00/Auth/2
REPORT OF THE ACIG 2000 MIDWINTER MEETING
LITA/ALCTS Authority Control in the Online Environment
Interest Group
Reporting Session/Business meeting, ALA Midwinter Meeting
San Antonio, Jan. 16, 2000
The substance of the session was a pair of reports from the Library of Congress. Ann Della Porta of the Cataloging and Policy Support Office (CPSO) began by reporting on some of the recent changes in MARC 21 carrying authorities implications. She outlined LC’s implementation of the change to the 1st indicator value in personal name headings that eliminates the use of value “2” for multiple surnames. LC began implementing the change on Jan. 1. She stressed that LC would not be attempting to synchronize values between headings in the bibliographic and authority files, and that talks were underway with OCLC to perform a global change in authority records, which could happen by the summer. Ann reviewed progress in implementing changes in form-genre headings and subdivisions, including the Feb. 1999 implementation of subfield “v”, the ongoing creation of 18X authority records for subdivisions, and plans to use 781 fields in geographic authority records to document the subdivision form of the entity’s name when it differs from that of the heading. No systematic update of subfield “x” to “v” delimiters is planned; corrections are made on an “as-encountered” basis. LC has begun a test project to assign subject headings to works of fiction. Finally, Ann gave a detailed accounting of the plans for conversion of headings for Chinese names and titles in bibliographic and authority records from Wade-Giles to pinyin romanization, which aims for an Oct. 1, 2000 “Day One” for use of pinyin in bibliographic and name-authority records.
Barbara Tillett, ILS Program Director, spoke about the implementation of a new integrated library system (ILS) at LC, giving a history of the process, noting the positive and negative implications of their current status, and outlining expected improvements for the future. Among these are the ability for other libraries to see and capture authority records; keyword searching of authority and holdings records; validation of free-floating subdivisions in subject headings; global change capacity for MARC data elements; and “cross-field” validation of data. LC is taking this opportunity to consider re-engineering its processes, specifically through a program called Business Process Improvement.
The session concluded with a period of questions and comments. Of most interest to music catalogers from this portion was the announcement that form/genre authority records (155 field) would be produced before the end of the year, starting with headings for cartographic materials, but with music expected to follow as soon as possible.
The business session concentrated on discussing possible ideas for the Annual program session. Some libraries have already been using locally-created 155 authority records in their systems, and this could be reported on. Other ideas included authorities implications of OCLC’s CORC project.
Submitted by Mark Scharff
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Last updated April 17, 2000