BCC00/Auth/3

Authorities Subcommittee MLA-Louisville Report (Feb. 2000)

Open meeting, MLA Annual Meeting
Friday, Feb. 25, 2000, Louisville, Kentucky

Nearly 100 persons attended the open meeting of the Subcommittee - nearly twice the number that attended the Los Angeles meeting, and remarkable for a session that was the last of the Friday BCC subcommittee sessions. After welcoming the audience and reviewing the subcommittee's charge, chair Mark Scharff gave a brief report on the LITA/ALCTS Authority Control in the Online Environment Interest Group reporting session at ALA Midwinter, which was principally an update from the Library of Congress on the ILS and its authority-related implications. The chair of ACIG is Rebecca Dean (OCLC), an Authorities Subcommittee member. Scharff also recognized outgoing Subcommittee members Suzanne Mudge (Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University) and Michelle Koth (Yale University), expressing gratitude for their contributions to the group's activities. He mentioned that Mickey would continue to work with the Subcommittee on maintenance of the Types of Composition document. Mickey then reported on the past year's maintenance activities for the document. The Authorities Subcommittee has been working hard on resolving issues with new and existing terms for the document, including work in the business meeting, and the list itself was updated in February of this year. The URL for the document is:
http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/types.htm . From this page, there is a link to a list of the additions and changes made to the Types document:  http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/typesadd.htm .  Mickey invited those with questions, comments, or new terms for consideration to contact her at michelle.koth@yale.edu , or by US mail (Yale Music Library, 120 High Street PO Box 208240, New Haven, CT 06520-8240).

Rebecca Dean then made a presentation that tied into the "metadata" theme of the BCC for the Louisville meeting. "Authority Metadata and the Information Highway: Cloverleaf, Access Road, or Cul-de-Sac??" first reviewed some of the field relationships between the Dublin Core metadata model and MARC and noted some of the compatibility issues (no main entry, no uniform titles as added or subject entries, no 240 uniform title; the difference in the concept of "series"). She then looked at a feature of the OCLC CORC project - that of linked authorities, where records contain pointers to authority records that provide the access points, and noted challenges, particularly that of dealing with validating subdivisions. Rebecca noted several authority metadata models in the wings, including the access control record, "V-cards", and the Agents portion of the Dublin Core. She now focused on one research project, taking its impetus from activities of the ALA ALCTS Subject Access Committee related to developing a subject heading scheme for metadata, though not a replacement for Library of Congress Subject Headings. With an eye to the functional requirements laid out by ALCTS/SAC (simplicity, intuitiveness, scalability, logic, and applicability to specific disciplines and subject domains), the FAST (Faceted-Application of Subject Terminology) aims to help fill the bill. Derived from LCSH, FAST proposes use of a post-coordinated faceted vocabulary intended to allow a broad range of users to assign subject terminology. FAST software will "deconstruct" LCSH headings while retaining the LCSH string, and will allow input of FAST headings (but with no attempt to construct an LCSH equivalent). Work has begin with topical, geographic, chronological, and form/genre headings and subdivisions, with subject names and titles to follow later. Rebecca mentioned some of the challenges that music headings will present, particularly those with parenthetical qualifiers for medium statement, and the issue of analytical subject access (how can deconstructed elements be "reconstructed" when needed to prevent false drops?). She concluded by explaining that the title of her talk envisioned MARC as a cul-de-sac (it's hard to get out of the library "neighborhood" with it), the access control record concept as the entrance to the on-ramp, Dublin Core as the cloverleaf, and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the superhighway. The ensuing discussion was a lively interchange.

Submitted by Mark Scharff, Chair

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Last updated April 18, 2000