BCC00/Auth/4
LITA/ALCTS Authority Control in the Online Environment
Interest Group
Managed Discussion and Business Meeting, ALA Annual Meeting
Chicago, Ill., July 5, 2000
This year's ACIG session was titled "Indexing and Authority Control
of Genre and MESH Headings". After a welcome and introduction by chair Rebecca Dean,
four speakers recounted how their libraries had begun to devise local solutions to the
challenges to be posed by the definition of form-genre subdivisions, already underway, and
the migration of Library of Congress Subject Headings for forms and genres (e.g. Sonatas
(Piano); Christmas music) from MARC tag 650 to 655, a long-anticipated development that
may begin later this year with the creation of authority records for those headings. These
libraries represent various stages of "head-start" actions in advance of the
Library of Congress's switch. David Miller, of Curry College, described the process of
current and retrospective conversion of existing headings and authority records in a
relatively small catalog. Some of the issues involved: adjusting some headings with
subdivisions to eliminate redundancy (e.g. "Specimens" as a subdivision was
deleted), copying and editing authority records from the subject file to the form/genre
file (the III software used by Curry maintains separate authority files for names,
subjects, and other indexes as defined by the library); adjusting references, public
notes, and other coding in those records; deciding the extent of retrospective activity.
Adam Schiff (University of Washington) has carried out a similar project, albeit as an
experiment rather than a standard procedure; there is no OPAC option for form/genre
searching at present. He outlined some of the challenges to be overcome before going
public, including reconciliation of conflicting usages among thesauri and developing
policies for ongoing and retrospective work. Robert Maxwell (Brigham Young) concentrated
on the issue of having terms from multiple thesauri in the same index, pointing out the
challenge involved in identifying the source in MARC subfield 2. One notable feature of
Brigham Young's project was the existence of a reference in the subject index to the
established heading in the form/genre index. Finally, Gary Strawn (Northwestern
University) spoke about the loading of MeSH headings and the problems they cause because
of conflicts with LCSH.
Ann Della Porta (Library of Congress) reported on LC activities of interest. One was the
decision to change "Afro-American" to "African-American" in headings
and subdivisions; authority records will reflect the new form starting in the fall, and
bibliographic cleanup will begin in the winter. Another was the decision to move ahead
with assigning subject headings to works of fiction by American authors and other
English-language writers; guidelines will appear soon in the Subject Cataloging Manual.
She reported that the project to create authority records for subject subdivisions was
about 70% complete, and that OCLC has corrected the indicators for headings with multiple
surnames for about 50% of the names file. She spoke at length about the national
cooperative project to convert bibliographic and authority records for Chinese-language
material from Wade-Giles to pinyin, which is underway. Ann reiterated that external
users of the LC catalog will be able to view and export MARC authority records by the end
of the year.
The session concluded with a brief business meeting, featuring the passing of chairmanship
from Rebecca Dean to Stephen Hearn (University of Minnesota). Among the other positions
changing hands was that of Ad Hoc Chair for Uniform Titles, with Mark Scharff elected to
succeed Karen Little, keeping this post in MLA hands. Some ideas for a 2001 program were
considered.
Submitted by Mark Scharff
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Last updated August 18, 2000