BCC00/SDC/3

REPORT OF THE CC:DA 2000 ANNUAL MEETING

The following are highlights of the meetings of the Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, July 8 and 10, 2000.  Please note that many of the proposals and reports mentioned in this summary may be found on the CC:DA website at www.ala.org/alcts/organization/ccs/ccda/ccda.html.

Report from the Chair:

D. Kinney announced that CC:DA will be sponsoring a program on map cataloging at the June 2001 ALA conference in San Francisco.  A program planning committee will be appointed.  Following upon an announcement that there is a new NISO standard for Dublin Core elements, a Task Force was charged with its review.  And it was announced that A. Schiff (University of Washington) will succeed Kinney as Chair following the annual meeting.

Report on Revising AACR2 to Accommodate Seriality:

J. Hirons reported that the international cataloging community continues to discuss the implications of her April 1999 paper.  Still under consideration are the change from earliest to latest entry for serials and the use of multiple publisher statements.  She has now submitted a set of Chapter 12 rule revision proposals to the JSC, an action which was part of their original charge to her.  A CC:DA Task Force, which will be reconstituted from the former Seriality Task Force, was charged to review the proposals.

Report of the ALA Representative to the Joint Steering Committee:

B. Schottlaender reported that MLA's 1990 proposal to revise the use of the term "work" in Chapter 25 for music uniform titles has finally been approved with amendments.

Discussions continue in regard to the "harmonization" of Chapter 9 with the ISBD(ER).  Questions remain about the impact of the proposed short- and long-term solutions and about the relationship between the "harmonization" process and an all-out revision of the rules.  Another Task Force was charged with exploring the definition of "publication" as it relates to electronic resources.  A. Schiff proposed several revisions to Chapter 1 which would bring it into alignment with those revisions to Chapter 9 which have been approved so far.

There was quite a bit of discussion about a package of rule revision proposals from the British Library about the inclusion of titles of nobility and British terms of honour in name headings.  The Committee felt that the revisions were Anglo-centric and would be difficult for non-British catalogers to apply.

A proposal was submitted by the Library of Congress to abbreviate both words and "non-standard" abbreviations according to Appendix B.  This would standardize abbreviations in series statements, such as "vol." and "numb." to "v." and "no.", respectively.  However, it was noticed that such a rule change would also require the abbreviations in publication statements, such as "CA" and "NY", to be transcribed in a lengthier manner, as "Calif." and "N.Y."  This was felt to be undesirable.

Concern was expressed about the appearance of the most recent rule revisions in Cataloger's Desktop before being made available in print, potentially causing implementation of the revisions to be out of sync.  D. Chatham from ALA Publishing reported that the most recent update is available in PDF format from the ALA website (www.ala.org/editions/updates/aacr2/).

Report of the Library of Congress Representative:

B. Tillett pointed out a few highlights of her written report, including information about the celebration of LC's bicentennial, implementation of their new ILS, discontinuation of "in-process" record distribution, changes to the MARC language code list, progress on revision and digitization of the classification schedules, and an update on pinyin romanization.

Report on the Metadata Preconference:

M. Larsgaard reported that the two-day preconference on metadata (July 6-7) had been a great success, with 29 faculty members and approximately 420 attendees.  The preconference papers will be edited by Wayne Jones and published as part of the ALCTS papers series in the Spring of 2001.

Report from the Task Force on ISBD(M):

L. Jizba summarized the Task Force's final report, which was approved for submission to the IFLA Review Group.  M. Wise reported that MLA had also reviewed the proposed changes to the ISBD(M) and that they had additional concerns about making other title information and subsequent statements of responsibility optional.  Several Committee members agreed; and so the "concerns" were appended to the Task Force's report.

Rule revision proposal on use of full stops with metric unit symbols:

J. Hostage presented a revision proposal to correct AACR2's inaccurate treatment of metric unit symbols.  Being symbols, rather than abbreviations, units such as "cm" and "mm" do not conclude with full stops.  Noting that the code was out of alignment with international standard punctuation in other ways, the Committee charged a Task Force to examine the situation and to evaluate the impact of undertaking a large-scale revision.

Report from the Task Force on an Appendix of Major/Minor Changes:

K. Lindlan guided the Committee through the Task Force's initial report.  There was general agreement about the specific conclusions which were presented, as to when a difference in bibliographic information would be considered merely a minor change and when it was a change substantial enough to require a new record.  However, there were serious concerns about the format and clarity of the appendix.  The wording in some areas led many to misunderstand how the appendix would be applied.  The Task Force will draft another version.

Report on Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, and Early-Modern Manuscripts (AMREMM):

R. Maxwell, Chair of the RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee, announced that draft guidelines for the cataloging of early manuscripts have been prepared by G.A. Pass, in collaboration with the BSC, and are now available for review at ftp://165.134.156.3/vatican/.  A Task Force was charged with such a review.

Joint MARBI-CC:DA Meeting:

B.C. Johnson and D. Kinney co-chaired this annual event at which D.R. Miller (Stanford University) gave a presentation comparing the MARC and XML formats.  P. Weiss (MARBI) and M. Beacom (CC:DA) formally responded to the presentation, and then the floor was opened to discussion.  The consensus of the Committees seemed to be, to quote M. Beacom, "Replacing MARC with XML would be like replacing spaghetti with pasta."

Submitted by Matthew Wise

Return to 2000 Documents Menu
Return to BCC Historical Documents Menu
Return to BCC Home Page

Last updated August 18, 2000