BCC01/Auth/2
LITA/ALCTS AUTHORITY CONTROL IN
THE ONLINE ENVIRONMENT INTEREST GROUP
Reporting/discussion session, ALA Midwinter 2001
Washington, D.C., Jan. 14
The ACIG session actually began with
an informal presentation by Mary Charles Lasater (Vanderbilt University) on the challenges
of the Wade-Giles-to-pinyin conversion project for a local catalog. Two local circumstances for Vanderbilt are the use
of a vendor for authority processing and updates, and having headings in bibliographic
records linked to authority records, with changes in the latter automatically triggering
changes in the former. Among questions she
posed: would a vendor be able to do the conversion on the descriptive portions of
bibliographic records without “re-converting” the headings? Are the Wade-Giles-to-pinyin conversion tables
adequate for use by non-Chinese-literate catalogers for local cleanup? How will catalogers detect, for example, headings
on older records which, when converted to pinyin, inappropriately match headings in
authority records? Of special concern to
Lasater are undifferentiated personal-name records, where a heading represents more than
one person. While Wade-Giles produced many
such records, pinyin caused differentiation in some cases, and some new authority records
came to be. However, all the bibliographic
records remained linked to the original authority record, and variations in citation
practice mean that in some cases, the cataloger cannot determine how many different
persons were originally represented by an undifferentiated record, or how many are now
represented by unique headings. Lasater asked
for a practice where differentiable names would be moved to new authority records, with
the original record remaining coded as undifferentiated regardless of the number of
persons it now represents. There was general
agreement that this proposal had merit.
News
from the Library of Congress came from Ann Della Porta.
She highlighted the implementation of “4-digit” Library of Congress
Control Numbers, in which the portion representing the year of cataloging was expanded
from 2 digits. The Cataloging Distribution
Service will soon implement 13 MARC characters originally defined in 1994. Use of the characters is subject to
bibliographic-utility decisions and NACO/SACO policies.
Among these characters is that for the musical sharp; however, OCLC will not
support its use at this time, and NACO/SACO will follow suit. For more information, see
http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/newchar.html , where a chart is available in PDF format. Recent pronouncements from the International
Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) signal a shift in thinking about the authority
component of Universal Bibliographic Control from a “single-record’ concept
covering all languages, to linking related records within national authority files. This new approach appears best suited to satisfy
user needs in terms of language, script, and cultural context. Two large conversion projects for LC have been
that of “Afro-American” to “African-American” in subject headings and
subdivisions, and its portion of the pinyin conversion project. Delays in implementing Voyager’s Release 2001
software have pushed the target date for making full MARC authority records available to
users of the LC catalog to May 2001. LC is
also asking Endeavor, its vendor, to provide the capability to store and display
vernacular script in authority records, but has not yet developed a policy for
implementation.
Glenn Patton (OCLC) reported on authority-control related
activities in Dublin. OCLC identified 152,000
authority records as candidates for Wade-Giles-to-pinyin conversion; eliminating 4,000
pre-AACR2 headings that were considered out of scope, ca. 121,000 were “cleanly”
converted in September 2000; the remainder are undergoing manual review to correct
improper conversions (e.g. the state abbreviation “Pa.” to “Ba”, and
the famous musical “Nuo, nuo Nanette”). Conversion
of bibliographic records will begin at the end of February 2001, starting with CONSER
serial records in reverse chronological order, with June as the projected completion date;
local-files conversion can begin in March. In
other activities, 235,000 name authority records, and the corresponding headings in
bibliographic records, were updated to correct the obsolete indicator value “2”
for multiple surnames. Some global changes
included new subfield coding for form-genre subdivisions and the “Afro-American”
to “African-American” conversion. OCLC
also revised indexing to accommodate the new LCCN structure. Goals for the coming year include introducing NACO
functionality within CatME and CORC.
Following
questions and discussion, ACIG held its business meeting.
The program for the annual conference in San Francisco will be titled
“By what authority?”, covering issues related to multiple sources of authority
records co-existing in the same searching environment.
Submitted by
Mark Scharff
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Last updated February 13, 2001