BCC01/SAS/1
2001 ALA Midwinter Meeting
ALCTS CCS SUBJECT ANALYSIS COMMITTEE REPORT
January 14 and 15, 2001
2. Sears report
The 6th edition of the Sears List of Subject Headings Canadian Companion is in press. The most significant change in this edition is the introduction of the term First nations to replace the term Indians of North America—Canada.
3. LC Report (Lynn El-Hoshy)
The final fiscal year 2001 budget for the Library of Congress included a special appropriation to begin a major undertaking regarding the building of a national repository of digital materials. This includes development and implementation of a Congressionally-approved strategic plan for a National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.
Two of the three planned pilot phases for the Collaborative Digital Reference Service (CDRS) have been completed. CDRS will provide round-the-clock, library-quality service to users anywhere through an international digital network of member libraries and other institutions. The third pilot began in November 2000, with LC’s Main and Microform Reading Rooms and the Local History and Genealogy Reading Room answering CDRS questions.
A three-month pilot test of Classification Web began on January 8. This experimental service provides full-text display of class schedule data and hypertext links within and between classes and subclasses. Related LCSH are accessible online and the service will do automatic calculation of table numbers. Thirty in-depth testers are evaluating the product, but any member of the library public may access the experimental product at http://lccweb.net during the 90-day test period. As a result of the testing, Cataloging Distribution Service would like to gather information on usability of the interface, speed of data delivery, potential use in reference as well as technical services and the degree of interest in a cost-recovery subscription product.
LC officially accepted the integrated library system (ILS) on August 21, 2000. The Library is working with Endeavor in preparation of implementation of Voyager Release 2000, now targeted for May 2001. This release will include the ability to display Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Hebrew vernacular characters in the web OPAC. The Library plans to make its name and subject authority records available in the LC online catalog following the implementation of this release. More information on the public ILS is available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/ils
The LC Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control in the New Millennium was held on November 15-17. The primary goals of the conference were to develop an overall strategy to address the challenges of improved access to Web resources through library catalogs and applications of metadata, and to identify attainable actions for achieving the objectives of the overall strategy. The invited guests came up with about 100 specific recommendations for shaping cataloging in the digital age. The papers presented at the conference and the recommendations are available at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/
June 2001 marks the 30th anniversary of the Cataloging in Publication (CIP) program. John Celli, chief of LC’s CIP Division, encourages librarians who benefit from the program to use the occasion of the anniversary to thank participating publishers. A program on CIP is also planned for ALA in San Francisco.
American libraries began using pinyin to replace Wade-Giles transliteration of Chinese characters on October 1, 2000. Information on LC’s conversion project may be found at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/
On January 2, 2001, LC began using the restructured LCCN in fields 010 of both authority and bibliographic records. The restructured LCCN uses a four-digit year and there is no longer a trailing blank at the end of the number. LCCNs in the old structure will not be changed and will exist simultaneously with numbers in the new structure.
Changes in subject headings and subdivisions included the following:
Headings that included the terms Afro-Americans and Afro-American … were changed to African-Americans and African-American …
On February 1, 2001, the location of geographic subdivisions in art subject headings will be changed to conform to the standard order used for most other topics. Headings such as Drawing—20th Century—France will be reformulated as Drawing, French—20th century. (See http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/artcat.html for more detailed information.)
Over 2100 subject subdivision authority records have been created and distributed to control the approximately 3100 free-floating subdivisions in the LCSH system. The project to recode form subdivisions from ¹x to ¹v is about two-thirds complete and will resume after the pinyin conversion is completed.
Changes and improvements were made to the LC Classification Outline posted at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcco/lcco.html
4. Report of IFLA liaison
Lois Mai Chan reported on the 2000 IFLA Conference. The Open Forum of the Section on Classification and Indexing included papers on a consolidated thesaurus for alternative medicine, a new classification for the literature of religion, and multilingual and multi-script subject access. The section also sponsored a workshop on crosstalks between languages, cultures and religions in classification and indexing.
The Standing Committee on Classification and Indexing established a working group to develop guidelines for the construction of multi-lingual thesauri.
5. Dewey report
It was reported that production in the Dewey office at LC is almost back to normal. Access to the full DDC database on the web is now available with annual subscriptions to WebDewey in CORC. There is a new expansion to sign languages in 419. New translations of DDC were just published in Italian and Spanish.
6. Report of the SAC Subcommittee on Metadata and Subject Analysis
The subcommittee is preparing a program for ALA in San Francisco. It will be entitled “Subject Analysis and Classification in Metadata for Digital Resources.” It will include presentation of two of the subcommittee’s reports, “Subject Data in the Metadata Record” and the final report. There will also be a comparison of subject treatment in different metadata standards and some examples of implementations by librarians.
7. Report of the SAC Subcommittee on Authority Records for GSAFD
As a result of its investigation of machine-readable authority records for Guidelines to Subject Access to Individual Works of Fiction, Drama, Etc., the subcommittee came up with a recommendation that a merger of GSAFD with LCSH be explored.
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Last updated February 13, 2001