BCC2003/SAS/2

Subject Analysis Committee

ALA Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada, June 22-23, 2003

Reported by Mark McKnight, Chair, Subcommittee on Subject Access

The following report represents selected coverage of topics from the SAC meetings in Toronto on June 22-23.

N.B. -- I was only able to be present at the June 22 meeting; also, per a change in the agenda suggested by David Miller, SAC Chair, this was the first time the MLA liaison and the American Association of Law Libraries liaison were asked to make official reports to SAC.

LC Report: Lynn El-Hoshy
The following are selected items from her written report. Ms. El-Hoshy did not attend; nor did the Library of Congress have an exhibit booth or representatives at the ALA Placement Center.

LC News -- It was recently announced that Deanna Marcum is the new Associate Librarian for Library Services. She will report to LC on Aug. 11. On May 7, LC inaugurated the John W. Kluge Center, which will be a center for advanced study in the arts and humanities. A number of fellowship and grant opportunities will be offered to nationally recognized scholars as well as scholars in the early stages of their careers. LC has expanded and improved access to its Integrated Library System (ILS) by making more external user sessions available. By the end of this calendar year the 2001.2 version of Voyager is expected to be available, and in 2004 LC expects to implement the Unicode standard.

Subject Headings and Classification -- Library of Congress Subject Headings, 26th ed., is expected to be published in print form in July. The new five-volume edition includes a new introductory section listing all of the free-floating subdivisions with usage information. This information is derived from the subdivision authority records that have been created over the past few years to control the approximately 3,250 free-floating subdivisions. See http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm1/ (TGM I) and http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/print/tgm2/ (TGM II) for more details.

Policy changes -- Headings for individual earthquakes are now established; formerly individual earthquakes were covered by generic subject headings of the type Earthquakes--[place]. Headings for specific notable earthquakes have now been established under their conventional names, e.g., San Francisco Earthquake, Calif., 1906. This change originated from a request from a former SAC member, Sara Shatford Layne. The free-floating subdivision --Travel has replaced --Journeys under names of individual persons, groups of literary authors, and headings of the type [place]--Kings and rulers for works about voyages and travel undertaken by the person or members of the group. This subdivision has also been authorized for use under names of individual corporate bodies to cover the travel or tours that musical groups, sports organizations, etc., undertake. Fee-floating subdivision lists and instruction sheets in the Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings will be revised to reflect these changes for the 2003 Update no. 2, to be issued in the fall.

The Cataloging and Distribution Service’s Classification Web, introduced in June 2002, now has 1300 subscribers. Annual subscription rates begin at $375/yr. CDS will also issue the seventh edition of the LC Classification Outline. This is the first print edition since the sixth edition appeared in 1990. The outline is also available at no charge on the Web.

The Library has introduced a new method of displaying optional numbers in the Library of Congress Classification Schedules. Optional numbers are those that are not used by LC but are provided for libraries that wish to follow an arrangement different from LC practice. These numbers, like obsolete numbers, have been presented in the schedules in parentheses; they will now be differentiated from obsolete numbers by being displayed in angle brackets. These changes are already implemented in Classification Web and will appear in new printed editions of the schedules beginning with 2003 editions.

The FAST Project
A brief report was made on the FAST Project. FAST stands for Facetted Application of Subject Terminology. It is a new subject heading schema, derived from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) that uses a simplified syntax while retaining LCSH vocabulary. The idea behind FAST is that personnel without extensive training can use it. FAST headings can easily be converted from LC subject headings. There are eight distinct facets within FAST: Topical, Geographic, Personal Name, Corporate Name, Form (Type, Genre), Chronological, Title, and Meeting Name. FAST is being developed by a team based in the OCLC Office of Research with support from the Library of Congress.

Sears List of Subject Headings
The new, 18th edition of the Sears List of Subject Headings will be published in January 2004, to coincide with the publication of the 14th Abridged Edition of the Dewey Decimal Classification.

Dewey Decimal Classification Division Reports
The 22nd edition of Dewey Decimal Classification will be published in July 2003, and the 14th Abridged Edition will appear in January 2004. DDC 22 is currently available on WebDewey.

Subcommittee Reports
The Subject Analysis Committee has a number of subcommittees working on projects: these include the Subcommittees on Semantic Interoperability, Subject Analysis Training Materials, and Subject Reference Structures in Automated Systems.

Report of the SAC Subcommittee on Semantic Interoperability: Shelby Harken
This subcommittee is charged with surveying the current state of international semantic interoperability projects, which focus on subject and/or classification data. One of the subcommittee’s main purposes will be to investigate approaches to integration and harmonization of subject vocabularies and knowledge information schemes used in various metadata standards for the purposes of effective and efficient resource discovery. The subcommittee plans to present either a program or preconference on its findings at the 2004 Annual conference.

Report of the SAC Subcommittee on Subject Analysis Training Materials: Lori Robare
The charge of this subcommittee is to collaborate with the Program for Cooperative Cataloging Standing Committee on Training (PCC SCT) in developing authoritative, standardized training materials in subject analysis. One module is scheduled to be previewed in a program at the ALA annual meeting in 2003.

Return to 2003 Documents Menu
Return to BCC Historical Documents Menu
Return to BCC Home Page

Last updated August 5, 2003