BCC2004/Auth/4
MLA liaison report to BCC from ALA Annual Meeting,
Orlando, June 2004
ALCTS Media Resources Committee
Following the MRC Listserv discussion that preceded the ALA Annual meeting in Orlando, the MRC members decided to dissolve the Committee. It came as a surprise to some of the members and associates as there was a plan to revitalize the MRC laid out at the ALA Midwinter meeting. The plan didn’t worked and MRC was not able to re-establish itself either as an interest group or a discussion group, and, more importantly, it wasn’t able to muster enough enthusiasm and commitment from the current committee members or justifiable vitality to carve a niche for itself within the ACLTS. Therefore, it has been decided that this committee is merely a relic of the past and should be simply disbanded. Nevertheless, a feeble attempt was made to meet during the ALA in Orlando for a final closure and maybe a future-oriented discussion, but nobody showed up at the meeting room (except the MLA liaison, I think).
Brian McCafferty who at the Midwinter meeting agreed to chair the group beginning June, 2004:
“[…] I I can understand why MR was established (back in its ALCTS-AV days); it was a growing novelty-interest area of librarianship, and it probably made sense to have a group within ALCTS to raise awareness and push issues. I think those days are over. […] It may be that cataloging is where advocacy continues to be warranted, but I think it's pretty obvious that OLAC is the group that is organized and focused on the issues and has a *real* (dues-paying) constituency to provide impetus. I think that what MR has done in this regard has not been much more than serving as a conduit to CCS for OLAC initiatives.[…] OLAC should be to AV cataloging what MLA Bibliographic Control Committee is to music cataloging. Interjecting ALCTS MR in the process seems like a waste of effort […].”
Miriam Palm, interim ALA designated leader of the group until June 2004:
“[…] When I asked for agenda topics for Orlando, I heard nothing as well. The
Listserv I had the ALCTS Office set up is rarely if ever used. All this led me to conclude there was no overwhelming mandate to continue on, either from people surveyed or from any of you. Then Brian "called the question" and got regrets but no objections. […]I haven't sensed the willingness to set goals and objectives and carry them out, in my three years with the group, and I don't think I have misread the situation that badly […]”.
Other members generally agreed with Brian’s remarks, and only Jay Weitz, OCLC liaison asked for a clarification:
“According to my notes from the MRC meeting last January in San Diego, we had collectively
decided to pursue the transformation into an Interest Group. Cecilia had volunteered to draw up the proposal to that effect,t and Brian had volunteered to lead the Interest Group during the transition. What happened with all of that?” (…the question that also expresses MLA liaison’s sentiment regarding this matter).
LITA/ALCTS—CCS Authority Control in the Online Environment Interest Group (ACIG)
Sunday, June 27, 2004, from 1:00 pm -5:30 pm
Open meeting program titled “Fast, Slow, and Z39.19: Emerging Trends in Subject Authority control” assembled important speakers and consisted of five presentations:
Presentation consisted of short historical review of how and why ACIG came into being, what is authority control and its virtues, existing authority control projects in US like NACO, SACO and started elsewhere like EU Author and LEAF projects, HKCAN (Hong Kong consortium project, or Russian National Authority Control projects. After mentioning existing IFLA standards, Unicode and cataloging rules she, Tillett talked at length about her dream, a Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) with same standards, form and structure used worldwide. In VIAF, each country is responsible for creating and maintaining the authority headings for its own personal and corporate authors and making national authority records available for everyone to use. Unicode standards, semantic Web building blocks, switching to different language, script and/or regional spelling displays, or employing FRBR in authority control will eventually lead to global sharing, and better service to users worldwide.
Maintenance of such an international authority file and uniformity of standards applied however, might be difficult to achieve across the board, given regional practices in, for example, differentiating authority headings, that is so important in LC authority file, and not so in German authority records.
The presenter reported that the group I s still working….Presently, it focuses on the Thesaurus standards responsive to, and expanded to account for the current Web environment. There are four major vocabularies the group is working on, that hopefully are finished by October, 2004: Lists of Indexes, Synonyms Rings, Taxonomies and Thesauri. The Group discussed also indexing standards, considered their usefulness (logical, not intuitive), pondered how many relationships need to be recommended, and regarded a potential for misunderstandings in usage of qualifiers. A draft, much more expanded in comparison to the original document, will be presented to NISO in October, 2004 for approval.
Arlene Taylor gave a short overview of history of subject searching, changing attitudes, methods and developing trends. She addressed controversial claims by some experienced librarians that some keyword searches retrieve records that only have one or more sought-after words in a subject string in a subject heading field, therefore the subject headings are not useful and should be removed from the bib record. Together with Tina Gross, she designed and conducted a study that gave an answer to a question of what proportion of records retrieved by a keyword search has a keyword only in a subject heading field, and thus would not be retrieved at all if there were no subject headings. The findings of the research study confirmed the high usefulness of the subject headings in keyword searching through documenting a percentage of hits lost, if subject headings were not present: 35,4% (38,319 out of 102,580 hits). A further analysis of the data reveals that for about 3 of every ten successful keyword searches, half or more of the hits would not be retrieved if there were no subject headings present. The study found that if subject headings were to be removed from catalog records (or not longer added to them), users performing keyword searches would lose more than one third of the hits they currently retrieve, which will be in addition to the loss of other functions and advantages provided by controlled vocabulary, like level of precision in searches. In addition, a keyword user whose search retrieves an overwhelming number of hits with a high proportion of irrelevant results, would have few option without subject functioning subject headings to find a smaller, more relevant set of hits.
Perspectives instrumental in developing FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) were driven by a need for a new approach to subject vocabulary for phenomenal growth of electronic resources, emergence of numerous metadata schemes and OCLC’s search for a subject access system for Dublin Core metadata records. The subject access requirements for electronic/Internet resources led to development of the FAST schema based on LCSH rich vocabulary with simplified syntax designed for online environment that retains the advantages of a controlled vocabulary. It is faceted, hierarchical, fully established and compatible with LCSH. As far as authority control is concerned, the differences between FAST vs. LCSH might be summarized by the statement that for FAST, all headings (except chronological) are established and only established headings can be assigned, whereas in LCSH, while many headings are established, most assigned headings are synthesized by catalogers based on rules.
The database is available at www://fast.oclc.org, however, its current version is not yet sufficiently developed for use in any type of application. Beta version is to be released in July 2004.
Presenter talked about emerging interest to apply FRBR to subject authority control that parallels worldwide interest in conceptual model of entities, attributes and relationships to help thinking about current practices and standards, and function of the catalogs (not records) in relation to user needs. Primary objective of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic and Authority record is to create a structured framework for relating data recorded in bibliographic/authority records to user needs by recommending basic level of functionality, by clarifying the function of identifiers or standard numbers for authority records and by assessing potential for international sharing and use of authority records. Global sharing of authority records requires knowing where cataloging rules converge and where they do not converge, to start formulating cataloging principles and rules on a global scale (IFLA Meeting of Excerpts on an International Cataloging Rules), as well as building and understanding subject thesauri in terms of consistent conceptual model that will enrich our understanding of subject relationships.
Submitted by Marlena Frackowski
MLA liaison
August 12, 2004
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Last updated September 1, 2004