BCC2005/C/2

BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL COMMITTEE
2005 ANNUAL REPORT

Voting members: Nancy Lorimer (Chair), Paul Cauthen (MARC Formats Subcommittee), Margaret Kaus (Authorities Subcommittee), Kathryn Glennan (Descriptive Cataloging Subcommittee), Michelle Koth (Editor, Music Cataloging Bulletin), Mark McKnight (Subject Access Subcommittee), Susan Vita (LC Representative)

Non-voting members: Jay Weitz (OCLC Representative), Kerri Scannell (Recording Secretary/Webmaster)

The members of the Bibliographic Control Committee have again been busy this year. In addition to thanking all of the members for their work, I would especially like to again thank Kathy Glennan, Chair of the Descriptive Cataloging Subcommittee, for taking on the task of running both BCC meetings in Vancouver, as well of those of her subcommittee, when I was unable to attend. The BCC made 11 appointment recommendations this year to fill subcommittee vacancies and to add members to the Metadata Working Group.

The open BCC meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada BCC’s open meeting on Friday morning, February 18th, had an audience of more than 80 attendees. The focus of the open meeting was Kathy Glennan’s (USC) presentation on the Development of AACR3 (now called Resource Description & Access (RDA)). She commenced with an explanation of the groups involved in creating and revising the cataloging rules and emphasizing MLA’s place within that hierarchy. She then summarized the reasons for undertaking a new edition of AACR, including the vision, purpose, principles and development goals behind this effort. Finally, she highlighted the changes in the review process for this draft and shared the ambitious timeline for the completion of the new edition, which is now scheduled for publication in 2008.

Stephen Davison (UCLA) reported on the progress of the Music Metadata Requirements Working Group, and Charlotte Wolfe (University of Michigan) and Karen Spicher (Yale) brought the group up-to-date on the activities of the Joint RBMS/MLA Task Group for Developing Rules for Rare Music Cataloging.

After the annual meeting, on the request of Stephen Davison, chair of the Metadata Working Group, BCC asked the MLA Board to extend due date of the final report of the Metadata Working Group from May 2005 until the 2006 annual meeting. The request was approved.

BCC also recommended to the Board that they establish and appoint a liaison to the music information retrieval (MIR) community. BCC members believe that explained that while music information retrieval was once the sole domain of music librarians, it is now also a major discipline within the broader field of information retrieval. The MIR community has broad research interests, from musical analysis to classification to intellectual property rights. For MLA to continue, and perhaps expand, its traditional influence in the field of music information science, the association needs to reach out to the MIR community and actively establish strong relationships with the ISMIR organization. Though it is an organization that may have once viewed as perhaps peripheral in the music community, ISMIR, today may hold important parallel interests or critical intellectual tools that the music library community should be exposed to and could exploit in their own areas of expertise. For the most part, MLA does not currently involve itself in the techno-musical world (there are exceptions of course). Adding a formal MLA liaison to the community that specializes in this area will allow MLA to proactively embrace the research and development of the MIR community, rather than continue its current usually reactive stance, and, in turn, to raise its own profile in the ISMIR world. The Board approved this recommendation and called on Paul Cauthen, the Board parliamentarian, to identify someone willing to take on the position.

All BCC liaisons attended the ALA annual meeting in Chicago and we all thank the MLA Board for their continued support in funding travel and their promptness in setting the budget this year. In Chicago, members represented the perspective of the music cataloging community on ALA committees and interest groups. Reports from these meetings have been published in the Music Cataloging Bulletin and are also available on the BCC website ( http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/BCC/bcc.html) along with annual reports from the Library of Congress and OCLC representatives.

Submitted by Nancy Lorimer

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Last updated October 9, 2005