BCC2005/SAS/1

ALCTS CCS SUBJECT ANALYSIS COMMITTEE REPORT
ALA Annual Conference, Chicago, June 26-27, 2005

Submitted by Mark McKnight, Chair, Subcommittee on Subject Access
of the MLA Bibliographic Control Committee

The following report represents selected coverage of topics from the SAC meetings in Chicago, June 26-27, 2005

1. LC report (prepared by Lynn El-Hoshy)

LC NEWS
Song of America Tour
As a part of the Library of Congress’s new “Creativity Across America” program, American baritone Thomas Hampson will tour twelve American cities during 2005-2006. The Song of America tour will also include master classes, teacher institutes, and special events for children, in addition to displays of materials from LC’s collections.

Library Services Realignment
Realignment of Library Services has been completed, with 53 divisions reporting to five different directorates. Acquisitions and Bibliographic Control are now combined under the directorship of Beecher Wiggins. There will be no Associate Directors for these two units, as previously was announced.

LC ILS (Integrated Library System)
During 2004 the ILS Program Office continued to expand access and improve services to users by the transition from a single integrated, commercial off-the-shelf product (COTS), Voyager, to multiple COTS products, in order to increase access to the Library’s ever-expanding digital collections. Within the next several months LC plans to release Voyager with Unicode, which will offer search and display of non-Roman scripts in the LC online catalog for more than half a million bibliographic records. ILS acquired the OpenURL software SFX from Ex Libris, Inc., which offers the feature called Find It! This function allows users to navigate between independently managed resources by generating links from citations for resources to full digital content, tables of contents, abstracts, the LC online catalog, Web engines, and other resources.

CATALOGING
Cataloging Distribution Service
The Web version of Cataloger’s Desktop has recently been upgraded to include new resources, including the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), NLM Policy for Subject Analysis and Classification, and Recursos de Catalogación en Español. CDS is currently surveying subscribers to determine whether the CD-ROM version of Cataloger’s Desktop should be extended beyond the current subscription year. Classification Web now serves more than 1,600 sites with nearly 9,000 concurrent users. The site has been recently enhanced to include LC/Dewey correlations and enhanced links to WebDewey will be made available sometime this year. During the second half of 2005 CDS plans to add LC Name Authorities to Classification Web.

Cataloging in Publication (CIP)
The Library of Congress has begun a cooperative pilot project to decentralize its Electronic Cataloging in Publication (ECIP) program. Cornell University was the first institution chosen to participate in this project. Cornell will provide full descriptive and subject cataloging and an LC class number, as well as all necessary authority work. Other institutions that will soon join the project are Northwestern University and Northwestern University Press.

Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT)
Among the current projects of the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate at LC is BEAT, which is charged with improving access to bibliographic data and conducting research and development in related areas through a number of initiatives. Among these are enriching content to bibliographic records, providing web access to publications in series, automated web cataloging with the Web Cataloging Assistant, Machine generated 505 tables of contents (MG 505), and the collaborative project to study iVia Software, developed at the University of California, Riverside, for the INFOMINE Project. Further information on these various BEAT initiatives may be found at www.loc.gov/catdir/beat.

PCC: SACO The Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO) is now a full-fledged component program of the PCC for subject and classification authorities. There are a number of different programs for training, including PCC workshops held during library conferences or subject cataloging workshops given by ALCTS/PCC and available through CDS. Michael Colby is chairing a task group to review edits to “Basic Cataloging Using LCSH Workshop” training materials. The LC Cooperative Cataloging Team has introduced a new three-day course, “Introduction to LC Classification,” which has been held at Duke University and Texas A&M University. Materials from this workshop will be used for a future ALCTS PCC course.

CPSO
The Catalog Policy and Support Office (CPSO) has begun a pilot project for a Database Improvement Unit that will develop, analyze, and document maintenance processes. One of the first activities of this Unit has been the updating of more than 360,000 records to correct obsolete subject headings and other access points.

Subject Headings and Classification
Library of Congress Subject Headings, 28^th ed., was published in May in five volumes, and contains headings revised or approved through Nov. 2004.

Policy changes: Names of Indian tribes recognized by the U.S. government as legal entities will now be coded as 151 (Geographic name) rather than 110 (Corporate name). This change will allow such headings to be used as jurisdictions when needed for cataloging, and will allow for geographic subdivisions. This change is made in accordance with guidance in Anglo American Cataloguing Rules, 2^nd ed. (AACR2), which specifies that such tribal entities are to be treated as national governments. More information on this decision may be found at www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/tribes.html.

A similar change has been made in headings for Government-Designated Parks, Forests, etc. Because these types of entities are usually treated as subjects, they are coded as 151; occasionally, however, headings are needed as main or added entries for works emanating from the administrative entities that manage or oversee them. Henceforth these types of headings will be used with the qualifier (Agency) and will be retagged 110. In the future, new headings will be established either as name or subject headings, depending on usage. Examples include national parks, forests, and battlefields; national wild and scenic rivers, and other similar entities at the state or departmental level.

Changes in Subject Headings for Drug Addiction and Smoking—In order to eliminate and update archaic and inaccurate terminology for headings related to drug addiction and smoking, a series of headings of the type “Cigarette habit,” “Cocaine habit,” “Morphine habit,” etc., have been changed to “Smoking” and “Nicotine Addiction”; “Cocaine abuse,” “Morphine abuse,” etc. “Narcotic enforcement agents” are now “Drug enforcement agents.”

2. Dewey Decimal Classification Division Reports
It was announced that a Dewey blog would be launched on July 1, with Jonathan Foerner as the moderator. The DDC editors are currently examining several different options for the classification of topics pertaining to religion, with the possibility of providing new options or establishing a new framework (such as a chronological arrangement). Before any further decisions are made a survey is planned to make it better understood how or whether the current options are being used.

3. 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 it can be used by personnel without extensive training. 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. As of June 20, 2005 there were more than 1.352 million FAST authority records in the FAST authority file.

4. Sears List of Subject Headings
The first annual update of the 18^th edition of the Sears List of Subject Headings was published in May for users in MARC21 authority format. A Spanish-language version of Sears is currently in preparation and will be published in the January 2006, with the title Encabezamientos Sears Siglo 21.

5. Subcommittees
The Subject Analysis Committee has a number of subcommittees and task forces working on projects: these projects include Semantic Interoperability, FAST, Library of Congress Classification Training Materials, and Named Building and Other Structures. The Named Building and Other Structures Task Force submitted its final report to SAC and was then officially disbanded. In the final report, the task force noted the complexities of the situation (whether to treat named buildings as subjects or corporate bodies), and recommended further study as well as the establishment of an Art SACO funnel to work with the existing Art NACO funnel. The task force also urged the establishment of an Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) liaison to SAC.

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Last updated September 11, 2005