BCC2005/SDC/1

Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access
ALA Midwinter Conference, Boston, MA, January 15 and 17, 2005

Reported by Kathy Glennan, Chair, Subcommittee on Descriptive Cataloging

The Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA) met in two sessions during the ALA Midwinter meeting in Boston, Mass. The Chair, Mary Larsgaard (University of California, Santa Barbara), led the discussions.

This report focuses on items of interest to the music library community. For more information about the meeting and for reports about activities mentioned below, please see the CC:DA web page at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/tas/jca/ccda/index.html.

Reports

Library of Congress (Barbara Tillett, LC liaison to CC:DA)

The Library of Congress (LC) has undergone a restructuring of reporting lines, which emphasizes collections. The new directorate of Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access resulted from a merger of acquisitions and cataloging.

LC’s ILS can now accommodate 550 simultaneous users; this 25% increase was in response to feedback from users. The upgrade of Voyager with Unicode is not yet scheduled.

In the past year, much arrearage reduction took place, particularly in the area of non-rare print, maps, rare books, and prints and photographs. LC continues to work on reducing the arrearage in manuscripts, moving images, music and sound recordings. During the past fiscal year, LC processed material from the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service broadcasts and performed collective level cataloging of the Dayton C. Miller Flute Collection, the Moldenhauer Archives and the Charles Mingus Collection. In other music cataloging news, the Hofmeister XIX Project will convert that series of printed music catalogs into a searchable, Internet-based database.

As part of the continued interest in adding contents notes to bibliographic records, LC is using ONIX data to bring machine-generated contents notes into cataloging records. Tillett reported that these will look “a little strange” and that she’s interested in reactions to the inclusion of this data. Also in the area of enhancing records, a pilot project investigated including publisher summaries supplied through the Electronic Cataloging in Publication program.

In Classification Web, LC is considering adding the LC Name Authorities later this year.

Most copy cataloging done at LC now has an encoding level of “7,” indicating that the record lacks full authority control, and ensuring that LC’s record won’t overlay fuller records in the OCLC database. However, copy catalogers change the encoding level to “7” regardless of the value on the original record.

In the area of providing access to electronic resources, LC is investigating a new level of cataloging (“access level”) which would emphasize data elements related to subject access while de-emphasizing those which do not support resource discovery. For details, see http://www.loc.gov/catdir/access/accessrecord.html

CPSO decided not to move forward with the proposed change in the Greek romanization table, since many respondents lobbied against this change. Future implementation of Unicode may allow for automatic romanization of scripts through computer programming.

ALA Publishing Services (Don Chatham, Associate Executive Director)

The development of AACR2 will be complete with the forthcoming 2005 amendments, which will only be six pages. ALA Publishing Services expects to publish AACR3 in both print and electronic form.

Joint Steering Committee (Jennifer Bowen, ALA Representative)

The Joint Steering Committee (JSC) has established an ambitious plan for the development of AACR3, with a publication date of 2007. This requires a different approach for developing and reviewing proposals: instead of the initiative for change coming from the constituent bodies, as has occurred in the past, JSC has hired a general editor, Tom Delsey, to develop AACR3. He is developing drafts for each part of the rules consecutively. The JSC reviews them first and then passes them on to the constituencies for comment. The production timelines overlap for the three parts of AACR3. For example, the constituencies have a draft of Part I for review now, and the draft of Part II will be on the agenda for the April JSC meeting. Because of the timetable, JSC members may not be able to consult with their constituencies on all proposed changes.

JSC continues with its policy of limited distribution of draft documents. They must balance the needs of the publishers/copyright holders with the opportunity for a broad review. Practicing catalogers who have access to the drafts are expected to try out the rules and see how well they work.

Comments from the CC:DA constituencies on Part I are due by Feb. 11, 2005, to enable the establishment of official CC:DA positions prior to the end of March.

JSC has appointed a separate working group to review examples in the text of AACR3. Jay Weitz will be among the members of this international group.

The next JSC meeting will be held in Chicago, April 24-28, 2005. If you are interested in attending as an audience observer, please notify Jennifer Bowen as soon as possible. The agenda includes reviewing the constituency comments on Part I, discussing the draft of Part II, and seeing the outline for Part III.

NISO (Betty Landesman, ALA Representative)

To deal with emerging specifications and guidelines, best practices, and other benchmark documents, NISO has created a registration process which is less rigorous than validating a “standard.” MODS and METS have both gone through this process, which may serve as the first step to creating a full-blown standard in the future. Registration lasts for 18 months and may be renewed.

Discussion of AACR3, Part I

(See the publicly available summary of the draft at: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/tas/jca/ccda/docs/chair22.pdf)

The bulk of CC:DA’s agenda focused on the draft of AACR3, Part I. Items for discussion included:

• Does the draft achieve what it set out to do?
• Do the objectives and principles established in the introduction work? What’s missing? Are these appropriately balanced?
• Are the rules useable in this form? Can they be made easier?
• Will the number of options available in the rules compromise record sharing?
• Does this draft meet the goal of broadening the use of AACR3 beyond the library community?
• How helpful is the change in distinguishing bibliographic resources as “finite” vs. “continuing” (AACR2, Chapter 12) to “issued simultaneously” vs. “issued in successive parts” (AACR3)?
• Should multi-part items and serials receive the same treatment?
• What happens when AACR3 conflicts with ISBDs?
• Is AACR3 a content standard, a display standard – or both?
• How important is transcription?
• Could AACR3 be more like other metadata schemes?
• Should we recommend moving the GMD from the title area?
• How can we formulate more useful GMDs? Could our catalogs display icons instead of text? With GMDs encompassing both content and medium, could the content portion be repeated for what would otherwise be “mixed content”?
• Is it useful to have SMDs to encompass both medium and content? In what order?
• How should “digital” be treated? Is it appropriate to exclude DVDs and music CDs from the chapter on digital media?
• Does it make sense to have just one list for the “chief source of information” regardless of the type of resource?
• Does the prescribed sources section need to apply to more than just titles?

CC:DA had no formal votes on AACR3 during this meeting; instead, members and liaisons will continue to comment on the CC:DA list serve and a website established for this purpose – through Feb. 11, 2005.

Rule Revision Proposals – CC:DA Actions

CC:DA/Serials Section/2004/1 (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/tas/jca/ccda/docs/ss1.pdf)

This proposal asked for a correction to the fifth example in AACR2 12.3G1, which is already supported by the rules. CC:DA approved this proposal, which will be forwarded to the JSC’s working group for examples for AACR3.

CC:DA/TF/Rule 21.0D/4/Rev

JSC did not approve this proposal for inclusion in the 2005 amendments to AACR2; instead they requested that CC:DA formally withdraw this proposal, which was done. The draft of AACR3 Part II will address the issues raised in this proposal.

Other

CC:DA’s official ALA website remains about two months out-of-date; the Committee should be using the Penn State site instead.

Comments on ISBD(CM) are due by the end of March.

CC:DA will sponsor two meetings at ALA Annual in Chicago: one on AACR3 (Sunday, 8:30-12:00) and one on Cataloging Cultural Objects (Saturday, 8:30-12:00).

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Last updated March 5, 2005