BCC2007/SAS/1

ALCTS CCS SUBJECT ANALYSIS COMMITTEE REPORT
ALA Midwinter Conference, Seattle, Jan. 21-22, 2007

Submitted by Beth Flood, Chair, Subject Access Subcommittee
of the MLA Bibliographic Control Committee

The following report represents selected coverage of topics from the SAC meetings and other related sessions.

LC News
Form/Genre Headings
The implementation of form/genre terms for music has been postponed until the new edition of the Class M schedule is finished.  Work on the project is expected to resume in March or later.  CPSO continues to work with staff from the Moving Image Section to analyze form/genre terms for moving image materials, and draft proposals will be forthcoming..

Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control
This group has been convened by Deanna Marcum to examine the future of bibliographic description. Three invitational regional meetings will be held in 2007, focusing on one of three themes: uses and users, structures and standards, and economics and organization.

ALCTS/SAC Form/Genre Program
A program on form/genre is scheduled for Saturday 1:30-3:30 during the annual meeting in Washington D.C. Three speakers will address the conversion of form/genre headings from X50 to X55 fields. Geraldine Ostrove will speak on music form/genre headings, and Adam Schiff will speak on indexing options and representation of form/genre headings in library catalogs. The third speaker is yet to be determined.

FRSAR (Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Records)
The purpose of the FRSAR working group is to build a conceptual model of FRBR group 3 entities as they relate to the aboutness of works. In addition to the user tasks defined for FRBR (Find, Identify, Select, Obtain), FRSAR adds the task Explore, meaning to navigate through terms and objects. The working group identified information professional and end users as the primary groups who use subject authority information.

OCLC FAST Project
The last three facets of FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) were recently completed. These facets are: chronological periods, events (conference and meeting names), and uniform titles. Unlike AACR2 headings, dates and places are not included in FAST headings for events. One reason for this difference is that dates and places are separate facets in FAST, and other reason is that exclusion of these two facets allows for more brevity in conference and meeting headings.

PCC/SACO
Much discussion during the SACO meeting centered around the new workflow which allows proposing new classification numbers via Classification Web. Proposals are still proposed through the SACO liaison at each institution.
A Northern New England funnel as been added to the SACO program.

Task Force on Library of Congress Classification Training
The task force is reviewing drafts of the sections for a two-day workshop on LCC training. The workshop is geared towards those with little or no experience in classification.

The NSDL Metadata Registry
During the SAC meeting, a presentation was made about using the NSDL (National Science Digital Library) Metadata Registry for semantic mapping. This registry is currently aimed at smaller vocabularies, and it allows users to register vocabularies of different complexity, from lists of terms to vocabularies with complete thesaurus structure. The registry is outside the scope of OCLC or LC at this point.

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Last updated February 19, 2007