Members: Voting: Nancy Lorimer (Chair), Jim Alberts, Beth Flood, Kathy Glennan, Sue Vita (LC representative), Mark Scharff (CC:DA liaison); Mickey Koth (MCB editor (absent)); Non-voting: Jay Weitz (OCLC), Rya Martin (neé Mary Prendergast) (Webmaster/Recording Secretary)

The Bibliographic Control Committee held two business meetings and presented two programs at the Newport conference, one on the current status of RDA, presented by Kathy Glennan and Mark Scharff, and one on current topics in music cataloging. Both programs took place on Saturday, February 23. The Subject Access Subcommittee also presented a program on music vocabularies. All the programs were well attended with standing room only crowds in a room that seated 120 people. Specific program reports are appended to the end of this document.

The first BCC business meeting began with discussion of the work of 3 BCC-related groups: the joint MLA/OLAC Taskforce on Playaways; the joint MLA/RBMS committee on early printed music; and the Metadata Working Group.

The Playaways task force has completed a draft document “Guide to Cataloging Playaway Devices Based on AACR2r Chapters 6 and 9”. BCC reviewed this document and discussed some of the objections heard from the OLAC list and other sources, mostly regarding the use of “electronic resource” for the GMD. In the end, the Committee voted to accept the draft unchanged, with only one minor question regarding the meaning of “speed” in relation to a Playaway. The Chair will forward the Committee’s decision to the Chair of the Playaways task force.

Nancy Lorimer, wearing her liaison hat, reported on the work of the Early Printed Music Committee. Work on the rare and early music manual, Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Music) (DCRM(M)) continues and publication is scheduled for early next year. All the MLA members of the committee met with the RBMS DCRM editorial committee at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia. One unresolved issue is our disagreement with the committee over the use of copyright dates in Area 4. Nancy is writing a paper supporting our viewpoint and will be submitting to BCC members & the RBMS BSC. Nancy also told BCC that a group at the Library of Congress, headed by Laura Yust, is helping find examples for rules in the manual.

The Committee next heard from Stephen Davison and Jenn Riley of the Metadata Working Group. The Working Group submitted its final report to BCC at the end of January, and has thus completed its work. The report mapped out important music attributes in Dublin Core, MODS, EAD, and MARC; promulgating these recommendations could be the first practical application of the report. BCC suggested that the working group should make a recommendation on how metadata should be approached within the structure of MLA and append this to the document. The Committee then voted to accept the document, with the understanding that the addition will be forthcoming as long as working group members agree. 

Next, the Committee discussed a project considered at the OLAC-CAPC meeting at ALA to define the attributes of work records for films and videos, and whether BCC should do this for Music. While there was agreement that this would be a good project, there was discussion on where to draw members of a group working on this—that is, whether to restrict it to BCC members or open it to any MLA member. In the end, it was suggested that the group start as an informal BCC working group, and then later expand to a larger group involving other members of MLA with the Board’s approval.

At the start of the second business meeting, Gerry Ostrove of the Library of Congress met with the Committee to discuss first steps in a project to move music form/genre headings from 150/650 records to 155/655 records. Gerry spoke about how she was beginning to visualize how MLA involvement might work, and the problems in dealing with the LC firewalls and with the headings themselves. A letter sent to BCC prior to the annual meeting lays out her initial proposals for administrating the project, and she went over some of these ideas in the meeting. BCC decided it needed some further information from LC about numbers and timeframes, while the Committee needs to decide on how to administer such a program within the MLA structure.

The Committee then moved on to discussion of two documents submitted by the Library of Congress to the JSC on changes to RDA. 5JSC/LC/12 suggests major changes to some of the music-related rules in RDA; 5JSC/LC/11 lays out roles in FRBR terms.

Discussion primarily centered on LC/12. Members have had little time to digest the document (it came out a week before MLA), and could not reach agreement on our response to all of LC’s suggestions, but did on several. Mark Scharff, as CC:DA liaison, is charged with writing up the MLA response, which will be submitted soon after the meeting. Mark has also been charged by CC:DA to write their response, so we can rest assured that MLA’s views will be well represented. The full response will be posted as soon as possible on the BCC website.

One other discussion topic at the BCC meetings was the document recently issued by the MLA Task Force on Committee structure, and its suggestions related to the makeup of BCC. These include: moving the ILS Subcommittee, currently under the Administration Committee, under the umbrella of BCC; forming some sort of metadata group; and, possibly integrating the Authorities Subcommittee into the Descriptive Subcommittee once RDA is published. Members agree with the rationale for moving the ILS Subcommittee, but are somewhat uncertain about its charge, which seems to leave out a lot of areas covered by the subcommittee currently. It was also proposed that the Subcommittee might be more at home in some sort of emerging technologies group in MLA, as might the metadata group. Another suggestion was that we should look on these two added groups as a place to start and that as the next-gen catalog, metadata, and cataloging communities evolve over the next few years, so should these groups. A fuller document about this discussion will be submitted to the Task Force.

Finally, I will be rotating off as Chair of the Bibliographic Control Committee with this report. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve as Chair and to all the Subcommittee chairs for all their hard work and lively discussion. I am particularly indebted to Kathy Glennan for substituting for me in my first year as Chair, for all her endless work on RDA. I am also pleased to announce that Kathy will now take on the position of Chair of BCC. Congratulations Kathy, and thank you.

I am also pleased to announce that Mark Scharff, currently BCC liaison to CC:DA, will take over as Chair of the Subcommittee on Descriptive Cataloging. MLA is lucky to have a new chair who is already so well versed in RDA and the workings of CC:DA as well as such a deep background in all aspects of music cataloging. Congratulations, Mark.

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Last updated March 12, 2008