BCC2008/SAS/2
Subject Access Subcommittee
2008 Conference Report
Covering the Program and Business Meetings
Feb. 21, 2008, 12:30-2 and 2-3:30
Submitted by Beth Flood
Genre/Form Project
One of the most prominent topics in both the program and the business meeting was the project to implement genre/form headings for music. Member of BCC and LC-CPSO subject representative Geraldine Ostrove have been in discussion about how to proceed with the genre/form project. The next steps will be determining how much of the conversion work MLA can contribute, and how much work CPSO can take on. Following that, a charge and proposal will be sent to the MLA Board for approval. An advisory group will be formed to set up the project and set up guidelines and processes.
The
Subject Access Subcommittee
(SAS) sponsored a program on Feb. 21 entitled "Music Vocabularies and
Subject Access." The program, which had over 75 attendees, featured
four presentations: Geraldine Ostrove, speaking on genre/form
implementation; a paper by Catherine Kerst (read by Gerry Ostrove) on
the American Folklife Center's Ethnographic Thesaurus; Jenn Riley
speaking on controlled vocabularies and the ways library systems need
to utilize them in new ways; and Stacy Allison-Cassin speaking on
social tagging and its relation to library cataloges.
Other topics from the Music Vocabularies
program
were discussed during the SAS business meeting which immediately
followed the program. These topics are presented below.
SAS Business Meeting
Business meeting, Feb. 21,
2008. members present: Stacey Allison-Cassin, Keith Chapman, Patty
Falk, Beth Flood (chair), Neil Hughes, Lynne Jaffe, Geraldine Ostrove
(LC representative), Jenn Riley, John Wagstaff. Visitors present: 14.
A special thank-you goes to outgoing
members Neil
Hughes and Keith Chapman for their valuable contributions and time
serving on this committee. Discussion during the meeting included the
following highlights.
Library
of Congress News.
A new LC report on the pros and cons of
pre/post-coordination of subject headings has been made available at: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/pre_vs_post.html.
In September, LC released the first
batch of
genre/form authority records, which were for moving images. Work is
continuing in this area and now includes headings for radio terms.
LC has begun creating "validation
records"--subject
authority records for subject strings that include certain
free-floating subdivisions. The goal of the project is to create
records for commonly occurring valid subject strings to facilitate
authorities validation in LC's Voyager database.
Genre/Form
Headings
How will automated authority vendors
(LTI, Marcive,
etc.) be notified? How will the new/revised authority records be
distributed and how will conversion be triggered in our catalogs? The
headings themselves will be updated in Cataloger's Desktop and in other
ways.
Regarding validation records, the
general goal is
that all headings will be supported by authority records, though LC
will not be systematically creating headings if they are not needed.
Authority records will be needed more in
newer,
robust systems, which will rely on controlled vocabularies. More than
headings created by strict rules, these systems need relationships
between headings, which involve much more effort.
Social
Tagging and Music Vocabularies
An important point of social tagging is
the way
language is changing and relating that language to subject
construction. Subject thesauri are highly valued, but what about users
who don't want to use terms hierarchically? There is need for a more
thesaurus-like list of synonyms, and tagging can often be used to get
lists of related terms.
Music vocabularies need to take into
account
geographic terms. Geographic subjects, while not strictly musical in
nature, are particularly important for subject access to ethnographic
music materials. If a clearinghouse for music subject vocabularies is
created, geographic terms need to be included.
Regarding a music subject clearinghouse,
it should
be easy to add entries. There may be thesauri for instruments,
forms/genres, and sociological terms, and these could be cross-listed.
There are sources beyond traditional thesauri, such as Freebase and
Musicbrains. Since they are created by enthusiasts, these could be good
sources of popular terms in a similar way as social tagging. The most
important thing in a project like this would be interoperability.
SACO
Music Funnel
A SACO music funnel should probably
operate out of
MLA rather than MOUG, since it is not OCLC specific. A music funnel
will provide a point person or persons for help with the proposal
process, allowing individual librarians to go to the funnel coordinator
for help and guidance. Also, with a national funnel, there is more
incentive for catalogers (and administrators) to recognize the value of
the work. Training will enable individual music catalogers who may not
otherwise be able to participate to contribute subject terms.
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