BCC2008/SDC/4

MUSIC LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
Bibliographic Control Committee
Descriptive Cataloging SUBCOMMITTEE (DCS)

ANNUAL REPORT
July 2007-June 2008

Members: Mark Scharff, chair (2008); Joseph Bartl (LC Representative); David Guion (2008); Jean Harden (2008); Steven Henry (2005); Mark McKnight (2008); Lois Schultz (2005); Heidi Siberz (2008); Patricia Thomson (2006).

Members who left the committee after the 2008 annual meeting were Robert Freeborn, Kathy Glennan, Terry Simpkins, and John Redford.  Thanks to all of them for their participation.

DCS member Robert Freeborn and LC rep Joe Bartl were members of the Playaway Cataloging Joint Task Force, made up of members from MLA and OLAC.  Kathy Glennan served as an advisor.  This body, established in early 2007, was charged with creating a document that would aid in descriptive cataloging of these devices.  The Task Force submitted a draft of its document late in June for consideration by the BCC.

Mark Scharff attended the CC:DA meetings at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia and ALA Annual in Anaheim, CA as the MLA liaison. (For details, view the summary reports available at: http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/BCC/BCC-Historical/BCC2008/BCC2008SDC1.html and http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/BCC/BCC-Historical/BCC2008/BCC2008SDC3.html, respectively)  Those two meetings saw the submission and acceptance of the final report of the CC:DA Task Force on Specialist Cataloging Manuals, which Mark chaired.  The task force produced a list that will be an auxiliary Web document to RDA.

CC:DA meetings continued to focus on the issues surrounding the creation of a new cataloging code to replace AACR2, known as RDA: Resource Description and Access. The Joint Steering Committee (JSC) asks for comments on the various chapters as they become available. During the fiscal year, DCS contributed to the MLA comments on the revised drafts of Chapter 3, “Carrier,” the revised drafts of Chapters 6–7, “Persons, families, and corporate bodies associated with a resource” and “Related resources,” and of Sections 2-4 and 9 (the mixture of designations reflects a drastic reordering of RDA’s contents).   DCS also offered comments on a proposal from CILIP (the British counterpart to ALA) to include introductory words in titles at all times, and on how closely RDA should follow guidelines for uniform titles in the draft report of the IFLA Meeting of Experts on an International Cataloging Code (IME ICC); that document differed significantly from current practice.  An ad-hoc DCS task force (Jean Harden. Steve Henry, and Mark McKnight) hammered out a definition for “study score” (which roughly covers the concept of “miniature score” in AACR2) on short notice, to be included in the RDA Glossary.  Subsequent endorsements by a majority of JSC constituents would indicate that it will be in RDA.

The most significant RDA-related activity may have been responding to a document representing the Library of Congress’s response to the portions of the RDA draft that deal with formulating preferred access points for musical works.  In addition to critiquing the RDA draft itself, the LC document proposed sweeping changes in practice.  The MLA response represented the negative reaction to some of these changes, and the ALA response was very similar.  The Joint Steering Committee, rather than trying to sort through the issues, asked that a meeting of music cataloging experts be convened to try to achieve consensus.  This meeting took place at LC on May 16, 2008.  Mark Scharff, Kathy Glennan, and DCS member Steve Henry represented MLA; there were also representatives from LC, the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, and ALA CC:DA.  The meeting produced some areas of agreement and identified bases for further discussion.  A subsequent conference call on May 29 furthered things, but made clear that there were still areas of fundamental disagreement.  This produced a flurry of activity in the attempt to meet a May 30 deadline for “drop-in” wording for the RDA draft.  Then the JSC stepped back and reset the clock for September 1, resolving in the meanwhile that the language in the current RDA draft would be what appeared in the initial rollout of the complete draft.  The fiscal year ended with things in limbo.

DCS will have a very full plate in the next year, as the review period for the full RDA draft will be very short.  New recording formats and playback devices will likely trigger new task forces to work out descriptive practices, in the collaborative fashion of the Playaways document.

Submitted by Mark Scharff


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Last updated November 17, 2008