Voting members: Kathy Glennan, chair (2008); Damian Iseminger (chair, Authorities Subcommittee), Mark Scharff (chair, Descriptive Cataloging Subcommittee), Jim Alberts (chair, Subcommittee on MARC Formats), Jenn Riley (chair, Metadata Subcommittee, from Oct. 2008), Beth Flood (chair, Subject Access Subcommittee), Mickey Koth (editor, Music Cataloging Bulletin), Sue Vita (Library of Congress Representative),

Non-voting members: Jay Weitz (OCLC Representative), Rya Martin (Recording Secretary/Webmaster)

The Bibliographic Control Committee (BCC) had another busy year. We welcomed the addition of the new Metadata Subcommittee, with Jenn Riley as the chair and recommended ten regular members with staggered terms for that group. The four-year rotation process saw Damian Iseminger (New England Conservatory) succeed Margaret Kaus (Kansas State University) as chair of the Authorities Subcommittee. In addition, BCC recommended eleven appointments to fill subcommittee vacancies. Two task forces also started their work: the joint MLA/OLAC Joint Task Force on Best Practice Guidelines for Cataloging SlotMusic, with three MLA members, and the MLA-BCC Genre/Form Task Force, with eleven members. I thank all of the BCC members, as well as the various subcommittee members, for their efforts in supporting BCC’s work during the past year.

The continuing evolution of RDA has absorbed much of BCC’s work in the past year; we again provided detailed comments on drafts and responses to other constituency proposals, especially the suite of documents deriving from the original LC document 5JSC/LC/12, which proposed significant revisions to the instructions for naming musical works and expressions. The Subcommittee on Descriptive Cataloging, members of the Authorities Subcommittee, and Mark Scharff in particular, spent countless hours reviewing these documents along with the full RDA draft, providing comments about particular issues related to music materials. In addition, Mark and I attended a portion of the March 2009 meeting of the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA (JSC) when these music instructions were discussed; we were invited to participate due to our roles in ALA’s Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (Mark is the MLA liaison; I am a voting member). For more details about RDA activities, please see the separate annual report from the Subcommittee on Descriptive Cataloging.

As an outgrowth of RDA development, Mark Scharff and I considered ways to monitor music catalogers’ participation in the upcoming U.S. National Libraries Test Plan for RDA. Then in March, Kelley McGrath, current chair of the Online Audiovisual Catalogers Cataloging Policy Committee, asked if MLA would like to join them in applying as a test partner in this project. With expressions of interest from MLA members and with Board approval, we submitted a joint application, which was officially accepted in May. The individual participants, with approximately 10 from MLA, will catalog a “core” set of materials in various formats using AACR2 and RDA and will also catalog additional materials of their choice using RDA alone. MLA’s inclusion in the test project should ensure that RDA gets a rigorous vetting for music materials and should provide practical information for future discussions of changes to music-cataloging practice. We currently anticipate that the six-month test period will begin in January 2010.

BCC and its subcommittee members also focused on the evolution of the music genre/form project, spearheaded by the Library of Congress. As the project gained momentum, we recommended the appointment of MLA-BCC Music Genre/Form Task Force to work on the specifics; this group started its work in March. I thank Beth Flood, chair of both the Task Force and the Subject Access Subcommittee for her dedication in working on this challenging project. For more details, see the separate annual report from the MLA-BCC Music Genre/Form Task Force.

Other BCC activities included:

• Approving two documents from the OLAC/MLA Playaway Cataloging Joint Task Force: Guide to Cataloging Playaway Devices Based on AACR2r Chapters 6 and 9 and Playaways and RDA Summary of relevant sections from RDA Chapters 3, 6, and 7
• Accepting and disseminating the Statement on the Transposition/Arrangement and Presence/Absence of Parts Positions of the MARC21 006 and 008 Fields prepared by the MARC Formats Subcommittee
• Accepting and disseminating the Final Report of The BCC Working Group on Work Records for Music, with thanks to all of the working group members (chaired by Jean Harden, University of North Texas)
• Updating the BCC Procedures Manual
• Continuing to update and streamline the BCC website

Four BCC liaisons attended the ALA Midwinter meeting in Denver, where they represented the perspective of the music cataloging community on ALA committees and interest groups related to cataloging (ACIG, OLAC’s CAPC, CC:DA, MARBI, and SAC). The Music Cataloging Bulletin contains reports from these meetings, which are also available on the BCC Web site (http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/ BCC/bcc.html) along with annual reports provided by the Library of Congress and OCLC representatives.

BCC held two business meetings and presented two programs at the Chicago conference, one on current topics in cataloging and one on RDA. The RDA in Practice session was well-attended, with approximately 150 people in the audience. This highly successful session featured sample RDA cataloging records, prepared by volunteers chiefly from BCC or its subcommittees.  Positive feedback from this program made its way to Marjorie Bloss, the RDA Project Manager, who asked that we share the examples and our experiences using RDA with her, and presumably with the rest of the JSC. I am grateful to all of the volunteers who created the sample records that made this program so successful: Damian Iseminger (New England Conservatory), Casey Mullin (Stanford University), Daniel Paradis (Université de Montréal), and Steve Yusko and his colleagues at the Library of Congress.

Submitted by Kathy Glennan

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