Members
present: Patty Falk, Beth Flood (chair), Ralph Hartsock, Lynne Jaffe,
Marty Jenkins, Geraldine Ostrove (LC representative), Jenn Riley,
Hermine Vermeij
Members not present: Stacey Allison-Cassin, Brooke Lippy, John Wagstaff
Visitors present: 37
Recognition of Service
A special thank-you goes to outgoing members Lynne Jaffe and Jenn Riley
for their valuable contributions and time serving on this committee.
ALA report (Beth Flood)
In the LC report on the moving image project, the Policy office
recommended that each of the five new projexts (music, law,
cartography, literature, and religion) contribute to a centralized
genre/form thesaurus. The report also recommended that LC "explore new
models for a community-based thesaurus of genre/form terms in
collaboration with professional organizations and other instritutions" (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/movinggenre.pdf).
In other news, LC will be continuing the project to make a subset of
LCSH available in SKOS format. They are developing a site within the
loc.gov domain for this project, after which SKOS should go live again.
The ALA/ALCTS/SAC Genre/Form Implementation Subcommittee discussed RDA
carrier terms in relation to the developing genre/form thesaurus, and
suggested that a list of carrier types/format terms could be made and
those terms established as 155 genre/form headings. The group also made
plans to create a list of form subdivisions (MARC authority tag 185).
This list will be used by specific projects to identify
subject-specific form subdivision terms, and it will also be used by
the subcommittee in developing a list of terms used across disciplines.
A new Library of Congress 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.
Library of Congress report (Gerry Ostrove)
LC has created about 35,000 validation records to date. However, the
program being used in generating these records developed a problem,
resulting in duplicate records. The project is on hold until this
problem is resolved.
Discussion of the Genre/Form Project
The group, including visitors, discussed at length LC's proposal for
beginning the music genre/form project. Issues that arose included the
following.
- Can $8 linking fields be used to support pre-coordination of strings in a post-coordinated environment?
- Determining
how post-coordination will work with existing systems can come after
the project is begun. The terms and structure in this project need to
be portable beyond MARC. The vocabulary should support a
post-coordinated indexing system, but development of such a system is
not in the scope of this project. The project should perhaps encourage
ILS groups and OCLC to develop the structure necessary to support a
post-indexing system.
- Instrumentation
is a single category which can then be subdivided into instrument terms
and ensemble terms. Pattern headings will now be different. In the new
system, will there be a way to address numbers of instruments versus
number of players (doubling, alternate instruments, etc.)?
- Named
ensembles could pose a problem in terms of specificity, because
instrument terms are implied but not stated in the ensemble names. For
example, a (standard) string quartet includes a viola, but the term
"viola" is not in the ensemble name.
- What about
the 048 field? The coding can currently be more specific than subject
headings, but is it easy to transform to linguistic terms? On the issue
of codes versus terms, the important thing is consistency--either use
consistent terms or consistent codes. In any case, the current
048 codes need to be replaced, probably by the IAML code list, to
increase the vocabulary. This would be a good opportunity for MLA to
work with IAML.
- A problem is caused by the inherent Boolean logic in many ILS systems. Such systems allow users to search for records which include specified terms but do not allow limiting to only those
terms. Systems also are not usually capable of limiting searching to an
individual MARC field (i.e., one 048 field in a record that includes
several 048 fields.) However, this is an indexing problem, rather than
a problem that the genre/form project can solve.
- Separating
medium of performance from genre/form headings, without some providence
for the medium portion of the headings, could result in an automated
authority control problem. There is not a one-to-one correlation
between current music heading strings and future form/genre terms.
There is a threat that automated authority control vendors could flip
music heading strings from 650 to the form/genre 655 terms and lose the
medium of performance portion of the heading in the process. This
threat needs to be communicated to vendors along with a recommendation
that vendors do not process music genre/form headings until the project
is close to completion.
- Genre/form
terms and medium of performance terms need to be related in the public
interface. A user might start with the form term "Sonatas", but they
then need to be directed to instrumentation.
Minutes approved by email, April 2, 2009.
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Last updated April 6, 2009