BCC2009/SDC/4

MUSIC LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
Bibliographic Control Committee
Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access
ALA Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, July 13, 2009
Reported by Mark Scharff, MLA Liaison to CC:DA

The Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA) met once during the ALA Annual Meeting in Chicago; the other sessions were cancelled for lack of agenda items, and to prevent a conflict with an RDA Update session on Saturday.  The Chair, John Myers (Union College) led the discussions.

This report focuses on items of interest to the music library community. For more information about the meeting and for reports about activities mentioned below, please see the CC:DA web page at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/tas/jca/ccda/index.html.  Presentation is more topical than chronological.

Reports

CC:DA Chair.  The full report is at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/tas/jca/ccda/docs/chair49.pdf . The Chair reviewed the votes taken by electronic mail since Midwinter 2008, and asked for and received confirmation of the results.  Both motions were associated with the development of RDA (Resource Description and Access), authorizing the JSC representative, John Attig, to prepare and submit an ALA response to RDA-related documents.  The first was to the revised proposals from the Library of Congress to change the RDA draft instructions for naming musical works, familiarly known as 5JSC/LC/12 followup and 5JSC/LC/12/follow up/2.  As with the original LC/12, the ALA response drew heavily from the MLA response to the documents.  The second was a response to the full draft of RDA.  Myers also reported that the Task Force for Review of ISBD Area 0 had presented a final report and had been discharged.  Finally, he announced that contrary to impressions given by CCS Executive Council actions, he would be serving another year as CC:DA chair. 

Library of Congress (Barbara Tillett, LC liaison to CC:DA). For a detailed report of LC initiatives, visit: http://www.loc.gov/ala/an-2009-update.html

Barbara Tillett reviewed highlights from her report.  Issues of particular interest to the music community include:

ALA Publishing Services (Don Chatham, Associate Executive Director)

Chatham said that RDA was “moving forward on schedule,” but that he would be looking to a Monday meeting with software developer Nannette Naught for confirmation.  He critiqued the RDA Update session given on Saturday, mentioning that parts of it were too technical and were being presented to the wrong audience.  ALA’s conversations with ILS vendors about RDA have had mixed results—nothing happens for them, it seems, without a final text.  LC has been initiating discussions with vendors, much more successfully, in advance of the RDA testing program, and Chatham hopes that communication will extend to ALA Publishing.  This is part of the challenge of connecting the conceptual and practical aspects of RDA.  As for pricing, Chatham noted that 1) not all costs have been calculated yet; 2) discussions with LC are ongoing re: Cataloger’s Desktop; 3) the schemas and data registry have costs, too.  There are still plans to market a basic RDA (the instructions) as a one-time purchase, which he expects to be in the $125-$150 range (up from $100-$125 at Midwinter).  A similar price would be used for a yearly subscription, with downward adjustments for multiple users.  He expects “largely reliable” pricing to be ready by October, and projected a “late November” publication date for RDA.  He noted that ALA Publishing provides approximately 50% of ALA’s revenue, so that any shortfall would have to be made up by increased dues or conference registration fees.

Among the questions during the ensuing discussion:

Joint Steering Committee (John Attig, ALA Representative)

Attig reported that ALA responses to the RDA full draft and the LC/12/follow up documents had been submitted.  He offered special thanks to Kathy Glennan, Mark Scharff, and Kevin Randall (Northwestern University) for their contributions to those documents.

The JSC received 1600 specific comments on the RDA draft; they identified and dealt with 600 of them as high-priority items at their March meeting.  That meeting marked the end of decision-making on the text, and a marked-up version of the text, running to 3000 pages, was delivered to the publisher on schedule.  After the software vendor incorporates the text into the RDA software, external users will conduct beta testing.  After that, the JSC will do a final review of the text for typo and error correction only—no rethinking will take place.  The RDA revision process is a separate topic for future discussion.  Attig noted that the JSC Web site had relocated to http://www.rda-jsc.org/ , and mentioned new documents there—mappings of RDA elements to various encoding schemes, known changes from AACR2, and a list of deferred issues.  He thanked Adam Schiff (University of Washington) for his work on the RDA examples; committee members in turn thanked John for blogging the March JSC meeting (http://www.personal.psu.edu/jxa16/blogs/resource_description_and_access_ala_rep_notes/blog/)

CC:DA Webmaster (Patricia Hatch).       

Migration efforts to move from the Penn State site to ALA Connect continue at a glacial pace.  ALA Connect is still new, and members expressed some frustration with using it.  Attig surmised that its ultimate value may be more for outreach than for being a working tool of the committee. 

RDA Implementation Task Force (John Myers for Shawne Miksa). 

The Task Force had its final meeting at this conference; it was discharged and changed into two new Task Forces—one for Planning and Training, and one for Update Programs.  The CC:DA chair is an ex officio member of the Planning and Training Task Force.  In assessing the Task Force presentations at Annual, the Preconference was deemed a success, with 126 participants and good feedback.  The Saturday RDA Update program was less successful, for reasons mentioned earlier in this report.  It’s expected that there will be an Update Forum at Midwinter 2010, though its content is yet to be determined.  Annual 2010 would feature a preconference and two program sessions—one a vendor panel on implementing, and a testing panel to provide some reflection on the testing period, at least anecdotally.

CCS Executive Committee meeting (John Myers)

The major point of interest for the committee was that the workload of the CC:DA Chair position has made it a very hard sell for potential candidates.   One possible remedy would be to increase the number of voting members and appoint one to be a vice-chair.  The ALA representative to the JSC also has had a staggering workload; the coming months being akin to the “eye of a hurricane,” may afford time to consider ways to lessen the load.

New Business

Attig reported that CC:DA had been invited to review the draft of the Functional Requirements for Subject Authority Data (FRSAD).  The deadline for comments was the end of July.  The Subject Access Committee would normally have the lead in reviewing such a document; the invitation to CC:DA recognized the committee’s experience with reviewing other such documents.  It also reflected a leadership vacuum in SAC.  A motion to establish a task force for this purpose was approved.  Lori Robare (University of Oregon) volunteered to chair the group; five CC:DA members and liaisons volunteered to serve, and Robare was directed to recruit members from SAC. 

Attig raised the question:  with the completion of work on the 1st version of the RDA text, what now?  He recommended that the committee start identifying instructions that will need revision sooner than later.  The Committee of Principals, RDA’s issuing body, has not begun discussion of what a revision process would look like.  Attig assumed that the JSC would continue to exist, but that other bodies may be more directly involved in revision processes.  He opined that the March 2010 meeting of the JSC would start this discussion, but likely not entertain any revision proposals.  Prioritizing will be a must, with bugs identified in the testing program coming first.  Constituencies should use the List of Deferred Items as fodder for their proposals.  (This will no doubt be a BCC task during the coming year).  

Voting members Robert Maxwell (Brigham Young University) and Paul Weiss (independent consultant) finished their CC:DA service at this meeting; they will be replaced by Martha Yee (UCLA) and Bob Wolverton (Mississippi State University).   John Myers continues as chair for another year.  The committee is scheduled to meet at ALA Midwinter 2010 on January 16 and 18. 

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Last updated August 18, 2009