BCC97/C/18
Annual Report
Bibliographic Control Committee (BCC)
Voting members: Linda Barnhart, Chair; Matthew Wise (Chair, Subcommittee on Descriptive Cataloging); Karen Little (Chair, Subcommittee on MARC Formats); Harriette Hemmasi (Chair, Subcommittee on Subject Access); Mark Scharff (Chair, Authorities Subcommittee); Philip Schreur (Editor, Music Cataloging Bulletin); Susan Vita (Library of Congress representative).
Non-voting members: Ed Glazier (RLG representative); Jay Weitz (OCLC representative); Christine Zuger (WLN representative).
The four subcommittee chairs represented MLA at ALA meetings in Washington, D.C. in February 1997 and San Francisco in June 1997. Their reports of those meetings have been made public; a summary of the major issues is given in the individual subcommittee annual reports which follow here.
This has been an extraordinarily busy year for the BCC. The group is completing its review of the Guidelines for Sheet Music Cataloging, and hopes to forward that document to the MLA Technical Reports Editor before the Boston meeting. BCC is also reviewing the very substantive Dance Cataloging Guidelines at the request of the Dance Heritage Coalition. The group is preparing a response to a request for support from the Society of American Archivists Committee on Archival Information Exchange for their proposal at ALA Midwinter 1998 to do away with the manuscripts codes from Leader/06.
At the New Orleans meeting, the Working Group on 20th Century Terminology completed its charge and was released, with thanks. The group produced an excellent thesaurus of terms which were lacking in LC Subject Headings, as well as a clear and useful report on their procedures. Notably, they submitted 20 proposals for new subject headings to the Library of Congress in the area of contemporary music.
In addition, a Working Group on the BCC Website was appointed by the MLA President in March 1997. Chaired by Philip Schreur, the group includes representatives from each BCC subcommittee and the Music Thesaurus Project Advisory Task Force. The group has moved forward very quickly with an "under construction" website for BCC minutes, reports, and links to other relevant sites. We hope to announce the public release of this website before the Boston meeting.
At the annual meeting in New Orleans, it was agreed that it was appropriate that one of the BCC subcommittee chairs (all of whom attend ALA as MLA liaisons) should represent MLA on the ALCTS-AV Committee. Because of the technical services functions of that group, it makes more sense for a BCC representative to make that connection with ALA, as opposed to MLA's general ALA liaison. The Chair of the Authorities Subcommittee has taken on this new role, and will be reporting out ALCTS-AV matters in writing and at the annual meeting.
At its May meeting, the MLA Board approved adding a Recording Secretary position to the BCC as a non-voting member. The BCC is in the process of further defining the responsibilities of this position and will subsequently draft a call to the membership through MLA-L and the MLA Newsletter.
The BCC has also been very active in planning a plenary session for the Boston meeting on the topic of core records and their implications for library catalogs. The speakers are Jennifer Bowen (Sibley Music Library), Joan Schuitema (Northwestern University) and Joan Swanekamp (Yale University). We encourage both technical services and public services music librarians to attend this session on Friday, February 13, 1998 from 9-10:30 a.m.
Submitted by Linda Barnhart, BCC Chair
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Last updated February 4, 2000