BCC98/ALCTSAV/1

ALCTS-AV Committee Meeting
ALA Midwinter Meeting
Sunday, Jan. 9, 1998, 8 a.m.

The major piece of business at the Sunday meeting was a report by former committee member Martha Yee on the International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR2 (popularly known as the "Toronto conference," at which she delivered a paper, "What is a Work?" She identified the issues (seriality, principles underlying AACR, and content-vs.-carrier) that emerged from the conference as items which would receive the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR2's (JSC) earliest attention, and described the "data-modeling" that the JSC plans to employ to examine the other main areas outlined by the conference. While acknowledging that anticipation of and preparation for the conference had seemed to induce paralysis in the processes of rule revision, Yee believes that this is giving way to an atmosphere in which interested parties will have more opportunities for input on future directions for AACR; she advises groups not to wait for the JSC's data-modeling project to begin the process of developing ideas into proposals. The committee also reviewed plans for two tour on June 26, during the Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. -- one to see the National Geographic Society's image collection; the other a two-site visit to the USA Today library and the Newseum. A proposal for a future project was the development of a guide to acquisitions and collection-development tools for media resources.

ALCTS-AV Meeting #2
Tuesday, Jan. 11, 1998, 9:30 a.m.

The committee approved a document from the ALCTS-AV Name Change Task Force that re-names the group the "ALCTS Media Resources Committee" and revises its charge to reflect the broader scope of materials coming under the committee's purview. The chair of the task force then carried the proposal to a concurrent meeting of ALCTS'sOrganization and Bylaws Board; having gained their endorsement, the document next goes to the ALCTS Executive Board for final approval. Changes needed for names and charges of subcommittees can be handled internally.

The committee next received corrections and additions to liaison reports submitted via e-mail (including MLA's). Among items of interest to MLA members:

• AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) received a report from the Motion Picture, Broadcast and Recorded Sound Division of LC that they have been using genre/form terms from the Moving Image Genre Form Guide since October 1997. The source code (MARC field 655 $2) for these terms is migfg.

• OLAC's next meeting is set for Nov. 4-7, 1998, at the Charlotte (NC) Radisson Plaza.

• The machine-generated authority records for music materials created as part of the joint LC/OCLC project are being loaded and should eventually number over 66,000 records.

• The Digital Resources Committee is working on its Web site (http://www.ala.org/alcts/organization/div/drc/drc.html), but has been slowed down by difficulties with the ALA board governing publications over the right to post material on the site, even DRC documents. A preliminary topic for a 1999 program is authorization (e.g. verifying the status of a user logging in to a licensed database). The committee wants to establish a "Friends of DRC" listserv to allow more outside input on activities and proposals. Norma Hendrickson (LC) addressed DRC on a project to provide CIP records for computer files. While LC catalogs ca. 250 titles/month, CIP records have averaged only 30-40 titles a year. Nonetheless, members hoped that the project would continue, and Hendrickson urged concerned catalogers to suggest names of publishers of such material that LC could contact regarding inclusion. She can be contacted at nhen@loc.gov.

• No formal reports were received from the Computer Files Discussion Group or the Video Round Table. Ann Caldwell will seek information to distribute.

• The ALCTS-AV Producer/Distributor-Library Relations Subcommittee has completed work on the "Are you media-savvy?" brochure for sound recordings, the 3rd in a series of brochures aimed at publishers, distributors, and packagers of media. After feedback from outside groups, the subcommittee expects to arrange for publication of the brochures. To follow will be a "definitional" brochure to clarify terms used in the format-based brochures.

• The Standards Subcommittee has received a final version of the "Draft American national standard for information on packaging, labeling and marketing of user mounted electronic multimedia resources;" since nearly all the members of the Subcommitee are new, approval was deferred to Annual to allow them to examine the document. The subcommittee also agreed to examine the report of the CC:DA Task Force on the Cataloging of Works Intended for Performance, with the goal of developing recommendations for ALCTS-AV's consideration that could be passed on to CC:DA.

In matters of old business:
1) ALCTS-AV's program program proposal "Acquiring minds want to know : the acquisitions process of video and CD-ROMS" was not accepted for the 1998 Annual program. Another proposal, with the same title, but a different slant, will be presented for 1999. The proposal will focus on two parts of the acquisition process: identifying bibliographic resources and finding titles, and decision-making.

2) Lowell Ashley, ALCTS-AV intern, has begun work on the Web page. Committee members are encouraged to suggest appropriate types of material and links to make. There will be a need for a policy-and-scope statement, within the overall ALA guidelines for pages.

3) The chair has received some comments about the draft of the new NISO Standard for Holdings Statements for Bibliographic Items, ANSI/NISO Z39.71-199X, and is open to more, but has a deadline of Jan. 20 for submitting the ballot.

New business consisted of floating ideas for future directions for the committee. Items mentioned included: followup to developments out of the Toronto Conference, a bibliography of resources for research, pursuing cooperative projects with the Digital Resources Committee, the formation of an "educational outlook" task force, and more consideration of the issues surrounding reformatting of information.

Postscript: a Feb. 4 e-mail communication from chair Ann Caldwell announced that the name change proposal mentioned above has been approved by the ALCTS Executive Board.

Submitted by Mark Scharff

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Last updated April 18, 2000