BCC99/Auth/3
AUTHORITIES SUBCOMMITTEE, BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL COMMITTEE
Open meeting, MLA Annual Meeting
Friday, March 19, 1998, Los Angeles, Calif.
Ca. 55 people attended the open meeting of the Authorities Subcommittee. After welcoming
the audience and reviewing the subcommittee's charge, chair Mark Scharff touched on themes
from the
LITA/ALCTS Authority Control in the Online Environment Interest Group reporting session at
ALA Midwinter (a full report is available at the BCC Web site). The Subcommittee's own
Rebecca Dean (OCLC) chairs ACIG, and among the speakers was Karen Little (University of
Louisville). The ACIG program for the summer meeting in New Orleans, "Who owns
authority control," will feature Linda Barnhart (University of California-San Diego),
BCC chair. Scharff also noted that two members were concluding their service on the
subcommittee -- Cheryl Gowing (University of Miami) and Ruth Inman (Kennedy-King College).
Joy Pile (Middlebury College) gave an update on the subcommittee's work toward drafting an
MLA policy statement about the importance of authority control. Discussion during the
business meeting showed the need for additional sections. The subcommittee hopes to wrap
up its work online and present the document to BCC for e-mail deliberation and submission
to the MLA Board this summer. Michelle Koth (Yale University) reported on developments
with the Types of Composition document. A Web page of additions and corrections is
available at http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/moretype.htm
. The subcommittee has been discussing terms via e-mail and spent a good amount of
time in the business meeting doing the same. She encouraged input from interested parties.
Suzanne Mudge (Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University), the subcommittee's
representative to the BCC Website Working Group, said that the Group had decided that it
had concluded its charge and had disbanded, with the BCC Webmaster/Recording Secretary,
Dennis Davies-Wilson (University of New Mexico-Los Alamos) now responsible for the site.
Joy Pile then reported on her work to find an effective way to supply notated and aural
incipits for musical works in a Web-based online catalog. Middlebury College's online
catalog uses DRA software, which supports OPAC display of headings in authority records.
By adding 856 fields to the authority record for the Goldberg Variations of J.S. Bach, she
allows catalog users to click on an "about" link which then gives the users the
choice of viewing a scanned image of the first few bars of the piece, or listing to ca.
30-45 seconds of a recording of the work (from a digitized sound file). The image was
relatively easy; creating the sound file required access to streaming software normally
reserved for faculty use. Joy considered the notated and aural incipits to fall under the
provisions of fair use. She did see a challenge in the current lack of standardization in
sound-file playback. She saw these incipits as most useful for helping users identify
musical works by composers for whom thematic catalogs don't exist or that are not readily
available. A lively and wide-ranging question-and-comment period followed. Among the
issues raised:
1) Could the notated incipits come from online thematic catalogs? What would be
copyright implications? Would the authority file become a virtual thematic catalog?
2) Could MIDI files, which are far smaller, be used instead of recordings for the sound
file? Would they be adequate for an orchestral work, or a work in which timbre was an
important distinguishing feature?
3) Would supplying these files be optional for creators of national-level authority
records? (Almost certainly). Where would the image and sound files reside? Would there be
guidelines to govern which records to encode?
Asked whether or not the subcommittee should consider further development of this idea,
response from the audience was overwhelmingly positive.
As discussions do, this one wandered into other areas. One had to do with the status of
the 856 field in authority records. Its use has been approved by MARBI, but not yet
documented in the USMARC publications. There are still questions about how the field will
and should be used. Another topic was the need or utility of authorizing a fixed-field
value that would distinguish authority records for single works from authority records for
collections. Adoption of the access-control-record model for drawing relationships among
items would require such a distinction to be made, and would also offer more control over
the use of authority records and the display of appropriate references in a library's
catalog. This issue would eventually have to go through the Subcommittee on MARC Formats
for consideration.
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