Catalogers Group

Minutes

January 31, 2002

 

 

Present:   John Riemer, Gia Aivazian, Nancy Norris, Rebecca Aiken, Beth Feinberg,

Elie Chammou, Janice Matthiesen, Angela Riggio, Jeff Morehead, Joan LoPear, Louise Ratliff, Jeff Sundquist, Renée McBride, Valerie Bross, Jean Rashedi (recorder)

 

The meeting consisted of reports from Janice, Angela, and Valerie on various meetings

they attended at the ALA Midwinter Meeting held in New Orleans, Jan.18-22.

 

I.  Janice

 

Janice reported on the OCLC Enhance Sharing Session which she attended on January 19.  She will circulate a copy of “The Cataloging & Collections Update” passed out at that meeting.  Notes from her report:

 

The final sale of NetLibrary to OCLC will occur at the end of January 2002.  NetLibrary will stay in Colorado.

 

The OCLC website now includes Cataloging Internet Resources: a Manual and Practical Guide http://www.purl.org/oclc/cataloging-internet

 

OCLC is going to write a new Bibliographic Formats and Standards.

 

OCLC’s Duplicate Detection and Resolution (DDR) process has run through the database fourteen times in eleven years.  They will try to run the program more often.

This process handles duplicates of book records only.  If we detect a reported duplicate still in the database after they run the program, it should be reported to DDR.  Electronic resources attached to Book Format records should also be reported.

 

If vendor records which use the wrong format are found, they should be reported as soon as possible.  Likewise, duplicate vendor records should be reported. 

 

Cynthia Whittaker from OCLC reported that foreign vendors producing records see no

advantage to revising their records.  They say that these records are not made for

cataloging purposes, but for reasons useful to the vendors.

 

There will be (as in CORC) as way to select records from a specific institution.

 

OCLC encourages more training and participation in Bibco and National Enhance.  As participants in these programs, catalogers may do more than one upgrade to a record, but will be credited only once.  Catalogers should not leave locked records in the Save File long; OCLC can tell who is using the record.  Reporting problems on PCC records is encouraged.

 

Janice then reported on the BIBCO at Large meeting, January 20:

http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/bibco/bibcoatlarge01a.html

 

Integrating resources:  Chapter 3 committee disconvened because LCRIs cannot come out until the AACR2 publisher releases the rules.  No PCC comments at this time.  Chapter 12 committee is working currently, and the Chapter 12 serials group for LCRIs is also meeting.

 

LCRIs are expected out in August 2002 and will take effect on September 1 at LC. 

 

OpCo training will be held in May for Conser.  All BIBCO catalogers may attend this

workshop.  (A task group on training has been appointed.)

New BIBCO OpCo (Operations Committee) members will serve for 3 years rather than 2, October 2001 – September 2004.  Current members’ terms have been extended to 2003.  OpCo selection criteria:  only designated BIBCO representatives at a participating institution;  members represent geographical areas and types of institutions; approval of BIBCO administrator.

 

Report of Model C Survey – effect of CORE  (March 2001).   Codes have developed without much input from users.  The study, User Perspectives on ohe Program for Cooperative Cataloging Bibco Core Record Standard is available at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/modelcfinal.pdf.  There are still some questions about the usefulness of CORE records and whether they contain sufficient information as compared to full level cataloging.

 

David Banush’s BIBCO survey on cataloger attitudes toward the core record.  (PoCo is still mulling this over.)

Recommendations extracted from the report http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/bibco/coretudeex.html fall into three groups: conservative, evolutionary and transformative.  Each offers a different degree of change and could be implemented chronologically, by group or in part within and across groups.

 

  Group 1 – conservative:  redesign training and documentation to emphasize  the 

                 mechanics of record creation, the most common complaint; easy to

                 implement; expand publicity and outreach effort for BIBCO; support and

                 publicize further research on BIBCO records; work with utilities to remove

                 barriers to record creation and exchange.

  Group 2 – evolutionary:  de-emphasize CORE record in training, marketing and

                 practice; shift program emphasis from records to cataloger judgment;

                 rename CORE and full records.

  Group 3 – shift BIBCO’s primary mission from product to service provision; help meet

                 need for training; make optional record creation component of BIBCO; allow

                 broader group of institutions to be cooperative participants; move to

                 embrace non-AACR2, non-MARC metadata format; forward-looking (BIBCO

                 won’t deal with this now.)

  

II.  Angela

 

Friday, Jan. 18 4:30-6:30

E-Resource Management Metadata

 

This group has received sponsorship from ALCTS (Technical Services Directors of Large Research Libraries Discussion Group), and there is other interest, most notably from DLF (Digital Library Federation).

 

Tim Jewell (Univ. of Washington) moderated the meeting, which was very well attended, among them people from Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Univ. of Washington, Cornell, CDL, UCLA, MIT, Penn State (via handouts), Johns Hopkins, Univ. of Minnesota.

 

Presentations of e-resource management databases were made by Nathan Robertson of Johns Hopkins and Sharon Farb of UCLA, to facilitate discussion on the future goals of the group.

 

Johns Hopkins has spent a great deal of time thinking about their database structure, purpose and required data elements. They have recently started to populate a test version of the database, but just with a few records. Many of the details and relationships Robertson described paralleled those of our ERDb.

A few of the interesting features: the database will be JAKE-ready, meaning that JAKE record id numbers will be input into database records; subject access will be mapped from LC and MeSH; a planned continuity with outside metadata efforts like this one.

 

Sharon Farb offered a very descriptive presentation on UCLA’s ERDb—a technical difficulty had prevented the visual aid of a PowerPoint presentation that we had worked on, which was unfortunate because we had very much prepared the talk around the ERDb screen captures. Everyone was surprised that we were releasing the ERDb to the public on Jan.23rd, and immediately began to scribble down notes. There were a few questions asked—some directed at cataloging issues and the extraction of data from our catalog. Sharon gave a nod to the cataloging department insomuch as she told the group that cataloging for licensed resources occurred in a timely fashion (indicating that they weren’t problems with our workflows).

 

Tim Jewell then asked for some sharing from other libraries that were planning e-resources databases.

 

The group spent the final 20-30 minutes brainstorming about the future of the group and the potential value of continuing these meetings. The overwhelming sentiment was that the work to develop a comprehensive data element set for the identification, acquisition, licensing, tracking and troubleshooting of e-resources was vital to the success of any library to accurately maintain them in a catalog or in a library dedicated to public use. Also the idea to share information across libraries and to vendors (both ILS and product vendors) was strong.

 

The group discussed similar work being done by some people affiliated with NISO, and the promise was made to investigate and report back to this group, if not to have some contact with the NISO group to coordinate effort. Jewell said that this work is of great interest to ALCTS. Nathan Robertson mentioned that other groups would take an interest in sponsorship as well. A discussion about future meetings followed; it was decided that it would be most convenient to piggy-back onto another major meeting (like ALA in Atlanta). A proposal to break the task of devising a core set of data elements up into subgroups was accepted—the subgroups were identified as Descriptive/Identification, Licensing, and Tracking/Troubleshooting. Volunteers to each subgroup will work via email until ALA in June, when everyone would regroup and report a proposed subset of required and defined metadata elements.

 

http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/elicensestudy/alamidwinter2002.htm

 

Adam Chandler has put his minutes up from the Managing

E-Resources Metadata meeting on the e-res. web hub.

 

Monday, Jan.21 9:30-11:30—CORC User’s Group

 

Jim Simms from OCLC talked about recent enhancements to the CORC database.

Between now and July, CORC will introduce what he termed “a new look and feel,” to the database, and further enhancement to searching, constant data, work forms, statistics, messages, Section 508 (which is keystroke equivalents for mousing actions)—overall, OCLC is promising better navigation and an all-around improvement of the interface. On July 1, CORC is scheduled to “go away,” and this interface will don a new name, and will eventually replace the Passport product.

 

Rebecca Payne, from University of Wisconsin-Madison, gave a presentation on the Digital Asia Library, a cooperative venture with Ohio State Libraries and the Univ. of Minnesota Libraries, of which she is the project leader. The mission of the Digital Asia Library is to “provide access to high quality Asian Internet resources,” by creating a catalog of resources that are selected and evaluated by subject specialists. The collection numbers over 3000 currently, and consists of freely available resources in both Asian languages and English. The cataloging is done in CORC, and the workflow incorporates both Dublin Core (at the beginning of the process) and MARC (the final record). The Digital Asia Database, is available at http://digitalasia.library.wisc.edu/

 

Following the presentation was a general discussion about the fate of the CORC User’s Group. There seemed to be an overall feeling that this group should continue after the demise of CORC as we know it, but opinion differed regarding the focus that the group should take. Some felt that we should carry on as an e-resources cataloging group, much as we are now, while others felt that the scope of the group should be extended, at least at the initial phase of the new interface, to include all users of the new OCLC cataloging product. Although no concrete plan for the group was decided, I’m certain that this discussion will continue over CORC-L, and culminate at the User’s Group Meeting in Atlanta.

 

The attendees then broke out into smaller groups to discuss the topics of workflow, authority control, pathfinders, metadata, and training. I was “lucky” enough to lead the training group and give a short report of our discussion. John also got to give the report on the workflow group’s discussion.

Eventually, a summary of these discussions will be posted at the CORC User’s Group website: http://www.sil.si.edu/staff/CORC-User-Group/

 

III. Valerie

 

1.      More on new OCLC Cataloging Service (from OCLC Update Session)

As Janice mentioned, OCLC will be releasing its new & as yet unnamed interface in July, as previously announced. Like CORC, the interface will be linked to the current database structure. Then at some later (as yet unknown) date, the cataloging database(s) will be migrated to an Oracle-based system. NOTE: This information only applies to the Cataloging services; InterLibrary Loan is on a different implementation schedule.

 

2.      More on revised Chapter 12 (from CONSER at Large and from ALCTS-SS/CSSC)
As Janice also mentioned, a loose-leaf edition of AACR2 including revised Chapter 12 is scheduled for release in July; LC plans to implement the chapter in September. Representatives from OCLC (Glenn Patton) & RLIN (Ed Glazier) voiced surprise at the early implementation date. Robert Bremer & Ed Glazier explained in detail the complex nature of change.

3.      Classification Web (from Demo by Cheryl Cook)
Classification Web has a scheduled release date of Apr-May (or May-June). It has the same look & functionality of the version that we used. One major enhancement: LC will allow subscribers to view LC’s bib records corresponding to the class numbers.

Question from audience: When will Cataloger’s Desktop be available through the Web?
Answer: Catalogers' Desktop has been discussed, but is harder to convert because it consists of full text. Bruce Johnson is looking at NextPage3 as a possible navigation tool for the full text

 

IV.  Announcements

Next month’s meetings will be Feb. 14 & 21 in West Electronic Classroom.