Catalogers Group

July 11, 2002

 

Attending: Gia Aviazan, Sharon Benamou, Elie Chammou, Beth Feinberg, Joan Flintoff Lopear, Janice Matthiesen, Luiz Mendes, Caroline Miller, Nancy Norris, Jeff Morehead, Louise Ratliff, John Riemer, Angela Riggio, Rita Stumps

 

ALA Reports : Highlights

 

 

 

Beth Feinberg

 

Ø       ACRL SEES : Slavic& East European Section, Committee on Cataloging:

                Discussed LC Serbian-Croatian language codes and subjects;

                Narrowed down abbreviations proposed for AACR2 App. B from 70 to 20;

                Cannot have liaison to CC:DA; looking into having informal representative;

                Slavic NACO Funnel: Joanna Dyla at Stanford currently working on it;

                Next year Committee will celebrate its 40th anniversary at ALA Toronto;

Annual program this year discussed smaller universities and collections not meeting the needs of faculty, and solutions to the problem;

                JSTOR presentation and its expansion to include Slavic materials;

                There will be an update on the split between Serbian (Cyrillic) vs. Croatian (Roman script).

 

 

Janice Matthiesen

 

Big Heads

 

Ø       Brian Schottlaender gave update on UC’s Mellon-funded e-journal study, the Collection Management Initiative (CMI) research project, investigating patrons’ preference for digital content vs. hard copy.  Final research results to be published at the end of grant program. Motivation for grant: (1) UCs running out of space, (2) SRLF duplicates/redundancies, and (3) availability of e-versions. Set-up of research: for control campus: hard copy use only; for experimental campus: patrons required to use electronic instead of paper copy; unless patron requested hard-copy and provided reason for request.

Quantitative conclusions: print use is higher when copy is on-site; e-version had higher use; digital copy printed out by patron, at times.

Qualitative conclusions: content not always available on e-versions; some publishers omit some content in e-version.

UCSD will be re-examining contractual agreement with publishers to address content discrepancy between versions.

 

Ø       Glenn Patton announced that OCLC Windows-Based Client will be available between Apr-June, 2003.

 

 

MARC for Special Collections

Ø       Training for Special Collections Catalogers at Yale: each cataloger assigned to a member of the team who trains cataloger in AACR2, DCRB, and NACO.  At Toronto, Special Collections catalogers work as a team. Both Yale and Toronto have eight Rare Book catalogers.

 

 

 

 

 

Effects of 9/11 on Special Collections

Ø       Organized by Head of Special Collections at Columbia, and attended by archivists and special collections specialists, discussed concern for archival collections destroyed during 9/11, and the need to collect artifacts to record major historical event.  Issues addressed: (a) document strategy to record event for the future (active collectors vs. community/passive collectors), (b) scope of cataloging: indefinite and diachronic (snapshot of time/event), (c) management of materials, and (d) legal issues (permissions, identification of individuals in photographs, etc.). This should be a collaboration of national effort, and LC feels great responsibility to document event.

 

 

RBMS—ACRL Rare Books and Manuscripts Section Annual Program

Ø       “Emergence of Digital Scholarship: New Models for Librarians, Archivists & Humanists”

Daniel V. Pitti (University of Virginia), Morris Eaves (University of Maryland), and John Unsworth (Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, Alderman Library)

 

Focused on theoretical background on archiving digital collections.  Addressed control/contribution to digital collections, and the emergence of thematic research collections. Example of thematic research collection: William Blake Archive (http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/blake/)

Collection consists of Blake’s manuscripts, images, printed works, curricula as well as other materials such discussion groups on Blake’s works. Collection has engendered interest among Blake scholars, and there is a commitment to maintaining and cataloging archive.

 

 

Angela Riggio

 

Ø       E-Resources Management Metadata

WebHub:  http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/elicensestudy/home.html

 

Tim Jewell, Chair.  Group continued ALA MidWinter discussion. Core Group (Sharon Farb, Ivy Anderson, Nathan Robertson, Tim Jewell) will propose to DLF and NISO data element sets, e-resource management, and standard for e-resources.

Updates:               

§         DLF/NISO Workshop given in May: problem deciding on a common metadata element; proposal of XML to be issued and sponsorship to be secured.

§         Legal implications of sharing licensed data: different laws from state to state; which resources can be shared

Johns Hopkins:

§         back to the drawing board for its ERDb equivalent; logistics/functionality problem.  Currently using the Catalog as the central point for e-resources and had problems extracting data from the Catalog.

Penn State:

§         moved to Cold Fusion/Oracle database; lack of SIRSI functionality has delayed implementation plans.

NASIG follow-up meeting update:

§         many universities are building separate databases for e-resources.

§         III interested in projects and began developing e-resource product, a stand-alone system.

§         At NASIG, III announced its product.

 

 

 

Ø       Planning for Life After OCLC Passport for Cataloging

Bill Carney & David Whitehair, OCLC

 

Carney reassured attendees that this is just like other changes—“We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again.”  Passport “has to go”; it was written for Windows 3.1. He explained that a database cannot do what needs to be done on the old platform. Connexion introduced and change also justified as being more inclusive: “more kinds of people will do cataloging, and librarians will do the enhancing.”  The move to Oracle will allow amazon.com-like views. Unicode will not be available until move to Oracle, and Windows Client will be installed in 2003. Passport will be taken down December 31, 2003.

 

 

Ø       ALA/ALCTS Newspaper Users Discussion Group

Nan Mcmurry, University of Georgia.

Presentation about the independent film lab at UofG library, which has completed the microfilming of about 200 weekly and daily newspaper titles. Next step will be digitization, but the project is dedicated to microfilm. Attempts to digitize collection has resulted in the creation of the Georgia Historic Newspapers Database (http://www.libs.uga.edu/gnp/index.htm).

 

 

 

Ø       CORC Users Group

Fate of the Group was discussed. Participants (50-60) would like to continue as Connexion Users Group functioning as support group to Connexion or to cataloging of e-resources. It is unclear whether OCLC will to continue to support Users Group.  CORC-L subscribers have automatically migrated to OCLC-CAT list, now that CORC has been replaced by Connexion. Users Group will continue.

 

 

John Riemer

 

 

Ø       Cataloging Norms Discussion Meeting

SerialsSolutions company is offering to provide to libraries MARC record sets for all the full-text titles in all the aggregated databases to which a library subscribes.  In cases where title coverage overlaps across packages, SerialsSolutions would de-dupe, so that the library would receive just one record with multiple 856 fields.  More information: http://www.serialssolutions.com/aggregators.asp

 

The University of Southern Mississippi has undertaken the Civil Rights in Mississippi project.  A unique aspect to this digital library project is the USM cataloging department’s applying to PCC for NACO & SACO membership expressly the new names and subjects encountered in the work.

 

 

Ø       XML & Cross-database searching possibilities

A colleague shared with John a conclusion formed after completing a daylong XML workshop at ALA.  There is a natural tendency to find it unfortunate if item-level resource descriptions emerging from digital library projects are not incorporated into databases like CORC or the local catalog.  This concern might be unfound, at least in part.  Dublin Core metadata residing in separate files can be crosswalked to MARC, as we have seen in CORC/Connexion.  The resulting MARC data can be served up in XML format (see http://www.loc.gov/marc/marcsgml.html for details) and searched in an ILS that offers cross-database searching.

 

This insight comes at a good time, for it appears that our Music Library’s Archive of Popular American Music (APAM) and Frontera projects will continue to use a local Oracle file to store the records.  Of much more significance is the decision by Stephen Davison and Gordon Theil to adopt our recommendations for using Dublin Core Qualified data elements, to use controlled subject lists, and to consult the name authority file during the work.

 

 

Ø       Big Heads

Memorable highlight: When the discussion of implementing the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) model in the utilities appeared to suggest that distinguishing between Work and Manifestation was a completely new concept, Cindy remarked, “I may be missing something here, but haven’t catalogers always been doing these things?”

 

 

Ø       CONSER-At-Large

There is a particular urgency to get records for the contents of large, aggregated sets into the catalog as quickly as possible.  Jim Stickman, of the University of Washington, pointed out near the end of the meeting that, unless we succeed in that task, the online catalog will cease to be the single-place discovery site users turn to for any type of e-resources.

 

 

Ø       Interest Groups in ALCTS’ future?

ALCTS is seriously considering whether to adopt LITA-style Interest Groups.  This might be a solution to the perennial problem of discussion groups wanting to do things like put on programs or pursue actions but not being allowed to under division policy.

 

 

Next meeting: July 25, 2002

Topic :  ALA and NASIG Reports

Future Topic: Mini-Demos of National Library OPACs (L. Ratliff, J. Morehead)

 

 

Submitted by Luiz Mendes 07/19/2002