LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE

Online Newsletter of the Cataloging Directorate

Library of Congress Volume 9, no. 8 ISSN 1066-8829 July 2001

CONTENTS

1. New Team Leaders in SMCD
2. Barbara Tillett Receives Arthur S. Flemming Award
3. Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan
4. Proceedings of the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium
5. LCRIs Available for Review
6. Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee
7. SACO Manual
8. International Participation in the PCC
9. Web OPAC Response Time
10. LC/RUSA Forum on Digital Reference and Bibliographic Control

New Team Leaders in SMCD

The Special Materials Cataloging Division (SMCD) gained two new team leaders this spring. Stephen Yusko was named to lead the Music and Sound Recordings II Team (MSRII) on May 6, and Allene Hayes became leader of the Computer Files and Microforms Team (CF&M) on June 4.

Yusko worked in other cataloging departments for more than ten years before coming to LC. After earning a bachelor's degree from the New England Conservatory of Music, he was a cataloging assistant at the Boston Public Library (BPL) while he earned a master's degree in library science from Simmons College. He then worked as a music cataloger at BPL and at the University of Houston. He joined LC's former Music Section in SMCD in October 1984. He served as acting team leader of MSR II and acted for six months in 2000 as leader of the Rare Book Team. He is a longstanding member of the Music Library Association and has compiled the quarterly booklist column for its journal, Notes, since 1986. He also belongs to the International Association of Music Libraries.

Hayes came to the Library in 1982 as a preliminary cataloger in the former Descriptive Cataloging Division. She moved to the Copyright Cataloging Division of the Copyright Office in the Library, where she was promoted to the position of senior reviser/reviewer and in 1986 received the Congressional Black Caucus Outstanding Achievement Award. She was selected for the LC intern class of 1992 and on the conclusion of her internship joined CF&M as a cataloger. In 1993 she was detailed to the Office of the Librarian for eight months as a member of the Congressional Services Team, a pilot effort to study and enhance the Library's responsiveness to congressional needs. Since 1996 she has served as BEOnline project leader (see URL //www.loc.gov/rr/business/beonline/), and most recently, was detailed to the Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division as the directorate's electronic resources coordinator. She is the coordinator for LC's CORC cataloging and is a member of MINERVA (Mapping the Internet: Electronic Resources Virtual Archive; see "LC/RUSA Forum on Digital Reference and Bibliographic Control" in this issue of LCCN) and its forerunner the Web Preservation Project Team, two Library-wide projects to explore the harvesting, cataloging, and archiving of open-access Web sites. Hayes is a graduate of Clark College in Atlanta (B.A.) and the University of Maryland, College Park (M.L.S.). She is a member of the American Library Association and the American Society for Information Science and Technology.


Barbara Tillett Receives Arthur S. Flemming Award

On June 5, Integrated Library System Program Director Barbara Tillett was honored with the Arthur S. Flemming Award, given to outstanding men and women in the federal government. Recognized in the administrative category, she was one of thirteen recipients, including also honorees in applied science and science. The awards ceremony was followed by a reception and formal dinner at the George Washington University. The award recognized Tillett for her "outstanding leadership and extraordinary commitment to the acquisition and installation of an Integrated Library System." Associate Librarian for Library Services Winston Tabb, subsequently quoted in The Gazette, LC's internal newspaper, commented that "The development and implementation of the Library of Congress ILS was a remarkable achievement for the Library of Congress--in the scope of library activities it covered, the massive numbers of staff involved in the planning and implementation process, and the very ambitious timetable required."

Now in its fifty-second year, the Flemming Awards program honors individuals with three to fifteen years of federal service who have made extraordinary contributions to the federal government.


Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan

The Library of Congress Cataloging Directorate has issued "Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan." The action plan is an outgrowth of the Library of Congress Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium: Confronting the Challenge of Networked Resources and the Web, held on Nov. 15-17, 2000. The Cataloging Directorate convened this invitational conference as a working meeting that would take advantage of an assemblage of experts from the various communities that play a role in the creation, retrieval, and cataloging of Web resources. The intention was to generate recommendations for the Library of Congress and the larger library community to use as a blueprint for action to improve bibliographic control of the Web.

In the months that followed the Conference, the Conference Organizing Team and the Cataloging Management Team considered each of the more than one hundred fifty recommendations emanating from the conference in order to craft the action plan. The result was a plan containing six broad objectives: 1) increase the availability of standard records for selected electronic resources; 2) enhance the access to and display of records for selected Web resources across multiple systems; 3) work collaboratively with metadata standards communities to improve bibliographic control of selected Web resources; 4) develop automated tools for harvesting and maintaining metadata to improve bibliographic control of selected Web resources; 5) provide appropriate training/continuing education to improve bibliographic control of selected Web resources; and 6) support research and development on emerging metadata standards and address the challenges of interoperability to improve bibliographic control of selected Web resources. Each objective is elaborated by more specific action items, an assigned priority, and a listing of potential collaborators for accomplishing it. The complete action plan is available at URL //www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/draftplan.html.

The Cataloging Directorate welcomes comments on any aspect of this plan. Please send comments to Judy Mansfield by email at [email protected] or by fax at 202-707-0973 no later than Sept. 1, 2001.


Proceedings of the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control For the New Millennium

The publication Proceedings of the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium: Confronting the Challenges of Networked Resources and the Web is now available from the Library's Cataloging Distribution Service. This indexed, illustrated volume (comprising 574 pages and featuring the full text versions of the thirty-two papers presented at this conference held Nov. 15-17, 2000) may be purchased for $45 (North America) or $50 (elsewhere), including handling and shipping.

Those wishing to purchase the publication should mail checks payable to "Chief, CDS/Library of Congress" to Library of Congress, Cataloging Distribution Service, Washington, D. C. 20541-4912. Copies may also be purchased using VISA, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover card, by calling 1-800-255-3666 (toll free) or 202-707-6100. Further information may be requested at [email protected].


LCRIS Available for Review

A package of four proposed changes to Library of Congress Rule Interpretations titled "Proposed Changes to LCRIs Stemming from the PCC Standing Committe on Standards (SCS) Cross Reference Task Group" is now available for review and comment at URL //www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/lcrixref.html.

Please send any comments on the proposed changes to the CPSO e-mail account at [email protected] by July 20, 2001.


Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee

The Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee (EPC) held its Meeting 116 at the Library May 9-11. New committee members participating in their first meeting were Mary Carroll (National Library of Canada) and Jessica MacPhail (Racine (Wis.) Public Library).

The committee approved various exhibits for inclusion in forthcoming DDC Edition 22: 020 Library and Information sciences; 070 Journalism; 150 Psychology; 370 Education; 621 Applied physics; 624 Civil engineering; 629.89 Computer control; and 650 Management. It also approved modifications/updates to schedules already approved in principle: 200 Religion; 300-307 Social sciences, Sociology, and Anthropology; 330 Economics; 340 Law; 381 Commerce; and 610 Medicine. Elements of Tables 5 (Ethnic and National Groups) and 6 (Languages) were discussed, and the new caption for Table 5 approved.

Outside reviewers' responses to 510 Mathematics prompted much discussion; a revised draft will be prepared for the next meeting. DDC Assistant Editor Gregory New's paper on the treatment in Dewey of the many aspects of tourism also produced lively debate; key issues will be taken up when the 900 History schedule is reviewed. Finally, EPC approved the following exhibits for Abridged Edition 14: 330 Economics; 350 Public administration and Military science; 360 Social problems and Social services; 390 Customs, etiquette, and folklore; and 551.46-.47 Oceanography.


EPC's Meeting 117 will be held at the Library December 3-5.

SACO Manual

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging announces the completion of theSACO Participants' Manual which may be found at URL //www.loc.gov/pcc/saco/manual01.html.

The manual, authored by Adam Schiff, principal cataloger, University of Washington, is soon to be published and distributed by LC's Cataloging and Distribution Service in a print edition as well as to be incorporated into the complement of documents in the Catalogers' Desktop. The manual is also available in Portable Document Format (PDF) on the SACO Web site.


International Participation in the PCC

Anthony R.D. Franks, senior cooperative cataloger, Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division, is the author of "International Participation in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging: Present Status" published in the April/June 2001 issue (v. 30, no. 2) of International Cataloguing and Bibliographic Control.


Web OPAC Response Time

LC's Information Technology Service (ITS) indicates that periods of high Web OPAC (public catalog) usage may have an adverse impact on overall integrated library system (ILS) performance. Since the primary goal of the LC ILS is to provide acceptable performance for all users, with the highest priority being access for Congress, LC staff, and onsite customers, ITS has restricted the number of simultaneous *offsite* users of the Web OPAC while it works with the vendor to improve system performance and response time.

This limit does not apply to Congressional users of the OPAC, or to LC staff or users accessing the LC Online Catalog through the Web from computers on the LC campus.

ITS set the limit to 250 users in late March and has since raised it to 275. When the 275 limit is reached, additional offsite users are not able to access the catalog and will receive the message: "All available connections to the LC Online Catalog are currently in use. Please try again in a few minutes." Because users are constantly entering and leaving the catalog, those who get the "all connections in use" message can usually connect successfully if they try again within a minute or two.

The ILS Program Office is working with ITS to find the optimal balance between the number of offsite Web users and acceptable system performance.


LC/RUSA Forum on Digital Reference and Bibliographic Control

The Library of Congress and the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of the American Library Association (ALA) co- sponsored "Digital Reference and Bibliographic Control: Options for Collaboration" on June 17 during the ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco. The forum was planned in response to a recommendation from the Library of Congress Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium, which the Cataloging Directorate hosted last November. Beacher Wiggins, director for cataloging at the Library of Congress, described to the audience of about one hundred sixty people the process by which the one hundred fifty-plus recommendations that emanated from the conference were refined into "Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan" (see announcement in this issue of LCCN).

Allene Hayes, leader of the Computer Files and Microforms Team, Special Materials Cataloging Division, LC, described LC's CORC cataloging, BeOnline+, and MINERVA projects. LC uses CORC, the OCLC Cooperative Online Resources Catalog, for cataloging and reference purposes as well as for display of the Dublin Core view of CORC records, maintenance, and workflow management. All CORC records are entered in OCLC's WorldCat, where searches can be limited to Internet resources. BEOnline+ is a recent expansion into the humanities and other social sciences of the original BEOnline Project that since 1996 has identified, selected, and provided access to remote-access, public-domain Internet materials in the areas of business and entrepreneurship under the auspices of BEAT, the Bibliographic Enrichment Activities Team (see URL //www.loc.gov/catdir/beat/). LC now uses CORC to catalog these resources and has incorporated CORC into regular selection and cataloging workflows.

The MINERVA Project's objective is for LC staff to investigate the feasibility of capturing, saving, and preserving open access materials on the World Wide Web. A cross-disciplinary team of Library staff representing cataloging, copyright, public services, and information technology services is studying methods of and gaining experience in evaluating, selecting, collecting, cataloging, and providing access to these materials for future generations of researchers. During the current phase of the pilot, the Library, through agreement with the Internet Archive, has collected a fairly comprehensive collection of Web sites related to the 2000 presidential campaign and a second collection related to American culture. The sites are being cataloged in CORC, like those selected in BEOnline+; however, unlike BEOnline+, MINERVA is also an archiving project. The MINERVA Web site is for LC internal use only until all copyright issues with the harvested Web sites have been resolved.

Carolyn Larson, business reference specialist, Science, Technology & Business Division, Library of Congress, presented LC's proposal for carrying out recommendation 1.1 of "Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan:" develop a plan to increase the creation and availability of standard records for electronic resources to include authority control and subject analysis. Larson felt that the need for such a database was evident, since a majority of library users prefer a unified interface. She recommended that the proposed database have a scope statement and selection criteria; CORC has neither currently, which limits its usefulness as a reference tool. The proposed database should also identify (and publicly state) the parties responsible for selection; have granularity, or various levels, of description; have mechanisms to eliminate redundancy and duplication of resources; support system and semantic interoperability (a major theme at the bicentennial conference); and have some kind of automatic maintenance tool to adjust the records in the database as resources evolve.

Diane Kresh, director for public service collections at LC, discussed the progress of the Collaborative Digital Reference Project (CDRS), which was widely publicized during the ALA Annual Conference. Kresh outlined the components of CDRS: member profiles, an Internet-based request manager, and the knowledge base of archived questions and answers. Issues to be resolved before the service goes live to the public early next year include standards, mechanisms for quality assurance, simplified routing of questions and answers, staffing, marketing, and a viable financial model. The CNN poll of library users last autumn showed that libraries were on the right track in offering 24/7 services, Kresh said. She predicted that CDRS would benefit all participants by extending traditional high-quality reference service based on validated sources, developing a networked community of libraries and librarians, establishing best practices for digital reference service, and fostering a new synergy between end users and their local libraries.

Paula Rumbaugh of the Marketing--Reference and Resource Sharing Division of OCLC described the knowledge base that OCLC is developing for CDRS. The questions and answers are edited to strip out any personal or confidential information and subject headings are added to each Q&A record. A review date field is also added to each record to ensure that records are reviewed for currency of information on a regular basis.

At the close of the meeting, several members of the audience volunteered to join the database planning group. Volunteers included Catherine Friedman and Carol M. Tobin, presidents of RUSA for 2000-2001 and 2001-2002, respectively. Other catalogers and reference service librarians may volunteer to join the planning group by emailing Beacher Wiggins at [email protected] .


LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE (ISSN 1066-8829) is published irregularly by the Cataloging Directorate, Library Services, Library of Congress, and contains news of cataloging activities throughout the Library of Congress. Editorial Office: Cataloging Policy and Support Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540-4305. Editor, Robert M. Hiatt; Editorial Advisory Group: Victoria Behrens, John Byrum, Roselyne Chang, Jurij Dobczansky, Anthony Franks, Les Hawkins, Albert Kohlmeier, Susan Morris, Geraldine Ostrove, David Smith, David Williamson, and Roman Worobec. Address editorial inquiries to the editor at the above address or [email protected] (email), (202) 707-5831 (voice), or (202) 707-6629 (fax). Listowner: David Williamson. Address subscription inquiries to the listowner at [email protected].

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Comments : [email protected] 07/18/01