LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE

Online Newsletter of the Cataloging Directorate
Library of Congress

Volume 10, no. 9    ISSN 1066-8829   August 2002



CONTENTS

Library of Congress Conference 2000 Action Plan Forum
Latest News from the PCC
Electronic Tables of Contents
Best Free Web Sites

Library of Congress Conference 2000 Action Plan Forun

The second Library of Congress 2000 Action Plan Forum, held on June 16 during the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Atlanta, was an opportunity for work item leaders, principal investigators, and other stakeholders in "Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan" to share progress to date on each of the twenty-nine work items in the Action Plan.

The ALA Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) Task Force on the LC Action Plan, chaired by Karen Calhoun, director, Central Technical Services, Cornell University Library, is the lead organization for three work items and has charged task forces to carry them out. The Library and Information School Education Task Force for 5.1 ("Improve and enhance curricula in library and information science schools ...) is chaired by Beth Picknally Camden, director for cataloging services at the University of Virginia and chair of the ALCTS Cataloging and Classification Section Committee on Education, Training, and Recruitment to Cataloging. Dr. Ingrid Hsieh-Yee, Associate Professor, Catholic University of America School of Library & Information Science, is serving as principal investigator to prepare a model curriculum for teaching cataloging and metadata to new librarians. For 5.3, Carol Hixson, head of the Catalog Department at the University of Oregon and chair of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's Standing Committee on Training, chairs the Continuing Education Task Force (CETF). Erik Jul, executive director of the OCLC Institute, reported for Hixson that the CETF would focus on what content should be delivered; the importance of "soft skills"; the process of continuing education in the community; and delineating the objectives of a continuing education program, according to the personnel that would enroll in it.

The Metadata Enrichment Task Force, also charged by the ALCTS TF, is responsible for 2.3 under task force chair Judy Ahronheim, metadata specialist at the University of Michigan Graduate Library. Professor Marcia Bates of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, has agreed to serve as principal investigator. The METF sorted this very large work item into three distinct but related functionalities: front-end user thesauri; access mechanisms that represent relationships among resource versions and formats; and additional descriptive information, including relating summaries to records for digital objects. Bates will conduct an environmental scan and draft recommendations for best practices by Nov. 15, 2002. The METF will produce an action agenda for the ALCTS board's approval by Jan. 29, 2003.

The ALA Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) is the lead organization for work items 1.3 ("Compile/review/disseminate selection criteria for electronic resources to supplement traditional selection criteria ...") and 5.2 ("Sponsor a series of open forums on metadata needs to support reference service ..."). Amy Tracy Wells, digital projects coordinator at the MATRIX, Michigan State University Libraries, will serve as principal investigator for 1.3. Wells intended to begin with an environmental scan and asked other Action Plan participants to send her their institutions' selection criteria. RUSA President Carol Tobin said that she and the RUSA Board were identifying the right group to carry out work item 5.2.

OCLC, Inc., is taking the lead in four work items. For 1.4 ("Design mechanisms to archive and provide access to selected electronic government publications through partnerships with government agencies and/or academic institutions"), OCLC Vice President Meg Bellinger announced that on May 26, OCLC's Digital and Preservation Resources Division launched the Web Document Digital Archive, the culmination of two years' work by OCLC, the U.S. Government Printing Office, Edinburgh University Library, and several state libraries.

The work item leader for 6.2 ("Research user needs and approaches in accessing the catalog and other discovery tools in a networked environment to develop user tools for customization") is Lorcan Dempsey of the OCLC Office of Research. The leader for 6.3 ("Support research and development to improve controlled vocabulary mediating tools, including a simplified LCSH") is Dr. Ed O'Neill of the Office of Research. O'Neill manages the FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) project, which will fulfill this work item by creating a subject schema that retains the rich vocabulary of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) while minimizing the construction of new headings and simplifying the syntax.

For item 4.3 ("Develop specifications for embedded metadata that can be used by software developers to incorporate usable metadata into the output of their products ..."), Dr. Stu Weibel of DCMI (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative)/OCLC reported by email that work was underway: "DCMI is pursuing the objective of promoting the incorporation of metadata creation facilities into content creation software ... Adobe is building into their entire line of products a utility for creating Dublin Core metadata as well as extensions to support additional elements beyond DC...."

The lead organization for 4.1 ("Develop specifications for the creation and maintenance of records for titles contained in aggregator packages ...") is the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's Standing Committee on Automation (SCA), and the work item leader is SCA chair Gary Charbonneau, systems librarian, Indiana University. He explained that although the SCA had considered a radical recasting of this work item to make it more investigative, in the end it had decided to pursue the work item in its original form with some modification to add the task of communicating with public service and acquisitions librarians about the importance of considering bibliographic control when selecting an aggregator package. The task group intends to conduct a survey to learn how libraries are loading aggregator packages in their local systems.

Library of Congress staff are leading sixteen work items; a few are highlighted here. Susan Vita, chief of the Special Materials Cataloging Division, leads work item 1.1 ("Develop a plan to increase the creation and availability of standard records for electronic resources to include authority control and subject analysis"). She said that LC was increasing the number of trained electronic resources catalogers by means of details to the Computer Files & Microforms Team (CF/M) and postings for eight new digital resources catalogers, expected by Sept. 30. To enlarge the pool of standard records for electronic resources further, a cooperative structure similar to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging might be considered.

Kathryn Mendenhall, acting chief of the Cataloging Distribution Service, said that to fulfill 2.5 (making LC Classification and LCSH available at no cost on the Internet) in order to encourage use of these tools by the Web development community, CDS was considering ways to send the full LCC and LCSH files via FTP as demonstration or test files, while meeting cost recovery requirements.

Dr. Sherry Vellucci, director, Division of Library & Information Science, St. John's University, will serve as principal investigator and author for 3.1 ("Develop and disseminate a widely- understandable paper that sets forth library principles for data content and structure for use by the metadata community. Disseminate it to the metadata community and encourage its use"), led by assistant to the director for cataloging Susan Morris. Vellucci intended the paper to describe principles of librarianship such as description, authority control, access, record structure, record interchange, and level of description in terms of granularity and would begin by looking for common terminology. She planned to involve members of the metadata community as well as library leaders and looked forward to presenting the paper to a panel of invited reactors from the library and metadata communities at the Library of Congress. Vellucci encouraged those in the audience to send her any input they might have to the principles paper.

John Byrum, chief of the Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division, said that work item 2.1 ("Define requirements for a common interface for searching, retrieving, and sorting across a range of discovery tools ...") needed to be rewritten because much work in this area had been done since the Bicentennial Conference eighteen months earlier. Fretwell-Downing, Ex Libris, Endeavor, and Epixtech are all now marketing portals, and the ARL (Association of Research Libraries) Scholars' Portal Working Group recently concluded its work. The real work remaining is to monitor portal development, determine what common enhancements are needed to existing portals, and provide a community forum for these concerns.

Sally McCallum, chief of the Network Development and MARC Standards Office (NDMSO), explained that NDMSO wished to combine work items 2.4 and 3.4 as: "Develop functional requirements to enable the interchange of manifestation records that support internal configurations for FRBR displays for multiple versions; determine supportive cataloging practices; determine any needed MARC 21 enhancements; communicate these to the vendor community." McCallum said that NDMSO would not do all the work in this item itself, but would ensure that the work was carried out. She said there were two main ways to apply FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) in a library catalog: either by "FRBR- izing" the database, or by applying FRBR to a retrieval set for display. NDMSO will publish some tools to enable experimentation with the latter approach.

Wiggins said that from the beginning of the planning for the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium, held Nov. 15-17, 2000, he and the Cataloging Management Team had not wanted the conference and resulting action plan to be "LC-centric." He was pleased that so many individuals and organizations from the larger community had accepted lead or collaborative roles for work items. A complete report of the June 16 Forum is available on the Conference Web site at URL http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/highlights061602.pdf [August 2002].


Latest News from the PCC Program

The PDF-formatted Descriptive Cataloging Manual (DCM) Z1 (the "yellow pages"), and the LC Supplement Guidelines to the MARC 21 Authority Format, 2002 ed. (the "blue pages"), have now been posted at URL //www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/naco.html [August 2002] and are available for downloading. A survey of PCC liaisons is currently being undertaken to determine future means of document delivery.

A summary of the PCC Participants' Meeting held June 16, 2002, is now available at URL //www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/pccpart02a.html [August 2002]. These highlights offer an evaluation of the Program's achievements during its first ten years existence and features photographs of many of the program's participants during PCC meetings, training sessions, and social gatherings.

Summaries of both the BIBCO-at-Large (URL http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/bibco/bibcoatlarge02a.html [August 2002] and the CONSER-at-Large meeting (URL http://lcweb.loc.gov/acq/conser/at-largesummary06-02.html[August 2002] are now available also. Each of the documents provides the highlights of the PCC component programs held during the ALA Annual Conference, Atlanta.

Reports of meetings held by the PCC Standing Committee on Training (SCT) and the PCC Standing Committee on Automation (SCA) may be found at URL //www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/sct02a.html [August 2002] and at URL [August 2002].

The current prototype of the Integrating Resources Workshop is now available at URL //www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/bibco/irtrng702.html [August 2002]. It is an update of the first integrating resources (IR) prototype workshop that was held at the PCC Operations Committees' meetings in May 2002. Steven J. Miller, University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee, has developed the workshop materials under the auspices of the BIBCO and CONSER Programs. A Microsoft PowerPoint presentation for use in local and regional basic IR cataloging training is being made available to BIBCO and CONSER participants in anticipation of IR implementation scheduled for Dec. 1, 2002.

The PCC midyear statistics for 2002 may be found at URL //www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/stats/stats.html [August 2002]. Statistics for individual program participants, funnel participants, and international partners are included.


Electronic Tables of Contents

A streaming video presentation Electronic Table of Contents : Key to the Library's Book Collection is available at URL http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/eTOC/jan30-eTOC.html [August 2002].

David Williamson, cataloging automation specialist for the Cataloging Directorate, discussed enhancing bibliographic records using publisher supplied table of contents (TOC) data. He demonstrated how catalogers manipulate TOC data from publisher galleys into an electronic cataloging in publication (ECIP) record. He also described how publisher-supplied TOC information in the ONIX format is reformatted and made available over the World Wide Web and accessible through search engines. This information is then linked from the bibliographic record using a MARC tagged 856 linking note. Bruce Knarr, a team leader in the Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division (RCCD) described and demonstrated the digital TOC project. This produces scanned TOCs from research materials which are HTML encoded and mounted on the World Wide Web. Like the ONIX-enhanced records, they are also linked from the bibliographic record by an 856 linking note. John Byrum, chief of RCCD, concluded with an overview on the uses and usefulness of TOC data to enrich bibliographic records.


Best Free Web Sites

With the approval of the board of ALA's Reference User Services Association (RUSA), the Library of Congress has begun adding to its catalog records the annotations for the sites selected annually by the RUSA Machine Assisted Reference Section (MARS), Best Free Web Sites Committee. The lists, which have been compiled since 1999, appear in the fall issue of the RUSA Quarterly and on the ALA RUSA MARS website at URL http://www.ala.org/rusa/mars/ [August 2002]. Usually, twenty- five to thirty sites are selected each year. The LC project to add the annotations has been undertaken under the auspices of the Library's Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT), an R&D group whose mission includes enriching the content of LC bibliographic records. The project follows a similar on-going undertaking to add annotations to the catalog records for the titles included in the annual list of print Outstanding Reference Sources produced by the ALA RUSA Collection Development and Evaluation Section (CODES). Additional information about BEAT projects is available from the BEAT web site at URL http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/ [August 2002].


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: Julianne Beall, John Byrum, Roselyne Chang, Jurij Dobczansky, Les Hawkins, Albert Kohlmeier, Susan Morris, Geraldine Ostrove, William Starck, Valerie Weinberg, 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]>. LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE is available in electronic form only and is free of charge. To subscribe, send a mail message to listserv @loc.gov with the text: subscribe lccn [firstname lastname]. Back issues of LCCN are available through the LCCN home page (URL ). //www.loc.gov/catdir/lccn/). All materials in the newsletter are in the public domain and may be reproduced, reprinted, and/or redistributed as desired. Citation of the source is requested.

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