LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE

Online Newsletter of the Cataloging Directorate
Library of Congress

Volume 11, no. 11    ISSN 1066-8829    December 2003


CONTENTS

CONSER Coordinator
New Team Leaders
LC Catalogers at IFLA
ISBD Review Group
Virtual International Authority File

CONSER Coordinator

Leslie Hawkins has been appointed as CONSER Coordinator in the Serial Record Division. As the current CONSER specialist he has a strong command of the entire CONSER program. His work is well regarded by the former CONSER Coordinator, the larger CONSER world, and LC staff.

Hawkins has been involved in serials cataloging in various capacities for about twenty years with increasing levels of responsibility. For the past several years as a senior cataloger in the National Serials Data Program and as CONSER specialist, he has focused on e-serials. As e-serials have become an increasingly significant part of serials cataloging, his skills in this area have served the division and the larger serials world in immeasurable ways. Most recently he completed a revision to the CONSER Cataloging Manual module on e-serials.

Hawkins has played a strong leadership role in SCCTP (Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program). He was a co-author of the SCCTP module on e-serials and has taught this class to national and international audiences. The e-serials course is one of the most popular SCCTP courses in large part due to his efforts.


New Team Leaders

Elizabeth H. Aulakh is the new team leader of the Germanic Team, History and Literature Cataloging Division (HLCD), effective Nov. 3. A cum laude graduate with high honors in French and German from Grove City College in Pennsylvania, Aulakh completed her graduate work for her masters degree in comparative literature and a masters degree in library science at the University of Wisconsin -Madison. She joined the Library of Congress in September 1970 as a cataloger in the German Section, Shared Cataloging Division. In November 1981 she became the assistant section head and served in this position until the Cataloging Directorate reorganization in June 1992 when she became a senior cataloger in the Germanic Team, HLCD. For the past ten years she has been active as a series liaison for cooperative cataloging, Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division, reviewing the work of numerous libraries. She also completed a half-time detail to work with series problems in the Cataloging Policy and Support Office in 1996 and recently completed a month's detail for training in electronic resource cataloging in the Computer Files Team, Special Materials Cataloging Division. Aulakh has recently been selected as the LCPA member of the Advisory Council on Women's Issues, 2003-2005.

Randall K. Barry is the new team leader in the World History and Literature Team, HLCD. He came to the Library in Oct. 1977 with several years of management experience in private industry. He worked for a short time in Acquisitions in the Order Division before moving to the German Section of Shared Cataloging Division as a preliminary cataloger. In Jan. 1979, while working toward his MLS at the Catholic University of America, he assumed the position of descriptive cataloger in training in the Romance Languages Section of Descriptive Cataloging Division. He cataloged primarily Spanish and Portuguese language materials. After finishing his MLS in 1982 he returned to the Shared Cataloging Division, and in March 1987 he accepted the position of standards specialist in the Network Development and MARC Standards Office, where he specialized in the development of standards for the MARC formats and character sets. Besides an MLS, he has two bachelor's degrees, one in French language and literature, the other in Russian language and literature, both from the University of Maryland, College Park.


LC Catalogers at IFLA

Members of the Cataloging Directorate and Serial Record Division participated in the 69th General Conference and Council of IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions, in Berlin, Germany, August 1-9, 2003. This was the first IFLA conference to bear the additional title "World Library and Information Conference." Library of Congress cataloging staff also took part in additional meetings held during or in conjunction with the IFLA Conference.

Acting Deputy Associate Librarian for Library Services Beacher Wiggins represented the Library of Congress in signing a cooperative agreement with OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., and Die Deutsche Bibliothek (DDB), the national library of Germany, to test the concept of a Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) on the World Wide Web (see article below).

Barbara Tillett (chief, Cataloging Policy and Support Office) and John Byrum (chief of the Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division), attended the first IFLA Meeting of Experts on an International Cataloguing Code, held in Frankfurt, July 28-30 and co-sponsored by DDB; the IFLA Cataloguing Section within Divison IV, Bibliographic Control; and the IFLA National Libraries Section, part of Division I, General Research Libraries. This was the first of five regional invitational conferences to be held in conjunction with the IFLA Conference over the next several years with the goal of increasing the ability to share cataloging information by promoting standards for the content of catalog records. Tillett, who chaired the planning committee for the Frankfurt meeting, spoke there on the VIAF and chaired the review of recommendations from working groups for five areas in contemporary cataloging codes: personal names, corporate bodies, seriality, multipart structures, uniform titles, and use of GMDs (General Material Designators). Byrum gave a presentation on the International Standard Bibliographic Description (ISBD) as an international standard for descriptive cataloging. For further information on this meeting, see "First IME ICC Meeting," LCCN v. 11, no. 9, October 2003.

Byrum also served as moderator for the Division of Bibliographic Control Section on Bibliography's open program on Electronic National Bibliographies (ENBs). Four speakers Marcelle Beaudiquez of the Bibliotheque nationale de France, Unni Knutsen of the National Library of Norway, Maja Zumer of the National and University Library, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Juha Hakala of the Helsinki University Library, the national library of Finland-- considered how the emergence of ENBs would either replace or complement printed national bibliographies and what guidelines were needed to ensure high-quality, effective, and user-friendly ENBs.

Regina Romano Reynolds (head, National Serials Data Program Section, Serial Record Division and head of the U.S. ISSN Center), presented a paper on "ISSN, CONSER, and Cataloging Convergences in a Digital World," to the Serial Publications Section, part of IFLA Division V, Collections and Services. Reynolds compared two long- term cooperative programs: CONSER, in which all partners catalog serials to the same mutually agreed standards, and the ISSN Network, which accepts a mix of data for serials produced according to varying standards in order to assign and disseminate ISSN (International Standard Serial Numbers), and judged both programs to be highly successful for their respective purposes. She highlighted the publication of a new ISSN Manual in 2003 and predicted growing convergences between ISSN Network records and other serials cataloging, as the ISSN Network will begin to provide information on starting volume and issue and will implement MARC 21 within approximately one year.

Julianne Beall (assistant editor, Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC)), spoke on "Approaches to Expansions: Case Studies from the German and Vietnamese Translations" at the workshop "Dewey Decimal Classification: Edition 22 in the Global Context," sponsored by the Section on Classification and Indexing of IFLA Division IV, Bibliographic Control. She also presented "DDC 22 and Abridged Edition 14 Translation Guidelines," at an invitational meeting hosted by OCLC, DDB, and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. This meeting also touched on use of translations in national bibliographies; subject gateways; database management systems; and models for associating other terminologies with the DDC.

Library of Congress staff continue to hold offices in the governance of various IFLA units. Tillett concluded her term as LC representative to the Cataloguing Section and was elected secretary of the Classification and Indexing Section and chair of the Coordinating Board for IFLA Division IV, Bibliographic Control, a role that gives her a position on the IFLA Professional Committee and Governing Board. Judith Kuhagen (senior cataloging policy specialist, Cataloging Policy and Support Office), the incoming LC representative to the Cataloguing Section, was elected to a two- year term as secretary of the section.

The Library of Congress joined five other national libraries, IFLA, and the Conference of Directors of National Libraries (CDNL), which meets annually at the IFLA General Conference, to form the IFLA-CDNL Alliance for Bibliographic Standards (ICABS), a strategic alliance to assure ongoing coordination, communication, and support for key activities in the areas of bibliographic and resource control for all types of resources and related format and protocol standards. For an initial period of three years, ICABS will fund continuations of several major efforts of the former IFLA core programs for Universal Bibliographic Control and International MARC (UBCIM), which closed in February 2003, and Universal Dataflow and Telecommunications (UDT), which closed in 2001, and will work to advance the understanding of issues related to long-term archiving of electronic resources.

Sophie Rigny (cataloger, Medical Sciences and Biotechnology Team, Arts and Sciences Cataloging Division), was part of the essential infrastructure of the conference, serving as a simultaneous interpreter from English to French, French to English, and German into French for several meetings during the conference. Rigny has volunteered as a member of the IFLA Language Conference since 1997.


ISBD Review Group

John Byrum (chief, Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division) chaired two meetings of the ISBD Review Group, which completed its review of draft revisions of ISBD(G), the General International Standard Bibliographic Description, and ISBD(ER), the International Standard Bibliographic Description for Electronic Resources. The review group considered how the ISBDs should reflect terminology and concepts from FRBR, the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, and generally concluded that FRBR terminology per se should not be incorporated into the ISBDs, but that the ISBDs should provide accurate definitions showing how each term used in the ISBDs is conceptually related to the FRBR terminology. The review group has submitted the draft for posting on IFLANET, the IFLA Website ( [December 2003].

The review group accepted in principle the draft revisions of ISBD(ER) prepared by Dorothy McGarry (retired from the University of California, Los Angeles) and Ann Fox (deceased shortly after the conclusion of the Berlin conference) and requested some minor amendments, with a view toward circulating the draft for worldwide review by the end of 2003. The review group considered a first draft revision of ISBD(A), the International Standard Bibliographic Description for Older Monographic Publications (Antiquarian), which was first issued in 1980; a final draft revision is expected for worldwide review in 2004. Byrum and McGarry met with members of the Standing Committee of the Geography and Map Libraries Section (IFLA Division II, Special Libraries) to clarify the scope of the review of ISBD(CR), the International Standard Bibliographic Description for Cartographic Materials, with the aim of forwarding a draft to the review group by the end of January 2004 that would include provisions for electronic cartographic resources. The review group also accepted the recommendation of its Study Group on Treatment of Publications in Multiple Formats, chaired by Lynne Howarth (University of Toronto) that in order to facilitate record exchange among libraries, the ISBDs should encourage libraries participating in cooperative networks to create separate bibliographic records for each format in which a work is issued. Finally, the review group charged a new Material Designation Study Group, to be chaired by Mauro Guerrini (University of Florence) to consider issues surrounding use of multiple general material designations, and a new Study Group on the Future Directions of the ISBDs, chaired by McGarry, to consider both administrative issues and the possibility of a single, consolidated ISBD.

In connection with the ISBD Review Group, Judith Kuhagen, senior cataloging policy specialist in CPSO, participated in the Series Study Group, which the review group charged to harmonize the handling of series within the family of ISBDs and also to consider whether different practices for series transcription in the ISBDs and the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd ed., can be harmonized.


Virtual International Authority File

The Library of Congress has entered a cooperative agreement with OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., and Die Deutsche Bibliothek, the national library of Germany, to test the concept of a Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) on the World Wide Web. The VIAF will provide open access on the World Wide Web to approximately two million records for personal names from Die Deutsche Bibliothek (DDB) and more than 3.8 million personal name records from the Library of Congress (LC). In cases where both national libraries have a record for a personal name, the VIAF will link the two records so that users can view the information in both, using the search techniques they prefer. The VIAF project offers immediate benefits in making cataloging more efficient and catalog searching more precise. The VIAF also holds long-term promise as a basic building block of the "semantic Web"- a future version of the Web that will permit human-to-human, human-to- computer, and computer-to-computer communication.

The cooperative agreement for the VIAF was signed on August 6 in Berlin, Germany, during the World Library and Information Congress (the 69th General Conference of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions). Acting Deputy Associate Librarian for Library Services Beacher Wiggins signed the agreement for the Library of Congress. Signing for DDB was its director general, Dr. Elisabeth Niggemann. Jay Jordan (president and chief executive officer, OCLC), also signed.

Technical leadership for the VIAF project is shared by Dr. Edward T. O'Neill (consulting research scientist, OCLC); Christina (Christel) Hengel-Dittrich (head of authority files, DDB); and Dr. Barbara Tillett (chief, Cataloging Policy and Support Office, LC).


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].

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