BCC2010/Auth/3

MUSIC LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
Bibliographic Control Committee
MLA Liaison Report to BCC from ALA Annual Meeting
Washington D.C., June 24-29, 2010

LITA/ALCTS—CCS Authority Control Interest Group (ACIG)
Sunday, July 27, 2010   1:30-5:30PM

Open Meeting

The theme of the open meeting was Authorized Genre, Forms and Facets in RDA and consisted of three presentations, plus a report from the Library of Congress.  Presentations are available on the ACIG page on ALA Connect (http://connect.ala.org/node/107447)

 1. LC Update to the Authority Control Interest Group – by Janis L. Young, Policy and Standards Division (PSD), Library of Congress (LC)

RDA Testing: Creation of bibliographic and authority records for the RDA National Test will begin in October 2010 and will run until the end of December 2010.  LC has developed documentation for its catalogers, which includes policy decisions and training materials, and is available at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/RDAtest/ rdatest.htm.  As the RDA test progresses, these decisions may be changed or rescinded.

RDA Entities: The entities Fictitious characters and Family names overlap with categories of headings already established in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).  For the purposes of the RDA Test, if a fictitious character is needed for a descriptive access point (e.g., attributed as an author), LC will establish the fictitious character in the LC NACO Authority File (LC/NAF).  If the fictitious character exists in LCSH, PSD will be informed, with any action on the existing heading to be deferred until after the testing period is over.  Fictitious characters not needed for descriptive access points should still be submitted as subject heading proposals.  If family names are needed as a descriptive access point during the RDA Test, LC will establish the name in the LC/NAF.  However, family names in the LC/NAF cannot be used as subject headings.  The currently existing family name in LCSH must be used.  This may lead to some situations during the RDA Test where a single family is represented by two different headings on the same bibliographic record.  As before, if a family name is needed for use as a subject and the name does not exist in LCSH, a proposal should be made via SACO.

Geographic Coordinates: On approximately 77,000 name authority records (NARs) for jurisdictions, geographic coordinates have been added in a 034 field.  The data was extracted by the OCLC Office of Research from 670 fields existing in the NARs and from various geographic databases.

Virtual International Authority File (VIAF): Membership has been extended to the Library and Archives Canada, the Getty Research Institute, and the NUKAT Center of Poland.  The National Institute of Informatics of Japan, the National Library of Slovenia, and the National Library of Hungary have requested membership.  The scope of VIAF has now been extended to include corporate, conference, and geographic names.  Subject headings will not be included in VIAF, as there is no one-to-one correlation between subject terms in the various authority files which make up VIAF.

Authorities and Vocabularies: This SKOS-based service at http://id.loc.gov is now accepting suggestions from the general public for changes or additions to the terminology already present.  The service is also exploring possible links to translations of LCSH, currently available at the Biblioteca Nacional de España , the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, and the Université de Laval.

2.  The Library of Congress’ Genre/Form Terms: A Faceted System – by Janis L. Young

Genre/Form Update

As of now, two genre/form projects, recorded sound and moving images, have moved out of the developmental phase and are now in the maintenance phase.  Four projects involving cartography, law, music, and religion are currently in active development.  Plans are in the works for genre/form terms related to literature. 

For cartography, 65 genre/form terms were approved on May 19, 2010.  Existing inverted headings were revised to direct order when necessary.  Revisions to form subdivisions will be approved by August 18, 2010, with LC implementation to follow on September 1, 2010.

For law, LC has been working with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and they are nearing agreement on terms that will be formally proposed that more than likely will be approved before the end of 2010.  LC implementation will follow in early 2011.  In addition to the initial list of terms, LC and AALL are conferring with the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Association of Jewish Libraries Cataloging Committee to develop a list of Jewish legal terms.  The possibility exists for the law project to also add terms from the religious laws of other religious groups.

For details of the music project, please refer to Geraldine Ostrove’s presentation below.

For religion, LC is collaborating with the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) to develop terms.  The project is in its infancy and just started work in June 2010.

All of the genre/form terminologies will be formally separated from LCSH and will be named Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT).  The MARC source code for the product will be lcgft and a new LCCN prefix of “gf” will appear on genre/form records.  Authority records which use LCGFT terms will have the 008/11 coded z for other and the 040 subfield f will be coded as lcgft.  In bibliographic records, LCGFT terms will be coded in the 655, with a 2nd indicator value of 7 and the source code appearing in subfield 2.

Faceting

According to Ms. Young, faceting is the coding of single terms or phrases, representing individual concepts, separately in the bibliographic record.  One concept per entity or field provides for data predictability.  Ideally, data present within one section of a bibliographic record would not be repeated elsewhere and that all data elements would work together to provide a fuller understanding of the work described.  This generally has been the guiding principle in the construction of genre/form terms.  However there have been instances where subject matter has crept into genre/form terminology.  A good example of this occurs in the moving images portion of the LCGFT, where superhero-themed movies can have headings assigned which combine the character with the genre, e.g., Batman films, Superman films. 

In future systems, Ms. Young hopes that the ability to browse LCSH and LCGFT terms and the ability to limit by facet will be available.  Vocabulary developers can help this process by creating headings which are predictable in their structure and format.  That being said, there is a constant tension between the need to maintain usable data for today while creating data for tomorrow.  Like the god Janus, we most look to the future and the past simultaneously.

3. The Music Genre/Form Project: Issues and Some Solutions – by Geraldine Ostrove, PSD, LC

The Library of Congress and the Music Library Association are collaborating in the creation of a music genre/form thesaurus.  While the project still has a long way to go, there have been some significant milestones.  These include agreement between LC and MLA on: a list of over 1000 terms which should be included in the thesaurus; the canceling of headings which are medium-only terms or terms which mix form/genre with medium; eliminating the current construction for musical settings of individual psalms and replacing it with a general term describing all psalm settings and a uniform title for the psalm text; converting subdivisions for musical format (e.g, Vocal scores with piano, Scores and parts, etc.) into headings that will be post-coordinated; finding a new place in the bibliographic record for medium of performance; and finally, the canceling of headings qualified by language.

Facets, as Ms. Ostrove sees it, refer to broad, mutually-exclusive categories, describing different aspects of a resource.  The genre/form thesaurus represents one of these facets.  Terms in LCSH represent the facet of aboutness.  Medium of performance is yet another facet.  For musicians, medium of performance is probably the most important facet.  It requires special attention, especially since the majority of musical works have no specific form and because users are usually more interested in the medium than the form itself.  Since the project has decided the LC subject headings will no longer be assigned for medium of performance, a new place in the bibliographic record must be found for them.  But this also allows the project the opportunity to completely re-think the way medium is presented in a bibliographic record and not be bound to the often peculiar way medium statements are currently constructed in LCSH.

Medium of performance terms will probably reside within LCSH as a controlled, searchable vocabulary.  While the current terms within LCSH function as subject terms about the physical instrument itself, it appears the terms can also function as medium of performance terminology in describing what the music is.  Some other issues with LCSH will also need to be ironed out when it comes to works about the music of a particular instrument.  For example, current practice would assign the term Piano music to a work or works for piano and the heading Piano music—History and criticism to works about piano music.  In future practice, since a heading like Piano music will not have to do double duty as a genre/form term and a topical term, works about the music of the piano would probably just be assigned Piano music by itself,  dropping the subdivision History and criticism.  Subdivisions denoting form such as Bibliography would probably be a separately assigned as genre/form headings, available for post-coordination.  Currently valid LC heading strings with complex medium statements, such as String quintets (Violins (2), violas (2), violoncello)--Analysis, appreciation will probably need to be simplified to String quintets—Analysis, appreciation in a topical construction.

The LC/MLA Genre/Form Task Force has just begun to consider the question of whether carrier terms (called extent terms in RDA) should be included in the genre/form thesaurus.  Current thinking at PSD indicates that only terms applicable on the FRBR levels of work and expression should be included in the genre/form thesaurus.  Some extent terms, such as vocal score and piano score are definitely terms applicable on the expression level, because they indicate an arrangement.  Other terms, such as study score, indicate format, a manifestation or item level attribute.  Because of this, PSD has begun to collect extent terms across disciplines to attempt to determine how exactly to deal with these terms and perhaps create a controlled vocabulary of extent terms that may or may not reside in the genre/form thesaurus.  The music project will need to work with the wider genre/form community when the time comes to really start work on this question.

Other vocabulary questions include whether the vocabulary between RDA and the genre/form thesaurus needs to be aligned, the issue of aboutness within musical works and how best to approach it, reconciling syntaxes used for different classes of materials within LCSH that express the same concept, and terms within LCSH which look like genre/form terms but that are currently used in a topical manner.  As one can see, there is much work that remains to be done, but the successes of the project so far indicate that the outstanding issues concerning music will most definitely be addressed in the near-future.

4.      Implementing (parts of) FRAD in a FRBR-based Discovery System – by Jenn Riley, Metadata Librarian, Indiana University Digital Library Program

The V/FRBR project at Indiana University is being developed as a public and concrete testbed for a full-scale implementation of FRBR which will contain real data (the Indiana University music catalog) in a production environment.  The project is also a response to the call for testing of the FRBR model in the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control report.  Other secondary goals include providing an openly-accessible Web search interface for FRBR-ized data; providing supporting data, including data model documentation and FRBR-ized data, available for analysis by the larger metadata community; and to create metadata input workflows based on innovative and evidence-based interface design techniques, which will make the most of the FRBR data model.

The central question of the project is how does one convert a conceptual model into a full-production data model, or put more simply, what does it really mean to "implement" FRBR?  The approach of the Indiana University Digital Library Program has been to interpret FRBR literally whenever possible and to represent FRBR in a XML schema that can be easily shared.  Also, the XML schemas will be developed in 3 different flavors, with the frbr XML schema representing a strict implementation, the efrbr XML schema representing an enhanced FRBR implementation, and the vfrbr XML schema that extends implementation to music-specific materials and that will hopefully serve as a model for other domain-specific implementations of FRBR.

The implementation of the Function Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD) within the V/FRBR implementation raises some interesting questions.  FRAD adds new entities, attributes, and relationships to the FRBR model.  FRAD also extends the FRBR model by stating that bibliographic entities are known by names/identifiers which serve as the basis for controlled access points.  This extension, while sounding benign, actually has large implications for the FRBR model.  In FRBR the title of a work or the name of person is given as an attribute of the entity.  In the way FRAD views the world, a title or a name is simply a label that serves as the basis for a controlled access point.  FRAD is saying that what is really important are the other attributes associated with the entity, such as place of birth, gender, dates of birth and death, just to name a few.  FRAD suggests a catalog that could be fully internationalized, that would provide users with supplementary information to help them better understand context, and that would be research systems, not just finding systems.

In the V/FRBR implementation, the new FRAD attributes were added to existing FRBR entities, the entity Family was added to the model, and some of the relationships in FRAD were added.  The entities Name, Identifier, Controlled Access Point, Rules, and Agency that were introduced in FRAD were not added to V/FRBR.     In practice this means the attribute of title and of name were kept within their FRBR entities and that a way had to be devised to distinguish between primary titles or names and variant ones. Next on the horizon for the V/FRBR project is the public release of a beta search of imported data, the availability of FRBR-ized data that can be downloaded by the library community, and the development of a FRBR-ized cataloging tool. 

To move forward, the community itself needs to embark on certain endeavors.  IFLA needs to officially resolve the differences between FRBR and FRAD.  There also need to be some real FRAD implementations done that show the implications of the FRAD conceptual model.  These implementations also need to concretely show the possible benefits of the additional data in the FRAD model.  Finally, ways need to be found to pull this additional data from other sources and not just rely on librarians to provide it.

 Business Meeting 

 Submitted by Damian Iseminger, Chair, Authorities Subcommittee

Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC) Cataloging Policy Committee (CAPC) Meeting

Friday, June 25, 7:30-9:30PM

Announcements 

Reports and Discussions 

Old Business 

New Business 

Closing Announcement

The OLAC Conference will be held in Macon, Georgia from October 14-17, 2010.  Online registration is currently available at http://www.olacinc.org/drupal/ conference/2010/index.html.

 Submitted by Damian Iseminger, Chair, Authorities Subcommittee


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Last updated August 17, 2010