Voting members: 

MEMBERS: Jain Fletcher (Chair) ; Nancy Lorimer (MLA Liaison); Robert Maxwell (RBMS); Karen Spicher (MLA); Charlotte Wolfe (MLA); Bruce Tabb (RBMS)

Report on activities                                                   

Much of this past year was spent preparing DCRM(M) (Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials—Music) for its first full review. By early spring 2010, the task group opened it up for review by the Bibliographic Control Committee of MLA, the membership of MLA, members of the Bibliographic Standards Committee (BSC) of RBMS and volunteers from the rare books and manuscripts community. By late May 2010, the task group received a large number of individual responses, primarily from the rare materials community, and an extensive official response from MLA-BCC. Because of the large amount of input on the project, we were not able to give the responses a thorough review before ALA Annual as hoped. Instead, in her report on DCRM(M) at the Bibliographic Standards Committee of RBMS at ALA, Jain Fletcher covered general trends about the input, and set a new task group response time of early fall.

An initial overview suggests that the general comments were mostly positive.  The vast majority of specific comments alluded to typos and other basic errors, and were uncontroversial in any way. After that, most comments discussed the wording of various rules and how they might be improved and clarified. There were some fairly mild disagreements on rules, some stemming from mixing the cataloging cultures of music and rare books, some from looking forward to RDA. We hope to have the comments more thoroughly analyzed in the near future and prepare a new draft that reflects the comments.

Goals for the coming year

1. Collate and analyze comments from DCRM(M) review, incorporate corrections, resolve questions and offer a new version for review.
2. Finish examples, bibliography and glossary.
3. Begin the publication process with ALA Edition.

Submitted by Nancy Lorimer, Liaison

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