San Diego, CA, Jan. 7-11, 2011
SAC
Subcommittee on Genre-Form Implementation
Report from the Library of Congress
PSD will cancel and reissue all of the approximately 700 genre/form
authority records no earlier than March 1, 2011. The new records
will have an LCCN prefix of “gf,” and the old LCCN will be retained in
a 010 $z. After the distribution, all LCGFT terms used in
bibliographic records should be coded 655 _7 [Term]. $2 lcgft.
These terms will be able to be controlled in OCLC.
Approximately 65 cartographic genre/form terms were approved in
mid-May, and the LCSH form subdivisions used for maps were revised in
August. The new headings and subdivisions were implemented on
September 1, 2010, and an instruction sheet on the application of the
terms is in the works.
In November, PSD approved approximately 80 genre/form terms for law
materials; the terms should be implemented in early 2011. LC is
still requesting help for terms for religious law.
The American Theological Association is partnering with PSD to develop
genre/form terms for religion.
Report from the American Association
of Law Libraries
The AALL Classification and Subject Cataloging Policy Advisory Working
Group (CSCP) is preparing for the implementation phase of the law LCGFT
terms. They plan to develop strategies for applying the new terms
retrospectively by identifying the relevant bibliographic records for
each genre/form term and working with Ed O’Neill at OCLC to enhance
OCLC records with the law terms. The CSCP group plans to post its
detailed search strategies for the individual terms. Their plans
include using classification—the K schedules include tables for form,
and it may be possible to figure out what something is by where it’s
classified.
Report from OLAC
OLAC is continuing work on its moving image genre/form best practices
document.
Recommendations of the 85/155 Working
Group
The working group distributed a spreadsheet of their recommendations,
which includes all the 185 form subdivisions from LCSH judged to be
“general” (i.e., not covered by one of the current genre/form
projects), the recommendation to create a 155 or not (including
suggested revisions in terminology and scope), and additional
recommendations on keeping, canceling, or modifying the scope of the
current 185. The subcommittee didn’t have time to review every
term in the extensive spreadsheet, so the discussion will continue
online, with the approved recommendations ready to distribute to SAC by
March 2011.
New business
The subcommittee ran out of time to discuss the last two items on the
agenda (Facets related to genre/form and Future genre/form term
projects for LC to consider), so the discussion will be continued over
email, and we decided to attempt to have two meetings at ALA Annual,
with the second meeting most likely on Tuesday.
Subject Analysis Committee
New business
John Attig (the ALA representative to the JSC) approached the committee
with a proposal to recommend to the CCS Executive Committee that a SAC
liaison to CC:DA be appointed. This liaison would lead a SAC
subcommittee to work on the issues for the Group 3 entities (subject
access) in RDA. The subcommittee would include people familiar
with the JSC process for rule revision. SAC will be the deciding
body, and the liaison would work with John Attig and report to
CC:DA. This proposal was approved, so there will be a new SAC
member appointed, and part of the CC:DA meeting at ALA Annual will be
devoted to a joint CC:DA/SAC meeting on this topic.
Report from LC
New print editions of the M, N, PN, and T schedules are available, as
well as the K and P-PZ tables. The 32nd edition of LCSH is also
available.
A number of enhancements to Classification Web are being tested,
including the addition of personal names from the LCNAF, expansion of
the correlations feature to include NLM, and other improvements.
In late January PSD will implement a new system for creating online
subject and genre/form proposals, similar to the classification
proposal system.
Since the implementation of “Terminology Suggestions” in spring 2010
for the vocabularies at id.loc.gov, PSD has received 16 suggestions for
new or updated subject headings. Several applications have been
developed using the LCSH/SKOS data from the site.
PSD will be launching a pilot project in 2011 to add MARC field 072,
Subject Category Code, to a subset of LCSH authority records. The
field will contain the Subject Headings Manual instruction sheet number
(e.g. H 1150), and it will be added to the subject authority records to
which it pertains. (Example: 072 H 1180; 150 Orchids). The
presence of this number will indicate that the heading falls into the
category covered by the guidelines in that instruction sheet, and the
idea is that computers could be used to recognize the appropriateness
of a subdivision for an individual heading (a way to actually control
the heading beyond OCLC’s current capabilities).
33,200 validation records were created in 2010, for a total of over
80,000 validation records in LCSH’s master file. The first A-Z
sweep through the bibliographic database has now been completed.
PSD completed the change of “cookery” headings to “cooking” and
introduced the LCGFT term “cookbooks.” 788 proposals for new,
deleted, or changed subject headings were required, and approximately
100,000 associated bibliographic records require revision. Other
recent changes include some shuffling associated with the dissolution
of the Netherlands Antilles, the completion of the project to add 053
fields to subject authority records for U.S. Civil War battles, and new
headings for iPad (Computer), Campaign promises, FAST subject headings,
and FRAD (Conceptual model).
FAST reports
The initial development of FAST (Faceted Application of Subject
Terminology) is complete, and the book has been published by Libraries
Unlimited in July. The focus is now on maintenance, enhancement,
and the support of new applications. The FAST database is
available at
http://fast.oclc.org,
and the full authority file and be licensed for non-commercial
use. An online service to add FAST headings to bibliographic
records or convert a set of LCSH headings to FAST headings should be
available in early 2011, and FAST will be available as linked data in
the spring of 2011.
H 1095 Project update
The group working on the H 1095 project has reached a consensus on some
terms (e.g., combining the subdivisions Quotations, maxims, etc. and
Quotations; Terminology, Vocabulary, and Glossaries, vocabularies,
etc.), and has no consensus on other issues (e.g., combining the
subdivisions Ability testing and Testing; how to treat books of a
general nature). Work is ongoing.
Submitted by Hermine Vermeij, MLA