MUSIC LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

SUBJECT ACCESS SUBCOMMITTEE

Business Meeting Report

Philadelphia – Feb. 10, 2011, 12:30 p.m.

Members present: Janet Bradford, Patty Falk, Ralph Hartsock, Marty Jenkins, Margaret Kaus, Nancy Lorimer, Geraldine Ostrove (LC representative), Carlos Peña, Karen Peters, Sheila Torres-Blank, Hermine Vermeij (chair).

Members not present: Annie Erickson, Brooke Lippy

Visitors present: 21

Recognition of Service

A special thank you goes to outgoing member Patty Falk for her valuable contributions and time serving on this committee.

ALA report (Hermine Vermeij)

Full ALA Annual Conference Report on the BCC Web site

• The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) is preparing for the implementation phase of the law LCGFT terms, and they plan to develop strategies for applying the new terms retrospectively to bibliographic records in OCLC.
• The 185/155 Working Group of the Subject Analysis Committee (SAC) is developing recommendations on current form subdivisions (185s) that can be turned into genre/form terms (155s). These terms are general in nature (not being covered by one of the current genre/form projects).

Library of Congress report (Geraldine Ostrove)

Gerry Ostrove distributed a report, which includes updates on the Cookery heading changes, the Cartography, Law, Music, and Religion Genre/Form projects, and the LCSH/SKOS expansion.

Update from the MLA-BCC Genre/Form Task Force (Beth Iseminger)

The task force’s next task is to create a syndetic structure for the approximately 800 terms that have already been culled from LCSH. They will also be considering adding new terms (especially to fill in holes in the hierarchy), and they are discussing ways new terms should be added to the thesaurus.

The Genre/Form Task Force will from now on focus their energy on only the genre/form terms; the Subject Access Subcommittee will be taking on the medium of performance aspect (in collaboration with the task force and with the Library of Congress Genre/Form Project Group).

Discussion on Medium of Performance

Medium of performance in the MARC record

We discussed a document Nancy Lorimer prepared on the use of MARC21 fields for medium of performance. The options are:

· Use the 048, a coded field

o Pros: able to list separate instruments/ensembles in their own subfields, and the number of parts for each can be specified; code source subfield and linking subfields already available; allows differentiation between soloist and general performer

o Cons: does not indicate the total number of performers/instruments; the 048 can only be repeated five times; the MARC21 and IAML code lists are not sufficient for our needs; codes would have to be translated to something user-friendly; the code structure (code + number of parts) is combining two sets of information in one string, which can be hard for computer processing to interpret.

· Use the 382 field (developed for use with RDA)

o Pros: It is a text-based field, and a linking $2 source of term is available.

o Cons: it would need many additions (new subfields) to be usable for our needs; currently it is used to record the medium of performance attribute of works or expressions in accordance with RDA; mostly being used in authority records, although defined for both authority and bibliographic formats; currently being recorded with a (mostly) controlled vocabulary from RDA.

· Use a 65X field

o Pros: Our terms will probably be part of LCSH, and LCSH headings go in 65X fields; we currently describe medium of performance in subject headings (650s); this would continue the status quo; needed subfields are mostly already available.

o Cons: a MARBI proposal for a new 65X field would probably be very difficult to get approved; we might need it available in authority records as well; some subfields would need to be added.

During the discussion, it was made clear that a new 65X field is probably an impossible goal, since there are none left to assign, and the 382 field already exists. The subcommittee’s next goal is to create a MARBI discussion paper with revisions for the 382 field to mold it to fit our needs.

Medium of performance as topic

As the genre/form project progresses, we also need to be thinking about the topical implications. Many of the terms the genre/form project will be adding as genre/form terms and this group will be adding as medium of performance terms will also be valid as subject headings, and some subject headings will see significant changes.

Gerry Ostrove prepared a document discussing LCSH headings with medium of performance used topically, along with a list of LCSH heading strings and possible changes to current headings. Notable:

• The general subdivision $x History and criticism will, in most cases, no longer be needed. It is currently used to denote that the resource is about a particular kind of music, but when genre/form terms start appearing in a designated field, the subject heading alone (without subdivision) will be sufficient.
• The current definition of headings like “Violin music” is music for only the solo instrument, but in topical usage, it may be more useful to define those headings differently to include music with the instrument as a soloist with accompaniment.

This will certainly become an important issue once we come closer to the implementation of music genre/form terms.

Group 3 Entities in RDA (Subject Areas)

A new subcommittee in SAC will be working on the issues for the Group 3 entities (subject access) in RDA. The discussions will be high-level for now, but eventually input from specialized communities (such as MLA) may be wanted. FRBR (the model for RDA) has not addressed any genre/form issues, so genre/form may or may not be included in RDA.