Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access
ALA Midwinter Meeting
San Diego, CA, Jan. 8, 2011
Reported by Mark Scharff, MLA Liaison to CC:DA

The Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA) met once during the ALA Annual Meeting in San Diego; no Friday meeting had been scheduled, and the Monday session was cancelled because it was not needed.  The Chair, Lori Robare (University of Oregon) led the discussions.

This report focuses on items of interest to the music library community. For more information about the meeting and for reports about activities mentioned below, please see the CC:DA web page at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/tas/jca/ccda/index.html.  Presentation is more topical than chronological.

Reports

CC:DA Chair.  The full report is at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/tas/jca/ccda/docs/chair56.pdf . The Chair called for confirmation of two votes that were taken electronically since the 2010 Annual meeting—one approving the report of the CC:DA Task Force to Review ISBD Consolidated (2010 Edition) and the other approving the creation of a CC:DA Task Force to Investigate Changes Affecting RDA in the Chicago Manual of Style 16^th Edition. This latter group, however, has not yet been constituted, as CC:DA awaits proposals from the Library of Congress that would change some capitalization instructions in RDA Appendix A. The members affirmed both votes unanimously. The Chair noted that CC:DA needs to revise its documents and written procedures to accommodate the appearance of RDA and other changes in the cataloging landscape. Among these are the committee’s statement of purpose, and the online forms provided for rule revision proposals. An open question is whether a new version of CC:DA’s print brochure is needed.  

LC Report (Barbara Tillett, LC liaison to CC:DA). For a detailed report of LC initiatives, visit: http://www.loc.gov/ala/mw-2011-update.html

Tillett reviewed highlights from the report. Among items of interest to the music community:

· She noted many retirements. Two with direct impact on music were Bob Hiatt and Paul Weiss, both from the Policy and Standards Division (PSD) of the Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate (ABA). In addition to editing the Cataloging Service Bulletin, Hiatt in recent years was the triage person for error reports sent through LC’s Integrated Library System. Weiss worked with online subject heading proposals, and was responsible for the quick turnaround time in recent years. Neither position will be filled, and this will likely mean some decline in service levels.

· The Electronic Cataloging-In-Publication Partners program (ECIP) expanded in 2010 with the addition of three new libraries that will provide CIP records for selected categories of material. Northwestern University has expressed interest in taking on CIP record creation for African materials.

· The Library solicited feedback from the library community in the early fall as to whether it should change its practice of always abbreviating the word “Department” in headings. The abbreviation has been a longstanding deviation from AACR2. RDA generally discourages abbreviation, too. While the feedback received was generally positive, it was not of a quantity to be considered a mandate for change, and there were strong arguments against change in the current environment. If the national libraries opt to adopt RDA, this decision will be revisited.

· Tillett observed that while statistics for full original cataloging were down by title count, the total number of volumes processed rose in the past year—this despite retirements and an extensive reorganization within the ABA.

· She pointed out the recent announcement of the next 25 films to be admitted to the National Film Registry.

· LC migrated to Voyager 7.2.0, and plans a “soft launch” of the TomCat discovery platform within several weeks.

· Work is continuing on the National Library Catalog, a search interface that will provide “one box” searching for “seamless access across all of the types of metadata that describe LC collections.”

· The RDA test period has ended, and evaluation of data has begun. Two meetings have been scheduled at Midwinter—one with vendors, and another with test participants. The test participants created over 10,000 bibliographic records and 13,000 authority records. All records are available at LC’s RDA Test Web site. Tillett stressed that the records display a vast spread of applications of RDA and its options. Realizing that regardless of the national libraries’ implementation decision, other large libraries will use RDA, LC will work with PCC to develop guidelines that will provide the greatest possible consistency among American libraries.

ALA Representative to the Joint Steering Committee (John Attig, Penn State University) Attig noted the relative inactivity in the wake of RDA’s publication and the end of the testing period, but did observe that things had happened and would happen. The JSC has been working through a list of errors in and corrections to the RDA text as published in July. There have been some preliminary discussions around the list of deferred issues, but few decisions. No JSC meeting for 2011 has been scheduled yet—the expected July meeting is looking iffy.

Attig expects that constituent proposals for revisions should come in soon. With that in mind, he outlined a possible procedure for dealing with proposals from the other JSC constituencies:

· Proposals get posted on the JSC Web site

· The CC:DA chair posts an announcement to the CC:DA mailing list and creates a page on the CC:DA wiki with the proposal and spaces for comments

· CC:DA members have a window of time for comments, generally two weeks

· A small group of members will look at the comments and assess priorities, timing, and other issues involved in advance of CC:DA voting

· After the vote, Attig drafts the ALA response; generally, no further response from CC:DA will be forthcoming

Attig noted that LC is expected to draft a proposal for writing the content for the placeholder chapters in RDA for subject access points. A complication is while RDA as a descriptive code is within CC:DA’s purview for comment and revision proposals, issues with subject access are not; and no other constituency in ALA has RDA revision in its charge. Attig has been and will continue to work with ALA’s Subject Access Committee and the ALCTS CCS Executive Committee to develop an appropriate mechanism for producing an ALA response.

RDA Revision proposals from American Association of Law Libraries (John Hostage, Harvard University)

Briefly, the proposals were to 1) clarify how and/or whether to give special treatment to certain federations and countries for creating preferred access points for smaller political units (e.g. adding the name of a U.S. state to the name of the city rather than “United States”) and 2) simplify the instructions for entering court reports. The proposals and discussions highlighted the role that history plays in shaping practice. The first proposal was deferred pending further discussion and rewriting; the second proposal was accepted with the stipulation that the phrase “nominative reports” be removed. The objection was that it was “redundant jargon,” and that AALL could achieve whatever specificity the phrase holds in an application profile. This may have some relevance for the music community, another group with specialized terms.

Task Force on RDA Instructions for Heads of State/Heads of Government (Kathy Winzer, Stanford University)

The overarching question here is: can rules for heads of state/heads of government be made consistent? The present situation is that for heads of government, access points follow the language of the jurisdiction, while for heads of state, the cataloging agency’s preferred language is the norm. The TF realized that the rules as they developed over time served to support a chronological arrangement of rulers of a country (hence the use of “Sovereign” for both kings and queens). RDA instructions undo this arrangement, particularly when there are not gender-neutral terms in the language involved.

The discussion turned on the question: is the loss of chronology a real problem? Are there other ways to achieve the chronological arrangement, presuming that there is a need? The TF will continue its work and aims for a report by ALA Annual 2011,

Task Force for Governmental/Non-Governmental Corporate Bodies (Kevin Randall, Northwestern University)

The task force had the goal of developing a single set of instructions for creating preferred access points for the two types of bodies. Two major issues emerged: what types of bodies are entered subordinately, and differing rules on what levels of hierarchy to include or exclude. One position would be to include all levels of hierarchy at all times. While this had its backers, Randall pointed out the problems it would create for serials cataloging, where such names are frequently used as qualifiers in access points; name changes at middle levels of hierarchy would mean more frequent need for new bibliographical records. The Task Force’s work will continue.

ALA Publishing (Troy Linker, Publisher, ALA Digital Reference)

Linker reviewed events since RDA’s publication in June 2010: the open access period, generating 5000 registrations; the success of the solo user subscription option (20% of subscribers); RDA Toolkit training sessions and Webinars, the last attracting 1500 subscribers; a good experience with the Support Center, with most problems coming from the subscribers’ IT practices; several content updates, principally to correct typos and add examples; the integration of Library of Congress Policy Statements into the Toolkit with links in the RDA text; the publication of a print version of RDA, whose sales have exceeded expectations. He noted that the position of managing editor had been vacant, but would soon be filled. He mentioned that subscriptions are currently being paid in 18 different currencies, that there has been customization of licenses, some sales to consortia, and selection of an Asian distributor.

Among the next steps: 1) a user survey, already underway; 2) another Webinar in February (Linker reminded the audience that Toolkit training sessions are always free); 3) producing better training videos; 4) increasing interaction with social media (e.g. blogs, Twitter); 5) enhancements to the element set view; 6) adding some third-party services; 7) providing multilingual support (with French and German under development); 8) integrating the index developed for RDA Print into the Toolkit; 9) developing mechanisms to provide visual identification of updates in the product; 10) using a blog to float enhancement ideas; 11) providing attribution for workflows.

Attig asked if there were a process for loading locally-created documents, workflows, etc. to allow global sharing. Linker replied that users could do that themselves using various settings inside the Toolkit on their own. A straw poll in the room showed that many were subscribing already, albeit with a limited number of users pending the national libraries’ implementation decision. Linker reminded the committee that the “double user” offer is good until August 31, and opined that the marketing department would have some sort of enticement after that. He noted that nearly 2000 copies of RDA Print have been sold.

RDA Training Task Force (Mary Woodley, University of California—Northridge, and Kate Harcourt, Columbia University)

Neither Woodley nor Harcourt were present, but the Chair passed along the word that many webinars had been held with more to come. A fuller report is forthcoming.

RDA Programming Task Force (June Abbas, University of Oklahoma)

Abbas reported that the preconference at Annual 2010 had 210 participants, and that the RDA Update Forum had a full house. The Task Force will continue its work for another year. A preconference for Annual 2011—“RDA 201”--has already been approved. Plans are for a two-day, hands-on experience with live connections and covering all major materials formats. The 2011 Annual meeting will also include an RDA Update session. Hopes are to hold a vendors’ forum, though previous attempts have been unsuccessful. A forum for non-MARC implementation is also expected to occur. Planning for a 2012 conference will start soon, though there is no clear sense of content at this point. Abbas said that the TF had been busy outside ALA meetings, too, with outreach through webinars and presentations at other library-association meetings. She put forth a call for more members for the TF, particularly from unrepresented constituencies. At Scharff’s invitation, Kathy Glennan (University of Maryland) described the RDA preconference planned for the upcoming annual meetings of the Music OCLC Users Group and the Music Library Association.

CC:DA Webmaster (Melanie Polutta, Library of Congress)

Polutta offered thanks to John Attig for his ongoing assistance with maintaining the CC:DA Web site and working toward its migration to the ALA server. While most of the content is still being hosted by Penn State, the “page of record” is at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/mgrps/ccs/cmtes/ccda/ats-ccscat.cfm In addition to pointing to the main site, it contains some basic content. When the migration is complete, CC:DA’s site will reside on its own ALA server because of the enormous size and complexity of the content. There will be some work to align the site with other ALCTS Web pages in matters of style and look. The migration has been delayed by ALA’s move to the Drupal management system, and will not happen before July. Polutta asked committee members for feedback on how they used the Web site. John added that the default format for all documents is now PDF; Word versions will be posted only as needed.

Future meetings

CC:DA is scheduled to meet twice at Annual 2011 in New Orleans—Saturday, June 25, 1:30-5:30 pm, and Monday, June 27, 8:00 am-noon. There may be a joint meeting with the Subject Access Committee (q.v.). Depending on other agenda items, that meeting could replace one of the above meetings or be a separate meeting; if the latter, it might be held on Friday afternoon. The committee adjourned at 4:59 pm.