About the PCC

Vision

The PCC is a diverse coalition of practitioners, service providers, and tool developers working together to harness the full potential of metadata to promote and sustain knowledge.

Values

Collaboration: We accomplish more together than we can on our own.

Sharing: We share metadata, expertise, training, standards, and best practices.

Innovation: We experiment, take risks, and learn by doing.

Empowerment: We put theory into practice and enable practitioners to leverage their skills in new environments.

Inclusion: We welcome and are strengthened by participation from all communities and diversity of viewpoints and experience.

Communication: We value consultation, responsiveness, and transparency.

Mission

The PCC promotes discovery and use of the world’s knowledge by supporting metadata producers in library and other cultural heritage communities and by forging alliances with partners who share common goals. The PCC embraces diversity, equity and inclusion in its membership, activities and practices. PCC members create trusted metadata and support its use and reuse by global communities. The PCC:

• Leverages data models, vocabularies, and technologies in support of flexible, interoperable, and scalable production methods
• Enables the extension, iterative enhancement, reuse, and open exchange of metadata
• Leads the community by developing metadata documentation and training, and promotes best practices for use by all practitioners
• Advances initiatives by brokering agreements among stakeholders
• Empowers metadata practitioners through training, education, and current awareness
• Experiments with new technologies and encourages the development of tools for metadata creation and editing
• Partners with scientific and cultural heritage institutions, publishers, and  library industry leaders to further advance cataloging community goals

PCC Programs

Monographic Bibliographic Record Program (BIBCO)

Through this program, members contribute bibliographic records to globally-distributed databases. These records are identified as PCC records and are notable for their complete authority work (both descriptive and subject), a call number from a recognized system (such as LC Classification, Dewey Decimal Classification, or NLM Classification), and at least one subject access point drawn from standard thesauri.

Cooperative Online Serials Program (CONSER)

CONSER is a source of high quality bibliographic records for serials and integrating resources that conform to approved standards. Unlike most monographs, serials and integrating resources are constantly changing in a variety of ways. CONSER Program participants are given the authority to modify the master serial record on the OCLC WorldCat database.

Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO)

Through this program, participants contribute authority records for personal, corporate, and jurisdictional names; uniform titles; and series headings to the LC/NACO Authority File. Membership in NACO is open to any institution willing to support their staff through a process of training, review, and direct contributions of records to the LC/NACO Name Authority File.

Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO)

The Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO) enables member institutions to submit proposals for additions and updates to Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), LC Genre/Form Terms (LCGFT), LC Demographic Group Terms (LCDGT), LC Medium of Performance Thesaurus for Music (LCMPT), and LC Classification (LCC) schedules.

PCC Training

In support of its mission and goals, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging conducts specialized training and mentoring for participants and non-members in conjunction with professional meetings and conferences, or as part of the Program itself with training held at the Library of Congress and institutions around the world. Additionally, in response to the need for general cataloger education, the PCC, the Library of Congress, and ALCTS developed several workshops now freely available through the Web at the Cataloger’s Learning Workshop (CLW). CLW workshops reinforce metadata and cataloging creation skills that ultimately improves the quality and increases the number of shared records.