The Program for Cooperative Cataloging is a coalition of nearly 200 libraries working together to increase the pool of bibliographic records created under mutually acceptable standards; to facilitate the creation and use of these records; and to provide leadership in the information community.
As the PCC's governing body, the Executive Council provides leadership and direction to the program. It consists of eight permanent representatives and seven rotating representatives drawn from the program participants together with two operational advisors.
British Library and Library of Congress Cooperation
Alan Danskin, Head of Authority Control, British Library, visited LC in December to meet with LC staff involved with cooperative cataloging projects between the BL and LC. These meetings continued the work that has been going on to align cataloging practices in the two institutions, particularly in the area of name authorities. The British Library now plans to load the LC name authority file into its own system in the next few months. Beginning in the fall of 1996, the BL expects to be able to contribute new and revised authority records directly to the file in those categories where agreement on cataloging practice has been reached. In anticipation of this, during Mr. Danskin's visit the draft Cataloging Policy Convergence Agreement (CPCA) was discussed and revised to reflect current circumstances. (The CPCA specifies those areas in which cataloging practices between the BL and LC will be aligned and those areas where differences remain.) In addition, meetings were held to discuss the logistics of the file load, details of the conversion programs that will be needed to convert records from USMARC to UKMARC and back to USMARC, and operational workflow. Very good progress was made in all areas, and staff at both institutions are anticipating the implementation of the project.
Cooperative Cataloging Programs
Cooperative cataloging programs have continued to expand in the past year. Since June 1995, eleven new libraries have received NACO training: Bowling Green State University; Brown University; Central Washington University; Indiana Historical Society; Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis; Indiana School of Law at Indianapolis; Michigan State University; Oliveira Lima Collection, Catholic University; University of California, Santa Barbara; University of Kansas; and Washington University. Brown University will coordinate a NACO funnel project for Online Audiovisual Catalogers (OLAC). The University of Washington and Indiana University, Bloomington have taken steps to increase their NACO participation by expanding training for catalogers at their libraries.
Almost all these participants were trained by graduates of the "Training the NACO Trainer" course held at the Library of Congress in May 1995. LC staff developed materials to be used in NACO training. While LC will continue to administer this decentralized training program, in the future most NACO training will be provided by the regional NACO trainers.
The Program for Cooperative Cataloging is eager to recruit new libraries in its efforts to build the national bibliographic databases. To that end, the Library of Congress is actively seeking new participants from among the various library communities with an emphasis on public libraries, special libraries, museums, and archives. LC is currently engaged in discussions to initiate NACO funnel projects for film libraries and law libraries.
The year-end statistics for fiscal year 1995 demonstrate substantial growth for all phases of the program. NACO participants added 92,108 new name authority records, an increase of nearly 18%. Series authority record contributions expanded at an even greater rate, due in large part to the successful series institutes held at LC. 4,476 new series authority records were contributed, an increase of 43% over that of fiscal year 1994. Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO) participants added 1,954 new subject headings to LCSH, a 113% increase over fiscal year 1994 contributions.
In the spirit of expansion, the PCC inaugurated the BIBCO Program, members of which contribute full or core level bibliographic records to the national databases. The ten National Coordinated Cataloging Program (NCCP) libraries, together with six new libraries, began their BIBCO participation in September 1995. During 1996, program focus will be to increase activity in this area.
Global Digital Library Conference
On December 11 the one-day invitational conference "Organizing the Global Digital Library: New Opportunities for Cataloging and Processing" brought together 23 computer scientists, librarians, and representatives of the bibliographic utilities at LC. Sarah Thomas, acting director for Public Service Collections, chaired the conference, which was sponsored by the Council on Library Resources and the National Digital Library Program of the Library of Congress. The participants' collective expertise included work with the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR, the OCLC InterCat project, the Research Libraries Group's Digital Image Access Project, and other initiatives in the effort to organize digital materials.
The day's discussions highlighted the library community's obligation to provide integrated access to digital and nondigital materials; the need to select the most relevant materials for cataloging; the eventual merger of the selecting and cataloging functions for Internet materials; and the role of libraries in archiving and stabilizing the volatile materials on the Internet.
The conference identified principles underlying efforts to organize Internet materials and proposed several action items. The principles are: 1) Libraries exist to provide value-added services to a wide variety of materials, including selection, organization, access, location information, delivery, and preservation; 2) Libraries will include a mix of traditional materials (print and non-print) and digital resources indefinitely; 3) Library collections will continue to be only subsets of the universe of publications, resources, and information; 4) Like traditional materials, digital resources will have more value and utility if they are organized, making resources known and available; 5)Libraries should integrate access to digital resources with access to conventional materials; 6) Genre is a more useful organizing principle than format; 7) Information seekers benefit from self-indexing resources, producer-generated access, and librarian-generated access; 8) Librarians will continue to use judgment in applying varying levels of description and access, as appropriate to each resource, in order to provide retrieval of relevant resources in a cost-efficient manner.
The conference closed by proposing the following action items for the library community:
- Lead by working with non-library groups and producers of digital resources to assure that developments progress with the needs of libraries in mind. Libraries should become more involved in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
- Review the work of the six projects in the NSF/NASA/ARPA Digital Library Project. [http://www.grainger.uiuc.edu/dli/national.htm]
- Attend and participate in the Digital Libraries '96 conference sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, to be held March 20-23, 1996, Bethesda, MD. [http://fox.cs.vt.edu/DL96]
- Plan a workshop (under the auspices of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives) involving librarians, those involved with the D-Lib group [http://www.dlib.org], producers of digital resources, and researchers, which will examine how traditional cataloging skills and developing computer tools can be coordinated.
- Participate in one of the Uniform Resource Name (URN) testbed projects which are commencing in the next few months. (LC's National Digital Library is participating in one of the testbeds). [Contact urn@mordred.gatech.edu]
- Continue work to identify data elements which aid in machine retrieval for automated metaindex searching, such as the projects at the University of Michigan and Stanford University and uses of the Dublin Core metadata set. Consider the need for new projects.
- Track the feedback on the field tests of current metadata schemes, such as OCLC's Spectrum project, and the work performed at the National Library of Australia.
- Encourage libraries to experiment with the inclusion of metadata in their electronic publications and projects, such as LC's National Digital Library. Develop models as requirements for digitizing contractors.
- Identify areas where libraries can capture data to apply metadata schemes and/or other tools, such as finding aids, dissertations, and university press publications.
- Make use of OCLC's InterCat database as a testbed to examine URLs/URNs, MARC and non-MARC mixes, and mechanisms for capturing user-supplied data. Structure and implement user tests.
- Examine creative applications for displaying and/or mapping to MARC format (e.g., capture Lycos records and create rudimentary MARC records for display in catalogs, or SGML to MARC mapping).
- Agree upon methods for carrying metadata in digital resources (as the TEI header does for some SGML documents). Possibly issue informational Request for Comment (RFC) on the topic and shepherd through IETF or NISO. Develop tools for application of the metadata schemes and make them available to those willing to test them.
- Explore continued relevance and application of cataloging practices and rules at meetings such as the OCLC Intercat Project Colloquium at ALA Midwinter in San Antonio and the international conference of cataloging experts being planned for 1997 by the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR.
- Monitor D-LIB magazine [http://www.dlib.org] as a good source of information on current digital library research.
Conference participants from outside LC were: Duane Arenales, National Library of Medicine; Bill Arms, Corporation for National Research Initiatives; Ross Atkinson, Cornell University; Alan Danskin, British Library; Peter Deutsch, Bunyip Information Systems; Erik Jul, OCLC; Glenn LaFantasie, Council on Library Resources; David Levy, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center; Clifford Lynch, University of California; Carol Mandel, Columbia University; Ingrid Parent, National Library of Canada; Brian Schottlaender, UCLA; Linda West, Research Libraries Group; and Jennifer Younger, Ohio State University. LC participants included Beth Davis-Brown, National Digital Library Program; Stephen James, Sandy Lawson, and Helena Zinkham, Public Service Collections Directorate; and John Byrum, Susan Morris, Barbara Tillett, and Beacher Wiggins, Cataloging Directorate.
Erratum
InLC Cataloging Newsline, v. 3, no. 13, "International News," the meeting of the Australian Library and Information Association was held in Sydney, not Canberra.
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