PCC Participants' Meeting

ALA Midwinter Meeting

Venetian Room, Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel
Boston, Massachusetts
January 16, 2005
7:00-8:30 P.M.

Roxanne Sellberg of Northwestern University, Chair, Program for Cooperative Cataloging opened the PCC Participants' Meeting at the 2005 ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston and introduced the evening's speakers as well as acknowledging the members of the Cooperative Cataloging Team in attendance. She explained that the meeting would be structured differently than those PCC Participants' Meetings in the past. Neither reports about the status of the component programs nor reports from the Standing Committee Chairs would be given; instead, a handout had been prepared on which URLs for the various PCC reports were provided.

Survey of Policy-Level Representatives from PCC Participating Institutions Sellberg)

Sellberg presented the results of a survey conducted of policy-level representatives from PCC constituent institutions. The survey had been developed by Ruschoff, PCC Chair Emerita, and Sellberg and vetted by the members of the PCC Policy Committee.

Its purpose was fourfold in nature and intended to

1. touch base with policy-level representatives;
2. take the pulse of the PCC membership, thereby getting an overview of the Program and its constituent parts;
3. gather ideas for the 2004-2006 tactical plan; and
4. gather concepts for strategic planning.

Questions on the survey asked

• how each representative would characterize his/her attitude toward the PCC; and
• characterize the representative's institutional attitude toward the PCC;
• if the representative would be willing to serve in some capacity for the PCC;
• if the representative could identify others who might be willing to serve in some capacity for the PCC;
• offer suggestions to include in the new PCC tactical plan; and
• offer suggestions to include in the new PCC strategic plan.

Sellberg stated that 166 email questionnaires were distributed, 21 of which were returned as "undeliverable", which Sellberg said demonstrated the need for updated information to be forwarded to the PCC Secretariat regarding policy-level representation from PCC members. Only 39 responses were returned; however Sellberg depicted the attitudes among respondents as being positive with the demographic distribution being quite varied - ranging from among the largest and biggest contributors to funnels and non-U.S. libraries. Unfortunately, among the non-respondents were many medium or small U.S. institutions. Sellberg even stated that some respondents were not aware that their institution was a PCC participant.

Sellberg identified the following themes in the responses:

1. the framework of the PCC should be made of goals that are "user-centered";
2. the PCC should continue to provide support for training initiatives;
3. how to best accommodate varying record standards given the participation of non-U.S. libraries in the PCC family of institutions;
4. a "struggle" that appears to exist between old and new goals, i.e., that the PCC ought to be able to do some things better, tie up loose ends, but move boldly into future; and in particular to:
   1. better define what a PCC record is;
   2. focus efforts on electronic resources and metadata; and
   3. facing an uncertain future with records not acting as surrogates for the material, but as "access points" for actual texts.

PCC Tactical Plan, 2004-2006, including Progress to Date on the PCC Strategic Plan, 2006-2010

Sellberg went on to discuss the PCC Tactical and Strategic Plan and explained that the mission of the organization is subdivided into five strategic categories; namely,

1. Databases, i.e., Automation
2. Standards
3. Leadership & Training
4. Membership
5. Governance & Operations

with 28 explicitly-stated goals. She stated that there had been 80 tactical objectives in the 2002-2004 Tactical Plan, but anticipates that the 2004-2006 Tactical Plan should be shorter as the PCC Policy Committee successfully narrowed the objectives into the following seven priorities:

1. publishers
2. automated means for digital record creation
3. partnering with information providers for record creation
4. "mutually-agreed upon" standards relevant to LC access records
5. strengthening the training programs "within the PCC" and "external to the PCC"
6. develop PCC leadership on policy level, and
7. increasing the public awareness of the PCC and its programs

When Sellberg was asked to define her use of "public awareness" and to identify who is considered the "public" her response was that the library community is what was meant. Sellberg also pointed for interested PCC members to visit the PCC Website for more specifics about the Tactical Plan.

Sellberg then turned the podium over to the Chair Emerita and explained that Ruschoff has been appointed chair of the Task Force on the PCC mission and vision and that Mark R. Watson (University of Oregon), PCC Chair-Elect, will have responsibility for the PCC Strategic Plan.

Ruschoff provided the introduction to the evening's Keynote Speaker, Dale Flecker, Associate Director for Planning and Systems, Harvard University Libraries, who addressed the audience on "OPACs and Our Changing Environment". She charged the audience to ponder what Flecker's comments mean for the PCC and its strategic plan.

Keynote Address:

Dale Flecker Presentation

Flecker began his prepared remarks by stating that the presentation had been written a year ago. He felt that recent developments and changes weakened some of the comments, which may now seem to be a bit antique. He stated that libraries are daily confronting challenges from a changing external environment and listed seven unique issues faced by the OPACs of today, which are:

1. an expanding information universe
2. better search systems
3. invaders in our domain
4. an unstable environment
5. a role for evaluation/recommendation
6. portals are a puzzle
7. FRBR

The remainder of the presentation was an exposition on each of these seven points. The entire presentation was serious, yet lighthearted, full of humor, and offered some hopes and expectations, although a sense of panic was palpable among members of the audience. Flecker pointed to Yahoo which is already in the business of harvesting digital library metadata and the fact that Google includes both journal articles as well as monographs in the same database. He ended with a myriad of ideas over which professional librarians need to ponder and openly faced what librarians may fear; namely that OPACs will be ignored in favor of more appealing, useful services.

For the record, PCC catalogers spend every day building the catalog for the users of libraries around the world and do understand what role the catalog plays in relation to the resource discovery experience of our users in the future. However, how the catalog fits into the larger resource discovery environment remains to be addressed.

Questions and Answers following Keynote Address:

Watson led a question and answer session following the keynote address. The presentation and its delivery generated much discussion and sparked a plethora of interesting comments and arguments. The lively audience participation was intellectually stimulating and challenging.

One audience member expressed concern by depicting the future of Web search engines as trains that are bearing down on librarians and OPACs, and short of lying down on the tracks and stopping efforts such as AACR3, what can professional librarians do?

Flecker responded that the librarians need to identify which tasks are their own, and which functions belong to others; professional librarians need to think about what aspects of metadata fall under their purview, and how and if metadata as a whole should be brought together, and what split apart.

Sellberg pointed out that OCLC's discussions with Google and Yahoo to develop individual catalogs for libraries will not be the way of the future. Sellberg asked why as professionals we did not raise the same concerns when OCLC originally began offering consolidated searching.

Flecker stated that Google is constructed such that there is an immediate sense of gratification in the set of "hits" following a successful search. There is an "I search- -I find- -I use" attitude, but OPACs provide information found in a given collection. If individual library databases are somehow indexed into the Google search engine, users will still not be able to get access to the contents of those collections unless they actually go to the libraries.

Another participant pointed out the benefit of having the contents of the OPAC under authority control as opposed to the lack of it in what Google indexes and rhetorically asked how much of the bibliographic world do libraries actually have under authority control?

Flecker welcomed the comment and responded that authority control is indeed useful, particularly under specific segments; the example he used was a search of personal names. Flecker also stated that the power is not to be found in the results of a search, but in the manipulation of the resulting sets. The product "Endeca" does need structured data, but the product "Grokker" does not. Google does not rely on structured data, or intellectual analysis; their engineers have absolute faith in having the machine solve all the problems.

This raised the concern that there is no need for cataloging, but just indexing, seeing how search engines simply rely on the texts of works.

Another participant remarked that the relationships across formats and content that are expressed in OPACs make a significant contribution and should be highly valued. OPACs enable unique identification of an item and thereby enrich search engines. Flecker countered this statement by saying that the relationships expressed are only useful in small closed environments of small collections; he pointed to how libraries have already given away the handling of serial publications. Some materials are not digitized and Flecker further stated that Harvard has put its old catalogs online and that Google intends to digitize all of Harvard's collections.

In defense of the OPAC the fact still remains that Google is unable to search across all languages and formats. Currently, search engines are English-language centric, which Flecker acknowledged.

Is an Internet engine able to search across email, the internet, and local files simultaneously queried another member of the audience?

Flecker stated that cataloging is "hand-crafted metadata" and closed by asking the provocative question "Are librarians cataloging for a few old crusty professors at Harvard?"

New Time Slot for the PCC Participants' Meeting

Sellberg solicited audience feedback regarding a change in the time that the Sunday night PCC Participants' Meeting is to be held and suggested that the meeting be moved to a 5:00-6:30 P.M. time slot; participants expressed concerns ranging from the NISO meeting that is scheduled from 4:00-6:00 P.M. on Sundays with its open standards forums to MARBI reserving time for its meeting until 5:30 P.M. Additionally, many vendor parties are slated for Sunday evening and are potentially a big draw, thereby causing a conflict. David Banush, Cornell, felt that discussion of the topic was moot since there will always be conflicts and that people need to make choices. He asked that a decision be announced and suggested that the 5:00 - 6:30 P.M. time slot be approved. Sellberg agreed; therefore, the PCC Sunday night meeting will be held during that time at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

Presentation of the PCC Certificate of Appreciation

Les Hawkins, CONSER Coordinator, closed the evening by presenting a PCC Certificate of Appreciation to David Van Hoy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on the occasion of his retirement in recognition of his service and dedication to the CONSER Program and of the many significant contributions he made to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging during his career.