PCC Participants’ Meeting Summary
American Library Association (ALA) 2006 Annual Conference

The PCC Participants' Meeting was held June 25 at the American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans. Mark Watson (University of Oregon), chair of the PCC, called the meeting to order by welcoming members and guests. He recognized chairs and members of the operations and standing committees, new Policy Committee members, the Steering Committee, the Cooperative Cataloging Team from the Library of Congress (LC), the PCC secretariat, and program coordinators. Also, he recognized Karen Smith-Yoshimura (RLG) as the "PCC Ur-Mother."

Mid-year Statistics

Watson highlighted accomplishments for the first half of Fiscal Year 2006 (October 1-March 30). During this period, PCC members produced 80,120 name authority records, 997 new subject authority headings, 37,970 bibliographic records, and 12,302 Cooperative Online Serials Cataloging (CONSER) authenticated records. Additional statistics are available at the PCC Statistics.

Presentation

Mechael D. Charbonneau (Indiana University) introduced the panel discussion on The Future of Bibliographic Control in the Cooperative Environment. Members of the panel included Deanna Marcum (Library of Congress), Beacher Wiggins (Library of Congress), Mark Watson, and Robert Wolven (Columbia University).

Deanna Marcum spoke about the future of bibliographic control and recalled early bibliographic sharing efforts. Today, issues such as the perception that cataloging is not user-friendly and the ability of search engines to produce results quickly present new challenges. She noted that younger users settle for the quick results of a search engine query rather than seeking more credible sources. Catalogs seem to be an antiquated resource to these users. Alternative sources are being made available through large digitization projects such as the one in which Google had agreed to digitize the collections of the New York Public Library, the libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Michigan.

The library community is engaged in the continuing work of rethinking the bibliographic future. Marcum pointed out that different user communities and several issues were identified as early as the 1970s and 1980s, long before the existence of the Internet. At the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium in 2000, bibliographic services were examined. Many of the same issues discussed at that meeting were cited in the report entitled The Changing Nature of the Catalog and Its Integration with Other Discovery Tools" prepared for LC by Karen Calhoun.

Marcum explained that there is a need for indexing schemes that are more effective in accessing content as well as a need to help users get contents quickly and easily. She stressed the importance of collaboration with vendors, search engines, researchers, and information retrieval developers. Partnering with publishers on licensing agreements will facilitate making resources available quickly. At the same time, it is important for the library community to be a creator of resources instead of a provider of services. Libraries should be engaged in digitally mastering in-house resources to make them widely available.

The challenge is to match the same creative leaps of the 1970s. There are many inhibiting factors. Donors and fund providers want access, but they do not necessarily need cataloging. Marcum remarked that it is time for a summit on the bibliographic future that involves the many stakeholders. She announced that she is forming an advisory committee to support summit activity and the process of broader consultation. She concluded by declaring that the PCC could be the first step toward a wider system of sharing.

Beacher Wiggins described the past year as a blueprint for the mission of the Bibliographic Access Divisions "to provide effective access to information resources and leadership to the library and information service communities in a rapidly changing environment." He spoke about the planned reorganization at LC that will streamline the workflow by merging the acquisitions and cataloging functions. In the restructured organization, a single position will include many tasks, including acquisitions and cataloging of monographs and serials. Technicians will handle descriptive cataloging and copy cataloging while professional staff will perform authority work.

Wiggins referred to the Calhoun report's recommendation to dismantle Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). He reassured the audience that LC will not jettison LCSH, but it will review pre-coordination of subject strings since automation can handle that task. Further, LC will consider clustered subject terminology as recommended by the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium. For further information please read the Proceedings.

Wiggins addressed LC's decision to discontinue series authority control. He said that LC made decisions about series prior to receiving the Calhoun report. The decision does not mean that LC is withdrawing its support of the PCC. LC will continue to support the program as a whole, including series documentation and training. At the same time, LC will continue to seek efficiencies in cataloging as well as seek feedback on content and implementation.

He went on to discuss the 2005 Casalini libri shelf-ready project, an agreement with an Italian vendor to provide cataloging records to accompany the resources it supplies to LC. The arrangement brought about new relationships involving training, utilities, the vendor community, and other PCC members. However, a new model for pricing, distribution, etc., is needed since the project is more costly than expected. LC plans to form a task group to address these issues and will engage in pilot projects with other vendors.

Mark Watson presented a timeline of the PCC's strategic planning process. He highlighted the five strategic directions and related action items identified by the Operations Committee at its April meeting.

He commented on the action item for Strategic Direction 1: Be a Forward Thinking, Influential Leader in the Global Metadata Community. He said the PCC should recommend implementation of the action item to create a think tank or metadata cooperative (METCO) before the idea is out-of-date. He stated that the PCC should lead in the area of assessing environmental changes and inventorying projects, developments, and initiatives.

For Strategic Direction 2: Redefine the Common Enterprise, Watson emphasized changing the PCC name by replacing "cataloging" with "metadata." He remarked that the PCC needs to figure out how to convey the concept of sharing.

Addressing Strategic Direction 3: Build On and Expand Partnerships and Collaborations in Support of the Common Enterprise, Watson asked the audience to consider who the PCC’s partners should be. He said that expansion is part of what is being discussed as in increasing the organization’s scope to include commercial vendors, new membership criteria, and more funnels. He endorsed PCC certification for individuals possessing expertise developed over the years. Certification has value as a way to prevent decline in expertise; to provide something of value to add to a person’s resume; and to offer accreditation that will be recognized by employers needing employees with certain skills. He spoke of building participation—one metadata specialist at a time, and suggested that certification could be a way to attract international participation.

Watson was especially enthusiastic about an action item for Strategic Direction 4: Pursue Globalization. He urged participants to review the PCC report; keep track of IFLA developments in this area; ongoing explorations of automatic translation; standards for manipulating data on the international level; and merging standards.

Full details are available at PCC 2010: Planning for the Future

Watson held up a copy of a new brochure from LC's Cataloging Distribution Service as proof of progress on Strategic Direction 5: Lead in the Education and Training of Catalogers. The brochure was distributed at the LC booth at ALA to promote the courses that are part of the Catalogers' Learning Workshop (CLW). These include Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program (SCCTP) courses of interest to serials librarians, Cat21 courses on metadata, and the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS)/PCC courses.

He concluded by stating that the PCC's future is bright as it moves toward expansion of its role. In his final words he encouraged members to take an interest in one another's work.

Bob Wolven remarked that the PCC is "coming to the end of an era in cooperative cataloging." He explained that the current model of consensus that has been refined over the last thirty years is coming apart. New models have to be developed quickly before events outpace the PCC community. The challenge is to change the PCC's way of thinking while reconciling two strong but countervailing imperatives that will shape the immediate future.

Wolven quoted Benjamin Franklin who, at the time of the American Revolution, told his fellow rebels, "We must all hang together or assuredly we shall all hang separately." This quotation describes the successful model for cooperative cataloging based on building consensus and agreeing to follow the same rules so that everyone has a high degree of confidence in the results. Wolven explained that PCC members agree, individually and institutionally, to subordinate some of their own beliefs and preferences in order to gain greater efficiencies elsewhere. One example is sacrificing some efficiency in original cataloging to gain greater efficiency in copy cataloging.

However, consensus building can be a time-consuming process that produces conservative results and is not the best approach for responding to rapid change because it produces complexity. Treating widely varying resources with the same rules is inefficient and leads to extreme and untenable positions. Wolven cited the debate about series access to illustrate his point. Questions have been raised about the importance of series and whether users find them worthwhile. It can be said that most users do not care about most series most of the time while some users care very much about some series some of the time. Yet, the PCC has not acted on this knowledge because it is seeking consensus by having everyone follow the same guidelines.

The willingness to wait for consensus is eroding and the process did not start with LC. Many PCC libraries have already made their own choices, compromises, and exceptions about the types of catalog records that are acceptable; about special workflows and batch processes; and about requirements for outside vendors and suppliers. The end result is not always PCC-quality records. The blame should not be place on cost-cutting alone. The PCC was founded on the need for cost efficiency and the membership has always worked within the basic framework of consensus and consistency.

There are two reasons why radical change is looking both sensible and possible. First, there has been an increased awareness of discovery environments outside the library catalog, including search engines such as Google as well as aggregators, federated search, and domain specific indexes. None of these follow the PCC’s rules. Although they have their drawbacks, one has to admit that they do work. It leads one to question whether all of the complexity is worth the cost. The second, less-recognized reason is that the scope of the PCC's mission is less clearly defined in a digital environment where an institution's mission is not limited to the physical objects on shelves or even by the relatively limited range of commercial publications. Since it is obvious that one cannot, will not, and should not apply PCC rules to all of these resources, it is necessary to examine how and under what circumstances the rules should be used. The PCC cannot afford to give up consensus. Ben Franklin was right. Each one cannot go its own way. If the PCC members do not work together, they will indeed all hang separately.

Wolven quoted the following lyrics from an Isley Brothers' song: "It’s your thing; do what you want to do. I can't tell you who to sock it to." The lyrics illustrate a model in which PCC members who cannot wait for a new consensus to form decide that the best approach is to experiment, argue, persuade, and be prepared to change course. However, despite the need for leadership, no one is ready to accept a dictatorship.

Wolven stated that what PCC participants need "to work towards, energetically, argumentatively, creatively and with open minds, is a new kind of consensus." He compared cooperative cataloging to a social contract, and commented that its terms needed revising in order to serve two very different ends. First, PCC members need to agree on what to tell others who supply cataloging--vendors, publishers, and agencies--what the PCC requires and what it is willing to pay. He said this is where the adage “Who pays the piper calls the tune” comes into play. He explained that any agreement reached in this area will be determined by market forces. If the requirements are too complicated, the costs will be so high that there will not be enough of a market to support them. On the other hand, if too few requirements result in a shoddy product, then there will not be enough "buy-in" to support the less complicated approach.

Second, the PCC should develop a culture that is based on principles and judgment rather than comprehensive rules or one that is more accepting of differences in the results. This type of acceptance already exists when it comes to accepting records into the catalogs of PCC institutions that would not be accepted if they had been created by the institutions' catalogers. The PCC needs to start tolerating some of these differences on the production end. Members want to preserve important principles such as authority control, controlled subject access, and Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). It is important to understand why and when these principles matter, and be prepared to apply them judiciously while trusting others to do the same.

The PCC has not reached this point yet, but it must. Its catalogers must treat resources on their own terms, and decide what is right for the resource, not for the catalog. The PCC is a good place to start this process.

Question and Answer Session Following Panel Presentation

In response to a question from an audience member about having the PCC Secretariat at LC considering the influence it has on the cataloging world through its widespread training activities, Wolven said that he feels there is no conflict of interest. Another participant commented that LC is rewriting documentation to reflect its decisions without discussion or waiting for any PCC decisions.

To a question about access and FRBR, Marcum responded that users are interested in access not cataloging. By "access" she explained that she was referring to making content available on the Web. Wiggins commented that this can be accomplished capably with a different level as well as a different generation of staff. Wolven added that the debate over the past couple of years has been about information discovery and access. He said the PCC needs to concentrate on knowledge organization not just discovery and selection of content, and that surveys of scholarly focus groups have confirmed that this is what users want.

When asked about Faceted Application of Subject Terminology's (FAST's) inability to replace the precision of LCSH, Wiggins said that pre-coordination is not effective. He challenged the audience to explain what pre-coordinated subject strings mean to users.

Another participant suggested that the future is the application of technology to mine data in our catalogs and to apply more value to the records catalogers create. Further, the PCC needs to acquire funding through grants for technology and communicate with technical researchers and developers. Wolven suggested using search engines to perform data mining. He said that a source of major traffic in WorldCat is Yahoo, which gives bibliographic data greater relevance. Smith-Yoshimura added that new mark-up languages are enabling the re-purposing of data bibliographic records.

One audience member commented on LC's discontinuing series authority control just as technology has enabled the linking of subject authority records to bibliographic records in OCLC. Wiggins responded that there is more to series authority control than creating subject authority records. Maintenance is still an issue. Wolven added that there is a need for something between abandoning the entire structure and keeping it as it is. When asked if LC considered its constituents such as public libraries, Wiggins replied that sometimes LC examines the impact on specific constituencies. He said that in the end LC looks at the aggregate effects of a decision. As for public libraries, LC still supports Cataloging-in-Publication (CIP) and Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). Marcum commented that where LC encounters differing views is between managers and practicing catalogers, not between different constituents such as the public library and academic library communities.

In response to a comment about LC's leadership role involving consultation and communication with its staff and the PCC and concern about how LC will handle future decisions, Marcum replied that the irony is that there is more communication than ever before, but it is never enough. Although many have said that they needed to hear about the series decision sooner, LC's experience has been that some view consultation as an opportunity to have their own view prevail. At the upcoming summit these issues will be discussed.

Presentation of the PCC Certificates of Appreciation

Mechael Charbonneau, PCC Chair-Elect, closed the evening by presenting a PCC Certificate of Appreciation to five members of the Program. Karen Smith-Yoshimura was recognized for her fifteen years of outstanding leadership on the Policy Committee as the representative of RLG, and for her strong advocacy of the PCC's basic principles as one of the program's founders. Mark Watson received a certificate for his sustained contributions as a member and for his outstanding leadership as chair of the Policy Committee. Certificates were presented to Judith Nadler for her active contributions to the Policy Committee as a representative of the member Monographic Bibliographic Record Program (BIBCO) member institutions, October 2003–September 2006; to Cynthia Shelton in recognition of her active contributions to the Policy Committee as a representative of the member CONSER member institutions, October 2003–September 2006; and to Paul Weiss in recognition of his active contributions as chair of the Standing Committee on Standards, October 2003–September 2006.