Minutes of the PCC Standing Committee on Automation Meeting

July 6, 1996

1. All the SC Auto members except for Louise Ratliff (UCLA) were present. Gary Strawn joined the Committee for the greater part of the meeting in order to discuss his paper on automated generation of authority records.

2. Colleen Hyslop reported on the May PCC ExecCo meeting and noted that we should be on the lookout for future Committee candidates from public libraries. Michael observed that we will be joined by a representative of CONSER at some point, but that the precise details are yet to be worked out. He noted that the SC Auto would be presenting a variety of approaches to NACO/BIBCO automation at the Sunday night LC discussion meeting.

3. Task Group reports:

Sally Sinn reported on her Linking Authorities and Bibliographic Records TG. Four papers are in progress, most rather on the long (and technical) side: validating uniform titles and series, subjects, names and the techniques to do all of these. She expects to have the papers ready for the SC Auto by Labor Day. Shorter versions with executive summaries will be prepared for presentation to the PCC ExecCo by mid-October.

Joe Kiegel reported on the Joint Task Group of Automation and Standards on Access and Retrieval. This TG has had a difficult birthing due to the loss of both of its original chairs (Judy Brugger resigned when she relocated to NM and Bill Garrison resigned due to lack of time to devote to it). Joe took over for Judy and now Rhoda Kesselman (Princeton) has agreed to take over for Bill. The 2 new Chairs will be meeting during ALA to discuss the TG's charge and where it should go from here. [This happened and a new, clarified charge is under discussion at this time.]

Michael Kaplan reported that the issue of a MARC Object Identifier for the Windows Clipboard has gone to NISO for discussion. Hopefully, NISO will run it through the Microsoft right-of-passage and receive an official MS blessing for it. Barring that, we will discuss directly with the AVIAC community the required OIDs, if necessary.

Considerable discussion followed with Gary Strawn on his paper, particularly on the wording (machine-assisted, cataloger-approved) and on the extent of the reference structure that the machine should offer: in the case of compound surnames, for example, it would be much easier for the computer and the programmers behind the authorities programs to permute on *all* variations of a compound surname and require the cataloger to delete those that are inappropriate, rather than requiring the program to generate only those that fit various linguistic and national categories. That, however, implies a change in rules, etc. For the meantime, Gary agreed to take his paper back and make certain changes and clarifications and then forward the paper back to the SC Auto in a few weeks.

4. The Committee discussed new directions for investigation and research in light of the fact that the original Automation Appendix is now 2 1/2 years old and predates, among other things, the WWW. Suggestions for future investigation included

• what documents that are not available online would be worth having online? [the issue of NUC codes had already come up at the July 5 RLG meeting. MK]
• what of a clearinghouse for online documents?
• training for automation, especially for workstations [Louise Ratliff had expressed an interest in this]
• further work on classification, such as links to holdings from the schedules and automatic cuttering
• it was noted that the relation of SGML to MARC had been suggested to the SC Auto, but that LC's NetDev staff are already involved with that
• role of Java was later suggested [Joe Kiegel] and it is to be noted that RLG can run some of its products with RLIN as a Java application under Netscape

5. We have volunteered to run a more extensive program on PCC automation initiatives at ALA Midwinter in Washington. Various times and venues were suggested. Michael Kaplan will be looking into utilizing an existing meeting or Discussion Group that might mesh well with our concerns. [No response yet from the group Michael has tried to contact.]

6. We will meet again Saturday afternoon at Midwinter and work on the various Task Groups and refine new initiatives in the meantime.