Standing Committee on Automation

Notes of SCA Meeting at ALA Annual,San Francisco CA

Jun. 17, 2001, 4:00-6:00 p.m., OCLC Red Suite

Present: Jeanne Baker, Kyle Banerjee, Matthew Beacom, Ruth Bogan, Karen Calhoun (chair), Ed Glazier, John Levy, John Riemer, Gary Strawn, David Whitehair, David Williamson

MEMBERSHIP

SCA members welcomed new member John Riemer (UCLA). The new SCA chair, Gary Charbonneau (Indiana University) had a prior obligation that prevented him from attending the ALA annual meeting, so he could not be present. Riemer's and Charbonneau's SCA terms begin October 1, 2001. With Deborah Duke's resignation from SIRSI and the SCA (Deborah returned to work in a public library), the SCA is again without a vendor liaison.

Actions:

Calhoun reported she has several leads for a vendor liaison and will pursue them.

REVIEW/APPROVAL OF THE REPORT OF THE SCA TG ON OCLC BATCH PROCESSING

Edward Weissman (Cornell), chair of the task group, had submitted the final report of the task group to the SCA for consideration at the SCA's ALA annual meeting. SCA members approved the report after offering a few comments.

Actions:

Calhoun agreed to pass SCA members' comments to the TG chair for incorporation. Calhoun will then send the revised version to the PCC Policy Committee for final approval and transmittal to OCLC.

SCA TASK GROUP ON AUTOMATED CLASSIFICATION

SCA members discussed how to influence library system vendors to implement the recommendations in the TG's final report. Strawn reported that he is in the process of implementing a new call number generation feature in the catalogers toolkit in use at Northwestern, which uses Voyager. The call number functionality is an example of how the TG's recommendations might come to life in a real system. Following a discussion of how to proceed, SCA members reached the consensus that impetus to include automated classification functionality in local systems needs to come from the user groups of each ILS. Before that can happen, however, it is necessary to further educate catalogers using various local systems about what is possible.

Actions:

SCA members agreed to do what they could to bring the TG's recommendations to the attention of their ILS user groups. Endeavor's Voyager User Group is aware of the issues, thanks to Strawn and Marty Kurth (Cornell), who spoke about the TG's work at a VUGM meeting this spring. Other systems represented in the room were DRA (John Riemer), SIRSI (Ruth Bogan), III (Kyle Banerjee), and Ex Libris (Jeanne Baker).

To gain greater awareness and support for the TG's recommendations within the cataloging community, Strawn agreed to present the TG's recommendations, in conjunction with a demo of the Northwestern call number generation features, at an appropriate venue at the ALA Midwinter meeting in New Orleans. Calhoun agreed to seek an appropriate venue for his presentation and demo.

SCA TASK GROUP ON JOURNALS IN AGGREGATOR DATABASES

Riemer provided an update on the TG's activities. At this ALA meeting, he, Calhoun and Banerjee met with Diane Smith, Henry Stoever, and Carol Johnson of Lexis Nexis to discuss how a MARC record set might be produced, per the TG's specifications, for their product Academic Universe.

Actions:

Riemer will continue to pursue collaboration with Lexis Nexis.

The TG's final report and recommendations are due November 2001. The final report will identify implementation issues, formulate plans to be presented to vendors, and describe the support required from other appropriate organizations.

OTHER SCA ISSUES

Whitehair and Williamson were asked for updates on BFM and real time upload of ARs, respectively, in advance of the SCA meeting. What follows are the updates they supplied:

Summary of Whitehair e-mail message, June 13, 2001: A brief update on PCC tactical plan 1.2.1.3: Real time update of authority records from local systems to OCLC. CatME 2.00 is currently in development, and it will include NACO support, "the Robert Bremer macro", and the ability to import authority records created in the local system for processing to OCLC in real time. There is no official release date yet, but this new version of CatME will be released later in 2001. Questions may be directed to David Whitehair at OCLC.

Summary of Williamson e-mail message, June 11, 2001: A brief e-mail update on PCC tactical plan 1.2.4: Streamline BFM (i.e., status report on global change in LC catalog): Gary Strawn visited LC in May. LC does not use the global update in Voyager due to limitations of the global update functionality. This means that the LC CPSO file maintenance unit continues making the changes one-by-one if there are more than about 15, and LC catalogers doing it if it's only a few. Strawn told LC staff about his heading changer and that generated a lot of interest, but no further action is anticipated until LC completes its upgrade to the next version of Voyager. That means that the NACO requirements for BFM will remain the same for now.

NEW BUSINESS: DISCUSSION OF LC ACTION PLAN FOR WEB RESOURCES

SCA members agreed to provide comments on the draft Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan. The SCA has been suggested as a collaborator on action items 2.1, 2.2, 2.4, 4.1, 4.2, and 6.3. Comments are due to LC by Sept. 1, 2001.

In the interests of making the best use of the limited time available for face-to-face discussion, the group discussed those items identified by LC as near term, high priority actions. Thus the discussion covered action items 2.4 (consolidating display of records for related manifestations of a work); 4.1 (specifications for maintenance of aggregator record sets); and 4.2 (detecting and reporting changes in e-resource content; automatic metadata extraction).

Calhoun also introduced discussion of another near term/high priority item in which the SCA might conceivably play a role: 5.1 (education and training to improve control of Web resources). A conclusion of the metadata discussion at the BIBCO/CONSER joint session, held during the PCC Operations Committee meetings in May, was that the PCC might become a "clearinghouse" for metadata information. At the San Francisco conference, Calhoun had learned of the interest of the ALCTS Networked Resources and Metadata Committee (NRMC) in providing a Web forum on metadata (and of the activity of the NRMC Web Page Task Force). Sensing an opportunity for synergy and collaboration among the NRMC, the PCC, and those implementing LC action item 5.1 (and possibly the DC-Libraries Working Group), Calhoun polled SCA members for interest in working on a collaborative Web clearinghouse about metadata implementations in libraries.

Out of time, SCA members agreed to discuss action items 2.1, 2.2, 6.3 later, via the SCA listserv.

Actions:

Calhoun will initiate further discussion of the LC action items via the SCA listserv, consolidate the SCA's comments, and send them to LC by the Sept. 1 deadline. She will also copy the PCC Policy Committee on the SCA's reply.

There was some confusion about the intent and scope of action items 4.1 and 4.2. Williamson agreed to seek clarification and post the explanation to the SCA listserv.

Calhoun will further consider the possibility of SCA participation in the creation of a metadata clearinghouse on the Web, in cooperation with NRMC, following discussion with other PCC leaders.

Notes prepared by K. Calhoun 7/7/01