Standing Committee on Automation: Annual Report 2005

October 1, 2004-Sept. 30, 2005

Membership change

Katherine Kott resigned from the committee in the first quarter of FY 2005 and was replaced by Liz Brown.

Activities

The major work of the committee was as usual carried out by several active task groups:

3rd Task Group on Journals in Aggregator Databases

The Final Report of this task group was completed in Aug. 2004 and was submitted to the PCC Steering Committee early in FY 2005.

Task Group on Linking Entries

This task group completed its work in Feb. 2005. Among its other recommendations, the task group urged that catalogers be encouraged to record multiple linking entry numbers in linking entry fields when known, not just one, and suggested that the wording in the CONSER Editing Guide that implies that the use of a single number is acceptable be revised. The task group also recommended a reexamination of the coding convention in MARC 21 that prescribes or appears to prescribe that the first indicator in a linking entry field be given a value of “1” when a corresponding 580 field is present.

Members of the task group were: Mechael Charbonneau (chair), Gary Charbonneau, Frieda Rosenberg, Beth Guay, Andrew Shroyer, and Robert Stewart. The task group’s complete final report has been posted.

Monograph Aggregator Task Group

This task group was organized in the first quarter of FY 2005 and was charged to “Develop a reference guide that lists the required data elements for machine-derived and machine-generated monographic records. The guide should include practical and detailed guidelines for applications.” The group produced an interim report early in 2005, and had a number of questions and requests for guidance that it brought before the BIBCO OpCo meeting on May 6th. When Standing Committee on Automation met at ALA in Chicago on June 26th, a good portion of the meeting was devoted to a discussion of two major unresolved issues:

1. What to do about those cases in which the task group’s recommendations are not in harmony with LC policy or with the report of the 3rd Task Group on Journals in Aggregator Databases?
2. How to work with vendors to make sure that the task group’s recommendations are adopted and followed?

SCA advised the task group that the guidelines for serials and the guidelines for monographs did not necessarily have to agree, since the serials guidelines are to be used for records created by CONSER catalogers, while the monographic guidelines are to be used for records created by vendors. In some cases it is quite appropriate that the guidelines be different.

A number of issues were then discussed and decided: the value of the encoding level and descriptive cataloging form, whether the aggregator package should be identified in a 79X field or a standard MARC field, whether access restrictions should be noted in field 506 or field 856, and whether to use field 500 or field 534 to identify the original version on which a digital version is based. With regard to the latter point, the committee agreed with the task group’s feeling that the 534 would be better. However, it is not clear from the field definition and scope statement in MARC 21 that this would be an appropriate use of the field. To remedy this, the committee recommended that a proposal for a revision of the definition and scope statement for the 534 be submitted to MARBI on behalf of the PCC. Task group member Becky Culbertson will draft proposed language of such a statement for review.

The task group wanted to know how to make the reference guide it is to write known to the vendors who need to use it. This type of problem has been raised before; it is important that individual institutions who are ordering record sets from vendors make it clear that they want quality records that conform to guidelines. Libraries ought to be willing to do this, because studies have shown that aggregator packages receive more use if the items in them are reflected in the catalog. However, the people in a library who make the decisions about which packages to acquire are not necessarily the people who understand the importance of obtaining quality record sets for those packages or who would be aware of a standard. Therefore, the existence of the guidelines should be widely publicized on various library listservs. The committee also suggested that the guidelines should, with the approval of the PCC, be registered with NISO. There are probably a lot of people within the PCC who would be willing to work with vendors to assist them in creating record sets for monographic aggregator packages according to the standards in the reference guide. It would be good to identify five or six such people who would volunteer to provide such assistance.

The task group has now nearly completed its final report to Standing Committee on Automation, which will incorporate the recommendation put forward by SCA at the ALA meeting in Chicago. Work on the reference guide is under way. Although it may not be completed by the end of September as originally planned, it is believed that it should be ready soon thereafter. Members of the task group are Kate Harcourt (chair), Becky Culbertson, and Kit Herlihy.

Task Group on Normalization

This task group was organized during the Apr.-June quarter and was assigned the following deliverables:

1. An identification of the various purposes to which normalization has been or may be used in library systems and the kind of normalization appropriate to each.
2. A detailed normalization scheme (intended to supplant the existing NACO scheme) for the handling of the extended Latin character set, together with a description of the work required on the part of library system vendors to implement it.
3. An extension of the normalization scheme for the extended Latin character set, together with a description of the work required on the part of library system vendors to implement it.
4. Principles for the extension of the normalization scheme to other alphabetic scripts.
5. Principles of the extension of the normalization scheme to other scripts.

Respectfully submitted,
Gary Charbonneau, chair,
Sept. 15, 2005