Standing Committee on Standards Annual Report 2003

October 2002 - September 2003

The Standing Committee on Standards met in person once during this period, at ALA Midwinter. Since the majority of members were unable to attend ALA Annual in Toronto, no meeting was held. The committee conducted its business via e-mail during the year. The following members' terms will be expiring on September 30, 2003: Ann Caldwell (Chair), Dajin Sun, and John Wright. Continuing members are: Ann Sitkin, Paul Weiss, Tatiana Barr, Ed Glazier (RLG liaison), Jay Weitz (OCLC liaison), Kay Guiles (LC liaison). Diane Boehr (National Library of Medicine) and Manon Théroux (Yale University) will join the group as new members October 1, 2003.

The committee's major activities focused around the final reports of two task groups, the Task Group on Conference Publications and the Task Group on the Function of the Authority File. Both of these groups submitted their reports during this year and both were excellent, thought-provoking and controversial.

Task Group on Conference Proceedings:

This Task Group, chaired by David Van Hoy (MIT), made four recommendations concerning the cataloging rules for choice of title for conference publications, the definition of minor change in name, guidelines on recording the abbreviated form of year in the name of a conference when establishing the heading for a conference, and classification for runs of conferences. SCS requested guidance from the PCC Steering committee for one of these recommendations and has requested rule interpretations for two others. In the case of the last recommendation, SCS felt that classification was a local decision and did not agree with the recommendation.

Task Group on the Function of the Authority File

This group, chaired by Manon Théroux (Yale University), made a total of 13 recommendations. Some of these deal with communications issues, some with MARC format issues, some with descriptive cataloging issues. SCS has accepted a number of the recommendations and will continue to follow-up on them as necessary.

Rule Interpretations

At the request of CPSO, SCS examined a draft LCRI of rule 25.5B (uniform titles for motion pictures) and accompanying questions for a Frequently Asked Questions for uniform titles. SCS reviewed the section labeled "PCC practice" and accepted the LCRI. OLAC also reviewed the LCRI and had some issues with it. To date it is still with CPSO.

SCS is currently reviewing another video-related rule issue: 7.1F1/7.7B6 and the statement of responsibility. The group has not yet reached consensus on this, partially because only a few members have experience with video cataloging.

Program records

The chair, Paul Weiss, and Kay Guiles worked with David Banush, chair of SCT, to revise an older document which is a reference tool for the identification and authentication of program records. This was reviewed by OpCo in May and is now part of BIBCO documentation.

SCS received a request from the National Library of Medicine to consider its videorecordings, which are cataloged according to AMIM, as PCC core-level program records. SCS reviewed the request as well as PCC documentation, and decided that while the records could be coded as "core", they could not be coded as PCC.

Submitted by Ann Caldwell, September 22, 2003