The most significant SCS accomplishment this year was developing a PCC response to the draft of AACR3 part I. The document to review was 258 pages long, the timeframe was very short, and the impact on PCC was quite high; we devoted correspondingly significant time and energy. I worked with the CONSER and BIBCO Coordinators, who arranged for me to get feedback from their programs. Les asked Kristin Lindlan to develop a coordinated CONSER response, which she did. Twenty people from 14 CONSER institutions participated, and I appreciated Kris’s work to send me a well-organized integrated document. Caroline invited members of the BIBCO Operations Committee to provide feedback. Three of the ten did, and Caroline sent me their comments. I used these comments from BIBCO and CONSER as well as comments from SCS members (including my own) to develop the first draft of the PCC response. I shared the draft with SCS, Les, and Caroline, and edited it based on their feedback. The final document that I submitted to CC:DA was 25 pages. At the request of PCC Chair, I also prepared a document highlighting the issues directly related to cooperative cataloging (6 pages), and an executive summary (2 pages).

Understandably there were areas of disagreement across the various sets of PCC comments. In particular, there were several points in the CONSER set that either conflicted with other comments, or that I disagreed with or felt were inappropriate. Les and I worked through many of them to consensus, while for some we did not, and did not include those. I am aware that some in the CONSER community were unhappy that some of the CONSER points did not make it into the final PCC response, some going so far as feeling that the CONSER document represented an official CONSER response that should have been submitted as such. However, PCC’s Governance Document (as well as a conversation I had with then-Chair of PCC, Carlen Ruschoff) makes clear that there is a single PCC liaison to CC:DA, which is the SCS Chair or other SCS member appointed by the Chair. Therefore I felt that SCS’s role was to submit a cohesive document that reflected what SCS thought was in the best interests of PCC. To this end I had communicated to Les and Caroline that the comments from CONSER and BIBCO would inform our writing of the PCC response, as opposed to automatically become part of it. It is quite apparent that PCC would benefit from generating a clear, explicit, and equitable policy on how official PCC positions are developed, approved, labelled, and communicated, especially for lengthy, complex documents such as drafts of the upcoming AACR replacement Resource Description and Access.

• “Thank you and all at LC for this response, and for making it available to all. And thanks especially for the opening comments on the whole misguided process.”
• “You did a fabulous job with the summary. You said what needed to be said and I'm so glad you did. I'm also glad you have gotten a lot of kudos and support.”
• “I wholeheartedly support your approach and your comments about the process. From what people here at [my institution] who have seen the document have reported, you are right in all respects.”
• “I want to thank you and all the others who took the time to produce this excellent document. Congratulations! I am very impressed by the intellectual clarity and integrity you and the other contributors have brought to this very difficult task, and hope very much that these comments will fall on fertile ground at the JSC.”
• “This document helped crystallize my thoughts.”
• “Your comments are good, specific and constructive -- exactly appropriate in a review process.”

Given how much effort we put into the document, and the mixed response from within PCC, we certainly appreciated getting these comments.

Other

We submitted 3 pages of comments on LC’s proposal on the addition of dates to existing personal name headings. I continued to participate in the activities of CC:DA in my role as PCC Liaison.

At the beginning of the year, LC began distributing its copy cataloged serial records as CONSER records. This became quite controversial. SCS treated it as a standards issue because although the records were identified as CONSER records, they did not meet the standard for CONSER records. I communicated with several CONSER participants and with PoCo about SCS-related concerns.

During the year, the LC liaison on SCS switched from Kay Guiles to David Reser. We appreciate Kay’s many years of service on the committee, and look forward to working with David. SCS members served on various PCC groups during the year:

• task group reviewing sub-full resource records: Diane Boehr
• Task Group to Plan for Multiple 260 Fields: Dave Reser
• SCA Task Group on Normalization: Ed Glazier and Tatiana Barr
• task group reviewing the access-level record concept: David Reser and Manon Theroux