ALC Cataloging Committee Meeting
Library Lecture Hall, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
Thursday, April 24, 2003: 3:45-5:15pm
Minutes (draft of June 6, 2003)

Present: Lygia Ballantyne (Library of Congress), Ruby Bell-Gam (Univ. of California, Los Angeles), Phyllis Bischof (Univ. of California, Berkeley), Simon Bockie (Univ. of California, Berkeley), Joseph Caruso (Columbia Univ.), Jill Coelho (Harvard Univ.), Andrew de Heer (New York Public Library), Vicki Evalds (Philadelphia), Gregory Finnegan (Harvard Univ.), Miki Goral (Univ. of California, Los Angeles), Marieta Harper (Library of Congress), Patricia Kuntz, Joseph Lauer (Michigan State Univ.), Robert Lesh (Northwestern Univ.), Peter Limb (Michigan State Univ.), Akilah Nosakhere (Atlanta Univ.), Anthony Oddo (Yale Univ.), Patricia Ogedengbe (Northwestern Univ.), Lauris Olson (Univ. of Pennsylvania), Laverne Page (Library of Congress), Loumona Petroff (Boston Univ.), Charles Riley (Yale Univ.), Gretchen Walsh (Boston Univ.), David Wesley (Boston Univ.), Dorothy Woodson (Yale Univ.), Joanne Zellers (Library of Congress).

1. Introductions & announcements: Chair Lauer opened the meeting at 3:45 p.m., with Lesh as secretary.

2. Minutes of the Fall meeting (sent to ALC list on Jan. 2, 2003) were approved.

3. Agenda approved with possible addition of "Foreign films" as subject.

4. History of Cataloging Committee for Britz memorial volume (Evalds/Lesh)
Evalds announced that Lesh had agreed to write the chapter on cataloging developments. In part, this would be an update of Widenmann's chapter for the Panofsky festschrift which covered through 1988. Group discussed what topics it would like covered. LCSH and subject funnel, automation, and reaching out to colleagues in Africa were mentioned. Scope would be limited to work in North America.

5. Unicode issues (Agenbroad work) (See Appendix I, which was distributed at meeting.)
Committee had many questions on the value of project to incorporate Unicode for foreign language characters in MARC21. They also felt that they could not begin to address the questions. Some did note that improvements rather than perfection were what was needed. More generally, the Committee lacked expertise with Unicode and with cataloging materials in African languages. Don Osborn, who runs Bisharat (a multilingual website and initiative for those concerned with African language publishing) from Niger, was mentioned as a better contact person. Walsh proposed a task force to prepare a response to Agenbroad's question and other issues being raised. Zellers noted that Agenbroad is retired from LC, but Jim Godwin at LC is also interested in Unicode, and Zellers has forwarded many messages on Unicode to him. Westley volunteered to chair this task force, with Walsh and Caruso as members. Westley proposed a late Summer deadline for a report. Lauer felt that Agenbroad deserved a response sooner.

6. Africana Subject Funnel report
a) General procedures were reviewed. Individuals on the review list wished to continue receiving proposed submissions. Agreed that lack of feedback did not indicate lack of interest and reworking of research was not expected.
b) Notification of changes in what we submit: This is not seen as a problem, as authorities librarian at a library arranges for updating any changed subjects.
c) Work of Margaret Hughes (Stanford): She has submitted 4 proposals for new classification numbers and 8 headings that were not submitted to the funnel. The group felt that these should not be included as funnel products, but they could be attached as an addendum. A few would like to see a list of work submitted by ALC individuals or even non-ALC members' work with Africana topics.
d) Peoples of Africa (Olson) as source
Chair acknowledged work of Lauris Olson in locating and analyzing reviews of James S. Olson's Peoples of Africa (1996). His survey found many non-critical notices along with devastating critiques from a few scholars or librarians. Lauer plans to forward these reviews to LC when time appears right.
e) Limb proposed a future ASA panel to involve scholars in defining terms for African culture and other topics. Finnegan saw this as tracing the library's handling of monographs, including adding subject headings. Lauer mentioned his experience with such a presentation at Michigan State University.

7. Classifying non-historical materials in DT and non-educational materials in LD: Bell-Gam felt too many monographs were classified inappropriately in DT; others noted that DT covered more than just African history. Lauer noted that some universities (e.g., UCLA and the University of Florida) classified their own theses in LD. This became a problem when other libraries copied the local call number for photocopies of the original.

8. Cataloging Committee website
Noted fine work of webmaster Zellers and suggested some format changes that would make it easier to find minutes for a particular meeting. This would involve moving details on Chair etc. to bottom or behind a button. Limb suggested loading materials on current items of interest. Limb would also like to see the website used as a forum for discussion.

9. Reports: ALA's CCAAM (sent to list on Jan. 30, 2003) (See Appendix II.)
The current proposal for Islamic law is likely to be redone, and Caruso called for more active recruitment of individuals for task force on Islamic law subjects.

10. Cataloging problems, needs, etc.
a) Updating catalogs to match changes in headings. Not a problem at Northwestern.
b) Bell Gam noted problems dealing with materials on law and spoke to a need for greater expertise by catalogers in this area.

11. Use of "Bantu-speaking peoples" and "Indigenous peoples"
(See Appendix III, which was distributed at meeting.)
After a brief discussion, the Committee encouraged submitting changes through the funnel that would eliminate geographic subdivisions for "Bantu-speaking peoples" and would stop use of "Indigenous peoples" for majority populations.

12. Bell-Gam raised issue of LC records with Minimal Level Cataloging, i.e., no subject headings. Zellers noted that MLC indicated that no further work was planned. Several noted that this was part of the broader problem of improving access.

Adjourned at 5:20

APPENDIX I: UNICODE & SPECIAL CHARACTERS IN AFRICAN LANGUAGES

James E. Agenbroad has prepared a 9-page paper (Unicode for Special Characters of African Languages) which he hopes to see published. Any ideas?

This report evaluates the adequacy of the Unicode Standard for encoding special characters used by various languages of Africa that use Latin script. It is based on Alphabets de langues africaines, edited by Rhonda L. Hartell (Dakar, 1993).

He found two special characters that seem to be absent in the Unicode Standard: 1) Latin small letter R with a stroke is used in Kanuri; and 2) Latin small letter S with a palatal hook is used in the Sudan with Arabic written in the Latin script. Some special characters do not have capital equivalents. He concludes the introduction by stating that asking Unicode to assign codes for absent letters and for missing capitals would seem desirable.

---------

Questions for ALC from James E. Agenbroad (jjagenbroad@AOL.com), in March 19, 2003, letter to Lauer.

1. How complete is Hartell (Alphabets de langues africaines, 1993)?
Do other African languages use other special characters or more unusual diacritics?

2. Does the lack of capital equivalents for some special characters matter?

3. Do we need to distinguish between apostrophe before a letter, after a letter and as a separate character?

4. These special characters are widely dispersed in the Unicode Standard. This makes it difficult to define a single escape sequence for them as was done for other alphabets. Could a single list of African special letters be defined and then given an escape sequence?

5. To what extent would inclusion of obsolete special characters be desirable (and feasible) for materials printed in earlier orthographies?
--Notes by J. Lauer, 4/23/03

APPENDIX II: REPORT FOR ALC ON CCAAM

ALA's Committee on Cataloging: Asian and African Materials met in Philadelphia on Jan. 26, 2003. 8 members and 6 guests attended it. Highlights of the meeting:

1. The task force assigned to review the word "Oriental" in AACR2 had concluded that no change was necessary or feasible at this time, even though the term was imprecise. (In some rules, it means nonroman; in others, Far East or Asian.) The task force was unable to comment on why oriental might be offensive. My own Google search led to a couple of sources that make it clear that while Oriental as a noun (for Asians or Americans of Asian descent) is to be avoided, its use as an adjective is not usually considered offensive. For more details, see the 4th (2000) ed. of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and the many news articles in 2001/2002 about the State of Washington law that mandated replacing Oriental with Asian in all state documents.

2. Supported changes in AACR2's Appendix E, relative to initial articles in Turkish (bir is to be treated as "one" rather than "a/an") and in Tongan, Maori and Samoan.

3. Agreed to propose a program in Orlando (2004) on using Unicode with nonroman scripts so that they can be displayed and searched on the Opacs.

4. John Eilts (Stanford) is assembling a task force to prepared additional subjects for Islamic law. The recent development of the classification schedule for Islamic Law (KBP) made it obvious that more headings were needed. Specialists from the Africanist community are welcome.

5. The LC Cataloging Report reported on progress in many areas. The Program for Cooperative Cataloging celebrated its 10th anniversary and has 43 international institutions participating. LC will explore using non-roman languages in authority records, expanding the languages that the Library can transcribe, and using Voyager rather than OCLC or RLIN for editing. Paul Crego of the South Asia Team has cataloged some of the Amharic and Ge'ez language material.
Some of the Chinese catalogers reported problems with LC's directions for Chinese place names. Because of the many recent changes in Chinese place names, the BGN headings are often obsolete. When cataloging a work with has newer information, the geographic heading should be established provisionally on the basis of the piece in hand. This runs counter to the current general policy of following BGN.

6. Julianne Beall's query to the MELA list concerning changes for Moroccan geographic names received no response. Dewey will make the changes as proposed.

APPENDIX III: HEADINGS FOR THE MAJORITY POPULATION IN SOUTH AFRICA & ELSEWHERE
Notes by J. Lauer, Dec. 9, 2002

010 sh 85014702
040 DLC ßc DLC ßd DLC
005 19901120142532.3
150 Blacks |z South Africa
450 Bantus |w nne
450 Negroes in South Africa |w nne
PROPOSED ADDITIONS
450 Bantu-speaking peoples $z South Africa
450 Indigenous peoples $z South Africa $w nne
451 South Africa $x Native races $w nne
550 South Africans $w g
670 Herbert, Robert K. "Introduction: language in a divided society," in: Language and society in Africa, Witwatersrand UP, 1992: $b p. 6 (Bantu " used as a coined scientific reference within linguistics for almost 150 years ... The term was later applied to the peoples who speak Bantu langauges and, unfortunately, came to be an official population designator for discirminatory policies and , still later, a racial epithet in South Africa. As a result of its offensiveness to the group named, the term is reserved to linguistic references now...)
680 $i Use only if the work discusses blacks apart from other groups in the country. See also: South Africans.

010 sh 85125485
040 DLC ßc DLC ßd DLC
005 19890531104053.8
150 Indigenous peoples |z South Africa
451 South Africa |x Native races |w nne
DELETE AS REDUNDANT.
Add both 150 & 451 to Black $z South Africa; except that works only about the Khoisan should be assigned the heading $a Khoisan (African people)

010 sh 89006450
040 DLC ßc DLC
005 19891227143126.8
150 South Africans
550 Ethnology |z South Africa |w g

RELATED:
010 sh 85011698
040 DLC ßc DLC ßd DLC
005 19960327160055.4
053 DT16.B2 ßc Africa
053 DT443.3.B35 ßc Tanzania
053 DT546.145.B35 ßc Gabon
150 Bantu-speaking peoples
450 Bantus |w nne
550 Ethnology |z Africa, Sub-Saharan |w g
PROPOSAL: ADD CANNOT SUBDIVIDE GEOGRAPHICALLY
REMOVE AS 550 from headings for separate peoples speaking Bantu languages.

Julianne Beall (Library of Congress), Ruby Bell-Gam (Univ. of California, Los Angeles), Simon Bockie (Univ. of California, Berkeley), Karen Fung (Stanford Univ.), Andrew deHeer (Schomburg Center, NY), Miki Goral (Univ. of California, Los Angeles), Marieta Harper (Library of Congress), Nina Johnsen (Centre of African Studies, Univ. of Copenhagen), Patricia Kuntz (Madison, Wisc.), Joseph Lauer (Michigan State Univ.), Robert Lesh (Northwestern Univ.), Peter Limb (Michigan State Univ.), Peter Malanchuk (Univ. of Florida), Jeff Myers-Hayer (Serial Record Division, LC), Lauris Olson (Univ. of Pennsylvania), Hans Panofsky (Evanston, Ill.), Loumona Petroff (Boston Univ.), Fred Protpappas (LC), Jason Schultz (Northwestern Univ.), Shoshanah Seidman (Northwestern Univ.), Janet Stanley (Smithsonian Inst.), Paul Steere (LC), Barbara Turfan (SOAS, Univ. of London), Gretchen Walsh (Boston Univ.), David Wesley (Boston Univ.), Joanne Zellers (Library of Congress).

1. Meeting began at with a call for agenda items in addition to the two reports by chair.

2. The minutes of the Spring meeting were approved. These were sent to members on June 13 and posted on the web at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/catm102.html

3. Report on Dewey changes (Beall)
Julianne Beall, Assistant Editor, DDC, distributed a copy of the July 19 query to ALC and a copy of the draft area Table 2 for Morocco and Western Sahara that will be included in Dewey Decimal Classification Edition 22. No problems were seen, but several suggested that MELA (Middle East Librarians' Association) or librarians with expertise in Arabic be contacted. Editing is in the final stages, so any corrections would have to come soon.

4. CC:AAM Report (Lauer)
The ALA CCS Committee on Cataloging: Asian and African Materials met in Atlanta, Georgia on June 16, 2002. Much of the discussion was again focused on the Pinyin conversion. LC presented a "Revised Pinyin Romanization Guidelines" which will be part of the ALA-LC Romanization Tables. I questioned the use of tribe/tribal in the following paragraph:

Join together transliterations of two or more characters comprising the names of racial, linguistic, or tribal groupings of mankind. Join the term zu (for tribe or people) to a name only in proper names of places.

During a long discussion, others stated that "tribal" or "tribe" were acceptable terms for peoples in Africa and elsewhere; and they rejected ethnic group as a substitute.

The task force assigned to review the word "Oriental" in AACR2 had done nothing and a new chair was appointed.
Selina S. Lin (Univ. of Iowa) is the new chair of the Committee.

5. MARC character repertoire expansion (Zellers)
James Agenbroad forwarded for Committee review a draft proposal (Consolidated Character Repertoire Expansion) that he prepared for the Asian, African and Middle Eastern Section (AAMES) of ALA's ACRL and for the American Association of Law Libraries. This proposal consolidated a minor request for new characters with AAMES request for the expansion of the MARC 21 character repertoire to include those langauges now getting "romanized only" cataloging. The proposal includes a scheme for assigning Unicode values to all letters or characters in the ALA-LC romanization tables that are not yet in MARC 21.

Lauer was asked to review the table for completeness. Limb raised issue of problems encountered with special characters in Latin alphabet that are used in African languages. Zellers assured him that this problem was included in the proposal. All felt that this project deserved support. There was some discussion about the relative importance of Ethiopic within the list of 36 scripts.

The Committee agreed on the following resolution of support:
Given the long tradition of writing in the Ethiopic script, the significant library collections of Ethiopian-language resources (as represented by librarians at this meeting), the large number of Ethiopian-Americans and Eritrean-Americans who are attempting to preserve their heritage, and the great difficulties readers of these languages have in locating bibliographic records that transcribe or romanize their script in a fashion not common among native speakers, it is a priority for this group that the Ethiopic script be included in the MARC character set as soon as possible.

6. Cataloging of African serials at LC (Jeffrey Myers-Hayer):
His current position was created in 1992, to concentrate the work formerly distributed among many librarians. He deals with serials from all of sub-Saharan Africa, including receipts from LC-Nairobi (992 serials in FY02). He has trained Catherine Thuku at LC-Nairobi to catalog serials. Monographs have headings loaded on oclc in Nairobi, while the records are shipped to LC-Washington for loading. LC-Nairobi is able to handle all materials received in African languages, either through its own staff or with contract help.

In response to questions, he noted that he can assist in updating bibliographic records (African serials on OCLC and African monographs acquired by LC). Questions about serial or other records should be sent to him at jmye@loc.gov. LC-Nairobi receipts for FY02: 992 serials and 2840 monographs. For electronic serials, LC usual practice has been to note these in 530 and 856 fields on the record for the print version. In 2003, they plan to start cataloging at least some titles that lack print equivalents.

7. Africana Subject Funnel (Lauer)
The report, with errors that need correcting, was distributed. Coordinator reviewed some of the problems contributing to delays.

Janet Stanley briefly outlined the procedures she follows in submitting heading to AAT (Art & architecture thesaurus). She checks a proposed heading in about 10 secondary sources. When there is no agreement, the primary literature is searched. Interns and volunteers are very helpful in this process.

There was a general discussion of the role of reference works in the process of submitting new subjects. Some wanted to see a list on the web. Lauer wanted more credence given to primary sources, while Seidman preferred to rely on a reference work. There was a discussion of the relative reliability of good sources such as Ethnologue, AAT, Biebuyck's African ethnonyms, and Dalby's Linguasphere. James Olson's Peoples of Africa, 1996, had no supporters among the attendees; and the chair asked L. Olson to gather some critical reviews that could be sent to LC. There was an exchange on experiences with NACO and BIBCO, which was the other LC-led cooperative project.

It was agreed that those submitting new form headings such as "Marine painting, South Africa" could submit directly via the web without using the funnel. LC now accepts from any source and many librarians are submitting their new headings directly. In some cases, a review by the funnel would have led to better authority records.

8. Other issues:
Walsh raised the issue of records with poor subject headings. For a book by Okonta and Douglas, Where vultures feast (Sierra Club Books, 2001), there was no hint that this covered the Ogoni crisis. The problem seemed to be a matter of librarian reluctance to identify precise locality for a place that was not in the authority files. The push for core records with fewer subject headings was also discussed.

Chair mentioned problem of Zaire still embedded in subject headings.

-----------------------

Page Last Updated September 10, 2003