ALC Cataloging Committee Meeting
Northwestern University, Norris University Center, Michigan Room
Friday, May 6, 2005: 9:45-10:45 am
Minutes
(draft of May 27, 2005)

Present: Ruby Bell-Gam (UCLA), Atoma Batoma (U. of Illinois), Phyllis Bischof (UC Berkeley), Ellen Bryan (U. of Chicago), Joe Caruso (Columbia), Jill Coelho (Harvard, Widener), Greg Finnegan (Harvard), Karen Fung (Stanford), Miki Goral (UCLA), Marieta Harper (LC), Bassey Irele (Harvard), Al Kagan (U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Patricia Kuntz, Joe Lauer (Michigan State, ALC Cataloging Committee chair), Bob Lesh (Northwestern), Peter Limb (Michigan State), Peter Malanchuk (U. of Florida), Giles Martin (OCLC), Karen Miller (Northwestern), Lauris Olson (U. of Pennsylvania), Laverne Page (LC), Edward Miner (U. of Iowa), Afeworki Paulos (U. of Michigan), Loumona Petroff (Boston U.), Dan Reboussin (U. of Florida), Andrea Stamm (Northwestern), Shoshanah Seidman (Northwestern), Gretchen Walsh (Boston U.), David Westley (Boston U.), Milicent Wewerka (LC), Dorothy Woodson (Yale).

1 & 2. Introductions were made and the minutes of the fall meeting were approved.

3. Africana Subject Funnel report (Lauer).
The Report was distributed and will be posted on the ALC website. There were contributions from many people and all of the submissions were thoroughly researched. Many new or revised headings are submitted directly to SACO from both ALC and non-ALC members.

Lauer mentioned that the proposed change from “Chapbooks, Nigerian” to “Nigerian market literature” was rejected, but new x-refs for “Onitsha market literature” and “Nigerian market literature” were added. Westley asked if Chapbooks, Hausa would be a permissible subject heading. Limb brought up Khoikhoi (African people), which is now sometimes spelled with an "e" as an example where LCSH has not kept up with current practice.

4. Issues with classification schedules:

a. Lauer reported that Margaret Hughes (Stanford University) has submitted a number of classification proposals over the past year. She expressed some concern about the length of time these took [and was told that proposals not listed within 4 months should be resubmitted].

b. Hughes also wanted to see a list of proposals being considered or in process, similar to the list of subject proposals available online. No one seconded this idea.

c. Lauer raised the possibility of revising the headings in the PL8000s and proposed preparing a draft. Limb cited Hottentot and German East Africa as highly outdated forms. LC practice for the classification schedules has been to retain the old form and add an x-ref so as not to alter the alphabetical order, which necessitates much additional work.

5. Future directions.

a. Margaret Hughes (absent) asked if the amplification of the LC classification for the Indian Ocean islands, which currently are all represented by a single LC classification number, is still a priority. The current problem is to coordinate the time periods for the LC schedules and LCSH, and nothing new has been done. Given the amount of work already done on this project, the Committee felt it should be completed. Caruso volunteered to contact Hughes to help.

b. Need for more chronological divisions in LCSH: Several noted that there are more chronological divisions in the classification schedules than in LCSH. Countries mentioned as needing more historical divisions were Ghana and Zimbabwe. Some thought we should ask LC to make this a priority, but LC simply does not have the staff to initiate these changes. Volunteers were requested. Bell-Gam, Limb, Seidman, and Batoma volunteered. [Lauer will send out guidelines.] In this expansion, LCSH and class headings should not be in conflict, and there should be support from reference sources for the dates chosen.

c. Walsh noted that users rely on keywords rather than subject headings. Someone suggested that librarians should ask authors and publishers to furnish sufficient keywords in titles to facilitate keyword searching.

5 Reports and announcements.

a. Library of Congress (Wewerka):
LC is reasonably current in cataloging of Africana materials in political science and history. Some backlog is accumulating in ethnology. There is a backlog in language and literature because no one is currently cataloging this material. Dictionaries from the backlog were cleared out with a special project. No one can do descriptive cataloging in the vernacular materials. Cataloging of Amharic and Tigrinya materials from the Thomas Kane collection is being done as a special project.

Cataloging issues: LC relies on the summaries from the Nairobi office for cataloging of Swahili and African-language materials. Catalogers noted the lack of (or unfamiliarity with) online reference sources other than Ethnologue, and would welcome recommendations of other sources.

Nature of material: Relatively little material is received on the colonial era. There seems to be a project in Germany to publish archival materials from German settlements (diaries, etc.).

New development, etc.: The PJ-PK and PL-PM schedules are being edited for new editions.

b. CC:AAM (Lesh) [see Appendix A]

c. Northwestern report [see Appendix B]
Olson raised the issue of hidden collection, which is a concern of many libraries.

6. Ongoing cataloging issues
a. Are more analytics needed?
Limb said a few words about analytics. This is a difficult issue in many libraries. Some libraries exclude analytics (Harvard) and others do make them available.
b. Experience cataloging free-on-web materials:
Caruso is involved in a Title VI digital project on Senegambia materials, which will be available online and free to the public. He would like to have these records included in other institutional catalogs. More information on this will be sent out on the Africana list.

The meeting was adjourned.

APPENDIX A
CC:AAM report (Winter 2005: Boston)
by Robert Lesh
(April 25, 2005)

CC:AAM (Committee on Cataloging: Asian and African Materials) met during the American Library Association’s annual meeting on Sunday January 16, 2005, at 1:00 P.M. This is a new meeting time, and CC:AAM will meet at this time in the future.

Since the previous meeting, the program evaluation summary was emailed to members. This evaluation consisted of a survey of those who attended the CC:AAM-sponsored program on Unicode, which took place at the summer meeting in Orlando on June 26, 2004. LC's response to CC:AAM's comments on the revision of the Chinese Romanization guidelines was also received. The text of both is included in the appendices of the minutes.

CC:AAM is undergoing a committee charge review. Part of this review involves a change in the organization of CC:AAM. The Cataloging and Classification Section has already reviewed and approved some changes. The size of the Committee will be reduced to seven voting members from a previous size of nine. The Japanese specialist will be removed from the Committee since that area should be covered by the East Asian specialist. As before, the specialists will be required to report cataloging activities of the area studies community to CC:AAM, and they will be expected to attend their respective area studies associations' meeting. There will be an addition of a Committee intern as a non-voting member. The intern will be assigned the task of taking notes on the meeting to aid in preparing the minutes.

Taking up the ALC recommendation to implement the Universal Character Set (UCS) on an accelerated basis, CC:AAM passed a resolution to that effect at the previous meeting and forwarded it on to MARBI. Initial reaction from MARBI was that this resolution was redundant since MARBI (Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information Committee) had long ago decided to include USC. However, the recommendation was passed on to AVIAC (Automation Vendor Interface Advisory Committee) and NISO (National Information Standards Organization (U.S.)). CC:AAM will take two further actions. Jade Atwill will coordinate with specialists to compile a need-based prioritized list of non-roman language scripts. David Nelson will conduct a literature review and develop a questionnaire that will be sent to vendors to find out the status of Unicode UCS implementation. Based on the findings of the questionnaire, the Committee will determine what should be the next course of action to advocate faster expansion of access to non-roman language scripts.

DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification) is still awaiting feedback from the National Library of Indonesia on their proposal for the Indonesian provinces. DDC is trying to find a more appropriate contact at National Library of Indonesia to expedite this process.

The development of Islamic law subject headings is moving very slowly. Most libraries have not yet started to use these new subject headings, and those that have report that it is inadequate. Experts in the field have started to propose subject headings in a more structured way. The task force in charge of the new subject headings is planning to make other contacts to see how the development of Romanization tables for Central Asia can be expedited.

The Committee will alert the cataloging community in the five regions it represents to encourage catalogers to participate in the review process of the draft of AACR3. Any comments may be sent to Committee member Keiko Suzuki, who is coordinating CC:AAM's comments on AACR3 (Anglo-American Cataloging Rules 3) with CC:DA (Committee on Cataloging: Description and Analysis). The draft of AACR3 is not for general distribution, and any ALC members who would like to have more information on the AACR3 draft are encourage to contact their ALC/CC:AAM representative. Suzuki will work with John Eilts to include any comments in the document that he will be preparing to CC:AAM to forward to CC:CA.

It was agreed that CC:AAM will sponsor a program on "Promoting PCC participation in the Area Studies Community", which would take place at the summer 2006 ALA meeting. The Committee would like to co-sponsor this program with PCC (Program for Cooperative Cataloging) as a silent partner. The program will be a discussion forum where existing PCC participants will share their experiences and answer questions from the audience. The target audience will include areas studies catalogers, other catalogers, librarians and administrators.

Due to lack of time, CC:AAM did not discuss the "ALA Ahead to 2010" plan. The chair will collect written comments from members and forward them to ALA. Written reports form the area studies groups, RLG, LC, and OCLC were accepted and are available in the appendices of the minutes.

APPENDIX B
Northwestern Africana Cataloging Report September 2005-April 2005

We have now completed two-thirds of our fiscal year. During this time, Northwestern staff cataloged 4,432 titles in 4,777 volumes for the Africana collection. Unfortunately, the Africana monographic backlog increased to 14,972 volumes (a 7.8 % increase). We do hope to stop this growth trend in the coming summer months, but that depends on other general collections that we expect to receive shortly.

Africana cataloging staffing remains at the same level as the previous fiscal year. Bob Lesh (cataloging ¾ time) and Shoshanah Seidman continue to be very productive catalogers, as is Karen Miller, an original cataloger who is completing her second year on a term position. Northwestern is most proud of its efforts in the digital arena. I hope you all had the opportunity to attend yesterday’s presentation on NU digital projects, where you heard about our recent efforts to catalog Africana posters and our implementation of the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) for the papers of Dr. Abdullah Abdurahman as well as the Winterton collection of East African photographs. We also began a digital project where we will catalog some 130 rare maps of Africa.

Another high priority project we recently began involves making sure Northwestern’s holdings are accurately reflected in OCLC. Catalogers are adding our holdings to OCLC bibliographic records and creating original bibliographic records in OCLC when there is no match of holdings already in OCLC. Africana accounts for a large proportion of our original records in OCLC. Much of the work is being performed by sophisticated programs, but human review is necessary for 60,000 titles. Thus far, we have completed approximately 28% of the project. We expect to continue for another 18 months or so.

The Africana conference paper indexing project produced 3,591 additional individual papers in 136 new Africana conference proceedings. Total figures in our separate Africana conference paper file are now: 108,763 individual papers in 6,056 conference proceedings.

Catalogers continue to process some of our “hidden collections”. This fiscal year, for printed Africana monographs, we continued to catalog the Africana textbook collection. The Library now subscribes to a table of contents (TOC) enrichment service. When a match occurs, Blackwell North America inserts the table of contents into the bibliographic record in a 505 field. The TOC is thus keyword searchable in Voyager. 6,600 bibliographic records were enriched, out of 17,606 sent (a 38% hit rate) this year. The specific hit rate of Africana titles is not known.

Submitted by Andrea Stamm, May 3, 2005