ALC Cataloging Committee Meeting Minutes

November 15, 2000, 1:00-2:45pm, Philadelphia, PA

Nashville, TN

Present: Julianne Beall (Library of Congress), Ruby Bell-Gam (Univ. of California, Los Angeles), Simon Bockie (Univ. of California, Berkeley), Karen Fung (Stanford Univ.), Miki Goral (Univ. of California, Los Angeles), Marieta Harper (Library of Congress), Margaret Hughes (Stanford Univ.), Joseph Lauer (Michigan State Univ.), Robert Lesh (Northwestern Univ.), Ken Lohrentz (Univ. of Kansas), Wonki Nam (Central State Univ.), Lauris Olson (Univ. of Pennsylvania), Hans Panofsky (Evanston, IL), Loumona Petroff (Boston Univ.), Elisabeth Sinnott (New York Univ.), Gretchen Walsh (Boston Univ.).

1. Introductions and announcements: Chair Lauer opened the meeting at 1:25 p.m., with Sinnott as secretary.

2. Approval of the minutes of the Spring meeting (sent to list on April 7, 2000 and online at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/afs/alc/catm100.html

3. Approval of agenda, with two additions (nos. 7 & 8 below).

4. Revision of Dewey tables for traditional African religions (Beall)
The Dewey Editorial Policy Committee in its preparation for DDC Edition 22 is working on several revisions in religion, including 299.6 (Religions originating among Black Africans and people of Black African descent). Two key changes are proposed: 1) to provide more detail for specific aspects, replacing the three broad categories of "Mythology and mythological foundations", "Doctrines", and "Practices, rites, ceremonies"; 2) to change the citation order so that previously scattered aspects of the religion of a specific ethnic group will be brought together. One problem: there can be more than one religion in an ethnic group.
Walsh criticized the use of "cults", which should be called "religions", as well as "Voodooism" and "Zombiism". [Note: All these critiqued terms are in LCSH.] Lauer questioned splitting Religions of the Khoikhoi and San from the others. Also, the cross references for religions originating among Ethiopians, Cushitic and Omotic peoples, and the Hausa, which were classified with North African peoples, could be improved.

5. Revision of DT schedule for Indian Ocean islands (report by Lauer)
Joe Caruso has not had time to add to the work done in 1995-98. The major task remaining is to establish, where justified by literary warrant, additional historical time periods for Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and Seychelles.
Lauer called for volunteers to work on the subject headings and other details. Photocopies of the proposal would be sent to those interested. Hughes expressed interest in participating in the revision process.

6. Directory of African Language Expertise (Walsh)
Elizabeth Plantz has compiled and sent to Walsh and Lauer a 13-page "African Language Expert Directory" of people willing to assist with the cataloging of African language materials. Lauer will forward the directory to the ALC web page or load it at MSU. Walsh would be willing to update.

7. Northwestern Report (Lesh):
Plantz' October departure from Northwestern University is having an impact. They no longer coordinate the SACO project, and there will be fewer BIBCO records, partly because catalogers are doing copy cataloging during the Voyager transition. They are advertising for the Africana Monographic Cataloger position, with the review of applications to begin immediately. Details available from: libpers@welles.library.nwu.edu.

8. Catalogingof LC-Nairobi Cooperative Acquisitions:
Olson wondered how other libraries were processing this material, which usually arrives with no-call number MARC records enclosed. He proposed to do a survey of other institutions. There is some potential for cooperation, using comparative expertise. Lauer gives priority to enhancing Amharic records, but does not handle the others. Bell-Gam asked for help with cataloging UCLA's Amharic acquisitions.

9. Africana Subject Funnel:

a. Status: Lauer agreed to serve as coordinator, after Plantz left Northwestern University. He will be contacting LC [They contacted him while in Nashville.] and sending out proposals to list used by Plantz before submitting to LC.
b. Plantz report of Oct. 13, 2000: Since the Spring 2000 report, the funnel has submitted 20 new headings and 27 revised headings. Plantz had sent a message to the SACO coordinator, asking that Olson, Peoples of Africa (1996) not be used to establish Africana subjects; but LC was reluctant to drop it from their list of recommended sources. (The chair will try to follow up, pointing out that any good general encyclopedia would be better than Olson.)
c. To put the funnel in some context, Lauer reviewed the new headings approved by LC's Cataloging Policy and Support Office as reported on the Weekly List or the Tentative Weekly List (see http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso). For 1999:42-2000:41, there were about 150 new Africana subjects, excluding name or place subjects. Of these, only 24 came via the funnel; about 75 were submitted by LC, and about 42 came from other libraries.

10. Library of Congress activities:

a. Kay Elsasser's classification proposals for Eritrea, Sierra Leone & South Africa include:
      DT388.2 Eritrean-Ethiopian War, 1998-
      DT516.823 Sierra Leone:1961-1991. General works
      DT516.826 Sierra Leone: 1991- . General works
      DT1971 South Africa 1994- . General works.
      DT1974.2 Truth and Reconciliation Commission
      DT1975 Thabo Mbeki, 1999-


    b. Cooperative Cataloging:
    Highlights from the Annual Report, FY 2000:
      SACO: Due to efforts of the African American funnel project, "Afro-American" is being changed to "African American". SACO production totaled 2681 new subject headings, with 621 revisions from 122 contributing libraries. Throughput time from the receipt of proposals has been reduced to 4-6 weeks.

      NACO has 35 new members, with 18 libraries in South Africa forming two NACO funnels.

      BIBCO has 42 new members and there is growing use of core-level cataloging, which amounted to nearly 35 percent of total output.

    c. Voyager transition: While there are many positive aspects of the new system, keyword searching has become more difficult and there is more downtime
.

11. ALA annual meeting (July 2000): reports from/issues for:

a) ALCTS-CCS: CCAAM (Cataloging & Classification: Asian & African Material Com.) (Report by Lauer, with information from Dawn Bastian)

    1) Mostly concerned with Pinyin conversion & other CJK issues. OCLC reported on its Arabic cataloging pilot. A review of the Committee's charge, especially no. 1 (To consider all aspects of problems in the bibliographic organization of materials issued in or dealing with Africa and Asia, with the exception of Asiatic U.S.S.R.), led to a long discussion as to how to amend this.

    2) A list of Asian and African language expertise was considered, at request of the ALCTS division. The idea of a joint list was rejected.

    3) CC:DA (Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access) accepted Jim Agenbroad's alternative proposal to amend AACR2 to permit addition of optional nonroman access points to bibliographic and authority records.

      20.5 NONROMAN ACCESS POINTS. Optionally, when technically feasible libraries whose collections include and whose clientele seek items in nonroman scripts should assign nonroman access points to records of such items. Apply the relevant rules of chapters 21-26 and the conventions of reference tools on persons, corporate bodies and titles using nonroman scripts to determine the choice and form of such access points and of cross references to them.


    Action since ALA: The Joint Steering Committee for AACR met in London September 13-15. ALA proposal 32 to add a rule 20.5 that would permit nonroman access points was introduced. Only LC had responded to it. Other members were too busy to do so. When the others (LA/BL, Canada, Australia) do so, consensus may be reached before they next meet in April in Washington, D.C.

b. Africana in the North American Title Count (ex Shelflist)
Lauer distributed a list of the 10 lines of DT that were added in 1997. He plans to propose 2 amendments: 1) change DT1001-3415 to DT701-3415 (Southern Africa); 2) merge 3 lines into DT160-346 (North Africa). Other possible changes were mentioned. A discussion about the potential usefulness of and problems with NATC data followed.

The meeting was adjourned at 2:55 p.m..