ALC Cataloging Committee Meeting Minutes
Dec 4, 2002: 1:00 pm-2:45 pm, Washington, D.C.
Minutes
Present: 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/afs/alc/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.
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