Present: Phyllis Bischof (UC Berkeley), Helene Baumann (Duke), Julianne Beall (Library of Congress), Ruby Bell-Gam (UCLA), Simon Bockie, (UC Berkeley), Joe Caruso (Columbia), Jill Coelho (Harvard, Widener), Miriam Couteer-Morgan (Ohio State University), David Easterbrook (Northwestern), Vicki Evalds (Philadelphia, PA), Gregory Finnegan (Harvard), Marion Frank-Wilson (Indiana U.), Karen Fung (Stanford), Miki Goral (UCLA), Beverly Gray (Library of Congress), Musa Abdul Hakim (Buffalo State College), Marieta Harper (Library of Congress), Esmeralda Kale (Northwestern), Peter Kargbo (New York University), Deborah LaFond (U-Albany), Joe Lauer (Michigan State), Robert Lesh (Northwestern), Nancy Presone Levy (Princeton), Peter Limb (Michigan State), Wonki Nam (Central State University), Emilie Ngo Nguidjol (U. of Wisconsin), Patricia Ogedengbe (Northwestern), Benedict Oledele (UCLA), Laverne Page (Library of Congress), Loumona Petroff (Boston U.), Lauris Olson (U. of Pennsylvania), Jason Schultz (Northwestern), Shoshanah Seidman (Northwestern), Magloire Somé (Fulbright scholar), Paul Steere (Library of Congress, Nairobi), Titia Van Der Werf (ASC Library, Leiden, Netherlands), David Westley (Boston U.), Dorothy Woodson (Yale), Hans Zell (Hans Zell Publ.).
1. The meeting was called to order by Chair Lauer at 9:30, with Lesh as secretary. Introductions were skipped and the minutes from the Spring meeting were approved as sent in May.
2. Unicode Task Force (Chuck Riley)
Westley (chair of the task force appointed in the Spring to respond to James
Agenbroad’s questions) did some preliminary work and concluded that
Hartell’s Alphabets de langues africaines (1993) is very incomplete
in the languages it covers. No further attempt was made by the original task
force to compile a list of missing special characters or prepare a report.
Chuck Riley prepared a draft report (see Appendix I) that attempted to answer
some of the other questions. He found 2 of the missing characters were in later
version of Unicode. He did not think punctuation marks (used in the orthography
of clicks) or an apostrophe that combines with a letter need separate codes.
And he drew attention to the SIL keyboard and the value of non-romanized scripts.
James Agenbroad has been seeking the endorsement of various ALA groups, including
CCAAM and MARBI.
Lauer proposed that librarians redirect their efforts to getting the existing
unicode values accepted by MARC21. The task of expanding unicode to include
romanized and non-Roman scripts from Africa could be left to publishers and
academics who need this expansion. While there are still many printed characters
not represented in unicode, ALC does not have the expertise to address this.
3. Africana Subject Funnel (Lauer)
Draft report was distributed [and it was posted to the ALC website]. Seidman
noted that generic headings could easily be submitted without the funnel
review, but they would be missing from the list of new headings. Lauer agreed
to add new non-funnel subject headings about Africa to his funnel report.
There was no time to discuss the need for authority records for subgroups
of larger groups (e.g., Zulu or Akan or Kongo subgroups) and the issue of
place as sometimes preferable to an ethnic name. There was general agreement
that Swahili (African people) is better than Swahili-speaking peoples; and
that “Post-apartheid era” should be replaced with headings such
as South Africa—History--1994-.
4. Cataloging of free e-resources: UCLA, Northwestern, Yale and Wisconsin
were making free websites accessible to their users. In some cases, a downloaded
print version was cataloged. In other cases, permission was obtained to electronically
archive an entire website. There is some confusion between bibliographies on
the web and the cataloging of web sources using MARC21.
Mention was made of the alternative of relying on the Wayback Machine (at
http://www.archive.org)
to locate information that was no longer on the web. [Fung reported later that
Stanford’s Political Web Archive project found that it could not always
locate missing data.]
5. Nko alphabet and publications: Michigan State recently received about 15 Mandingo-language publications that use the Nko alphabet. These will be cataloged by Lauer, using a table he recently published in Mande Studies.
6. Committee web site at http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/catcte.html - This has been amended since Spring, in accordance with our instructions. Further changes were suggested, including adding important reports (e.g., Riley’s report) on the Committee homepage.
7. Reports & Announcements:
a) Northwestern announced that its Africana backlog went from 26,038 to 15,697
in the past fiscal year, a reduction of 39.7%. The Northwestern Conference
Paper Index now contains 102,571 individual papers, or 5,713 conference proceedings.
The library hosted two library interns, who cataloged digitized Africana
posters and a recently acquired South African children’s literature
collection.
b) ALA's CCAAM (see Appendix II)
c) PCC (Program for Cooperative Cataloging) extracts from the FY2003 Annual Report (available at: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/archive/annualreports/annualrpt03.html) were sent to the ALC list on Oct. 28.
d) History of Cataloging Committee for Britz memorial volume—Lesh submitted chapter to editor.
e) Library of Congress (Page): The History and Literature Cataloging Division reports that it is essentially current in its cataloging of Africana materials. The Cataloging Policy and Support Office undertook a project last fall and spring to improve the headings for African languages and literatures. The project resulted in 51 new subject headings, 12 updated headings, and 39 new LC classification proposals. Gracie Gilliam of the Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division reports that the Africana funnel contributed 47 new headings and 16 revised headings during FY03. This was almost double FY02.
f) Dewey (Beall): New language headings accepted by LCSH are being mapped to the Dewey classification without waiting for literary warrant.
The meeting was adjourned at 10:00.
Appendix I: Report on African Scripts in Unicode 4.0
by Charles Riley (October 30, 2003); revised by Lauer
This report is in response to questions raised by James Agenbroad in a letter to Joe Lauer as chair of the Cataloging Committee. (See minutes of Spring 2003 meeting for more details.) The letter was accompanied by report assessing the adequacy of the unicode standard for encoding special characters or modifications to Latin script used by African languages.
Using Hartell’s Alphabets de langues africaines (1993) as his source, Agenbroad found two cases where a character was missing from the Unicode Standard; but he is basing this on an analysis of Unicode 3.0 rather than the more recently released 4.0. Unicode 4.0 includes the Sudanic S as code point U+0282. The Kanuri R also can be represented, using an on-screen keyboard and Unicode-compliant font developed by SIL, which gives it the code points U+F213 and U+F214 (from the Private Use Area of the Unicode character range) for the small and capital characters, respectively. See: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/sites/nrsi/media/AfricanKeyboardv3.pdf.
The SIL keyboard is one of the most significant developments toward processing African scripts based on romanized or extended roman characters. Other efforts in this area are listed at the Bisharat! website, at: http://www.bisharat.net/A12N/Projects/. An earlier template for a keyboard appears in the appendix of Michael Mann and David Dalby’s Thesaurus of African Languages (Hans Zell, London, 1987, p. 218.) This was known as the International Niamey Keyboard, but was limited to representing only about 28 special characters. There may be some obsolete characters listed elsewhere in Mann & Dalby’s appendices which merit investigation, e.g., Latin B, J and T, each with a horizontal stroke; these were proposed for use at N’Djamena in 1978. A reference chart for these proposals, including the list of characters from the Africa Reference Alphabet (1982) is on p. 219.
The question of incorporating punctuation into a character seems to me to be most relevant with regard to the orthography of clicks, as in the Khoisan languages for example. The most comprehensive list I could find of these is Anthony Traill’s Phonetic and Phonological Studies of !Xoo Bushman (Helmut Buske, Hamburg, 1985, p. 206). These require multiple characters to be accurately represented, e.g. “!n”, “g!h”, “dzx”, etc. As our concern is with capacity to represent the written form, and all the necessary characters are available, I think this does not pose a unique problem. To the extent that a click takes multiple characters to represent, it can be thought of as a special kind of letter that just requires more input than others, but would not necessitate the addition of new characters into Unicode, unless there are special characters or digraphs that can be found which have no equivalent in Unicode as yet.
An area which also is highly deserving of attention is the question of non-romanized scripts such as Ethiopic and Nko.
APPENDIX II: REPORT FOR ALC ON CCAAM
by Joseph Lauer
ALA's Committee on Cataloging: Asian and African Materials met in Toronto
on June 22, 2003, with less than half the committee members present. Partly
because of attendance problems, they deferred action on several items of old
business, including changes in AACR2 treatment of the Turkish bir, initial
articles in Tongan, Maori & Samoan, and work on new Islamic law subject
headings. They agreed that the Committee webpage should have links to associations
represented on CCAAM. They also decided to make it mandatory for committee
members who also belong to area associations to report to this committee.
They are planning a program with ACRL’s SEES for the 2004 annual meeting
in Orlando. Title: Library Catalogs and Non-Roman Scripts: Development and
Implementation of Unicode for Cataloging and Public Access. The focus of the
program will be more on planning for future development and less on historic
review.
New chair: Shi Deng (U. of Calif., San Diego; sdeng@ucsd.edu). New ALC representative:
Robert Lesh.
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Page Updated March 25, 2004