Cataloging Committee Minutes
Oct. 29, 1998, 9:00 a.m.-10:15 a.m., Chicago, Ill.
Present:
Dawn Bastian (Northwestern), Julianne Beall (Library of Congress), Ruby Bell-Gam (UCLA), Joseph Caruso (Columbia), Jill Coelho Harvard), Badara Diakhate (Northwestern), David Easterbrook (Northwestern), Greg Finnegan (Harvard (Tozzer)), Karen Fung (Stanford), Miki Goral (UCLA), David Hogarth (Vendor), Deborah M. LaFond (State University of New York-Albany), Joseph Lauer (Michigan State University), Bob Lesh (Northwestern), Ken Lohrentz (Univ. of Kansas), Lauris Olson (Univ. of Pennsylvania), Hans Panofsky, Loumona Petroff (Boston Univ.), Elizabeth Plantz (Northwestern), Elisabeth Sinnott (New York University), Alan Solomon (Yale), Andrea Stamm (Northwestern), Ruth Thomas (Library of Congress, Nairobi Office), Catherine Thuku (Library of Congress, Nairobi Office), Gretchen Walsh (Boston Univ.), Joanne Zellers (Library of Congress)1. Introduction and announcements
Chair Plantz opened at 9:15, with Sinnott as secretary.
2. The minutes of the April 3, 1998 Gainesville meeting were approved.
3. Dewey Decimal Classification report
Beall reported that the Dewey Decimal Classification area table for South Africa will be issued before the end of this year, hopefully in a paper print out. She thanked the Africana Librarians Council (ALC), Cataloging Committee for its support. There is no date set for the combined new area tables for the United Kingdom and South Africa. No dates were given for the former homelands, except for 1997, the year of the formal adoption of the new South African constitution. Beall also spoke about the three responses which the Decimal Classification Editorial Policy Committee had received in repect to the classfication of the Venda and Ndebele languages. These responses were documented in a handout. The Committee had tried to be in synch with Ethnologue. In ed. 21 Ndebele had already been relocated and is not treated as a Nguni language at present. Beall indicated that she intends to write to the editor of the International Encyclopedia of Linguistics in order to find out if he would support the non-Nguni classification of Ndebele. Lauer expressed his concern regarding the privileging of just one source but pointed out that one could clarify the complex nature of this classification decision in subject headings.4. Africana Subject Funnel Report
Plantz noted that there had not been a lot of activity in respect to the Africana Subject Funnel project this year. She predicted that due to the Voyager implementation at the Library of Congress (LC) and understaffing at LC things may slow down for the next six months. In the event of an "urgent" need for a new subject heading (i.e. for BIBCO records) a note will be added to the submission and it will be looked more at quickly by our liaison at LC.Plantz reported that since the beginning of the Funnel approximately 160 subject headings have been proposed and accepted; six have been recently submitted and eight headings have not been accepted and need to be looked into. At least 15 subject headings have been revised and accepted. A number of language headings to be revised need to be reviewed. This type of revision has proven to be much more difficult than originally thought as some language headings are rather complicated. Some of them were sent back to members for additional work. Plantz urged the persons involved to
In answer to Caruso's question of how we could find out which is not that subject headings don't get accepted at all but that some have to be negotiated with LC. By now, Plantz usually can spot the problems before submitting the subject headings; most changes needed are minor.
Web page
Zellers reported that she has done some work on the ALC, Cataloging Committee Web page but that it is not yet up. At this point, Caruso proposed another workshop on doing subject headings. The Chair will send out a message on the ALC list in order to see how many people would be interested in such a workshop and what their specific interests would be. She noted that there might be the possibility that such a workshop could take place in Spring 1999.
Possible expansion to include Afro-American subject headings
Recently, Plantz has received two requests for cooperation between the Africana Subject Funnel and catalogers working on Afro-American subject headings. It appears that LC would like to use our Funnel Project as a conduit for Afro-American subject heading submissions. Cornelia Goode from LC/PCC contacted Plantz to let her know that LC would like to encourage people working on Afro-American subject headings to use the Africana Subject Funnel. Also, Plantz reported that Andrew De Heer from Schomburg (New York Public Library) had informed her that although Schomburg's participation in the Africana Subject Funnel has been dormant for some time, they were planning a program to tackle their need for both Africana and Afro-American subjects. They have expressed a desire to cooperate with the Funnel to avoid duplication of effort.A discussion of the question of the possible expansion of the Africana Subject Funnel to include Afro-American subject headings followed. Lauer expressed the opinion that we should stay in the area of our expertise and that people working on Afro-American subject headings should have a separate funnel project. He suspected that LC is trying to assign the role of a middle man to Plantz when it is really their area of responsibility. Walsh thought that African-American Studies is part of American Studies. Of course, there are overlaps but African and African-American Studies are two different areas. In addition, there is no natural meeting place for face-to-face communication unless they would attend ALC meetings or we would go to the African-American Studies meetings. Finnegan drew the membership's attention to the fact that is is much more difficult to separate African and African-American Studies on an intellectual than on a practical level and he expressed interest in finding a way to bridge these areas. As project coordinator Plantz was wondering how much extra traffic would be created by including Afro-American subject headings in the Africana Subject Funnel. Members noted that we really have enough of our own work to do and that taking on additional responsibilities may be too much.
Coelho pointed out that the reason why people working on Afro-American subject headings would like to be connected is because our project is already established. Furthermore, she suggested that Plantz give her expertise to a liaison. Zellers supported this idea by saying that providing a mentor would be better than a joint effort. Plantz concluded this discussion by pointing out that it was not really clear to her what LC thought we could do and that she had no objections to the idea of a mentorship. Also, she emphasized that there are already enough organizations dealing with African-American library issues that should be able to organize a funnel of some sort.
5. ALC Web page
Zellers reported that there were no additional suggestions for Internet resources of interest to catalogers.
6. Africana cataloging resources and reference tools
The Chair reminded the membership of the decision that it would not be possible to update Gail J. Junion's article, 'A guide to reference tools for cataloging Africana', Library Resources & Technical Services, vol. 26, no. 2, April/June 1982, pp. 109-21. At our previous meeting we discussed the idea of putting in-house cheat-sheets on the list and on the ALC Web page. And of looking for useful sites, etc. There was very little activity other than what the chair sent out (and the few people that tried them, e.g., Walsh, had failed to find these sites helpful.)Plantz did some looking at various Cataloging Web sites, most of which repeat each other and, moreover, point to overall general cataloging tools. Most of them provide links to Cynthia D. Bertelsen's two Web pages which were discussed at the last meeting. Overall, group response to this project had not been good. What do people really want to do? What is feasable and how can something be done without the Chair having to do everything? Zellers proposed to send out lists of words on the ALC list and get African language terms this way. Goral opposed the idea of putting such lists on the Web. According to Walsh the real problem are items where one even cannot figure out what the title page is. Plantz suggested to restrict ourselves to words that one can find on a title page and said that she would be willing to work on this in cooperation with others. Finnegan proposed to find out which language specialists are working at which institutions.
7. LC report
According to Zellers, the new Acting Head for the Coop Team at LC is Ana Cristan. Ann Della Porta, who previously headed the Coop Team, told Zellers that there were 230 new name authority headings and 32 changes to existing ones. The Africana Subject Funnel project had contributed eight new SACO headings and one change to an existing Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) heading.
Thomas announced that the LC Nairobi Office now has a CD-ROM with cataloged newspapers. The information contained in it is not available in the LC database.
8. ALC/CC:AAM report
Bastian reported that Julianne Bell and Winton Matthews discussed the Dewey Decimal Classificiation numbers for Venda and Ndebele and those for the former homelands at the American Libraries Association, Cataloging and Classification: Asian, African and Mid-Eastern Materials (CC:AAM) meeting on June 29th. Also, the LC Nairobi Office is the next target for an update to a direct MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging) operation mode which would start with serials cataloging.
The American Libraries Association (ALA) program on vernacular
scripts in the authority record was attended by about 100 participants.
At the 1999 ALA Mid-Winter convention, CC:AAM will meet on Sunday, January 31, 1999 from 8:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. The new chair of CC:AAM is Wen-ling Liu.
The meeting was adjourned at 10:20 a.m.