Present: Andrew de Heer (Schomburg Center), Greg Finnegan (Tozzer Library, Harvard Univ.), Gracie M. Gilliam (Library of Congress), Miki Goral (UCLA), Marieta Harper (Library of Congress), Margaret Hughes (Stanford Univ.), Joseph Lauer (Michigan State Univ.), Robert Lesh (Northwestern Univ.), Peter Limb (Michigan State Univ.), Edward Miner (Univ. of Iowa), Loumona Petroff (Boston Univ.), Shoshanah Seidman (Northwestern Univ.), & Gretchen Walsh (Boston Univ.).
1-3. Meeting opened at 11:15 with introductions from 12 in attendance (The simultaneous meeting of LCCAP participants with LC suppliers reduced attendance below expected range), the approval of the minutes from the Spring meeting, and slight adjustments in the agenda. Margaret Hughes took notes.
4. Issues in the cataloging of maps (de Heer)
Schomburg Center decided to catalog its backlog of maps on Africa in 1998.
Since then the collection has grown tremendously. Interest in such maps has
increased in recent years, chiefly as a result of a recent focus on slavery
materials and a major project on migration in the African Diaspora. Maps
on Africa have an important role in these projects, and cataloging them poses
the greatest challenge, especially pre-1800 maps. The map division of the
New York Public Library has a very comprehensive collection of older maps
and tools for cataloging them, but not as many maps on Africa as in the Schomburg
Center at the moment. De Heer is convinced that older maps on Africa need
some special treatment, and he wishes to discuss the issues with any colleagues
who are also cataloging older maps on Africa. Several suggestions were made
by those in attendance. Finnegan noted that this is another category of materials
often not recorded in the library’s OPAC.
5. Africana Subject Funnel
a) Coordinator report (Lauer) : 2-page report distributed. There often delays
at the coordinator level. E.g., when Janet Stanley proposes new subject headings
based on articles, Lauer waits for more literary warrant before submitting
to the funnel. In answer to a question, Lauer reaffirmed the earlier decision
to exclude from our annual statistics those headings submitted by Africana
librarians that had not been vetted by the funnel.
b) LC report (Gracie Gilliam): She noted that she was the liaison for many contributors, including 1 NACO South African PCC contributors. In order to facilitate the processing of our proposals, she distributed photocopies of 26 slides (on 14 pages) that reviewed the procedures and noted specific actions taken at LC. The statistics for FY03 were up compared to FY03. In reviewing the proposal for the Bacama language, LC changed Bachama (African people) to Bacama (African people) as ethnic groups and languages are usually spelled the same way. Gilliam explained how to qualify a heading in cases of conflict, using the country, region, or larger group of people in that order. She explained that the proposal to change Fula to Fulfulde was rejected because if the proposal involves many changes the LC liaison should be contracted first before submitting the proposal. SACO’s FAQ no. 6 covers LC's policy of preferring reference sources to work-in-hand when proposing new headings; FAQ no. 7 states that there is no definitive list of reference works.
c) During the discussion, Gilliam said that more than 1 reference source was needed to list different names for language and people. We agreed that in the future the institutional MARC-21 code would be that of the librarian making the proposal, and not the code of the coordinator’s institution. Finnegan and Limb spoke on the issue of colonial ascribed "ethnicities" and expressed concern about possibly creating false ethnic groups.
6. Schedules for Indian Ocean islands (Hughes)--In progress; will report back at spring meeting.
7. Bibliographic records with links to partial or related data on web (Lesh)
The issue was raised in a Nov. 2 message to the alclist by Al Kagan, who thought
the 856 fields (on electronic location and access) in records were coded
incorrectly. The coding was correct but in some local systems, many bibliographic
records with links to web sites for tables of contents or for related materials
are labeled as electronic resources when it is only part of the resource
(or related material) that is available electronically. In other systems,
the field is correctly labeled, e.g. “Table of contents.” The
issue of more user education vs. more intuitive system labels was briefly
discussed.
8. Reports & Announcements:
a) ALA's CC:AAM (Lesh)--Annual meeting focused on Unicode. They accepted the
ALC resolution to expand the character repertoire to include the Unicode
Universal Character Set (UCS) on an accelerated basis, and forwarded it to
MARBI. [See Appendix A for full report, which was sent to the ALClist on
Nov. 1.]
b) Library of Congress (from notes distributed by Laverne Page):
Gabe Horchler (Head, Business and Economics (BE) team leader, Social Sciences
Cataloging Division) provided information on a new cataloging project. This
initiative provides web access to publications in monographic series. This
is an ongoing, systematic endeavor to capture non-profit, government and
other monographic series in the public domain and, after cataloging them,
add links for the full-text on-line document. For example, the bibliographic
records for titles in the African Economic Research Consortium research paper
series each have a link to
http://www.aercafrica.org/publications/index.asp.
A listing of all of the electronic series for which links have been added
to date can be found at the website for Business Reference Services (http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/techreps/techrepshome.php).
Barbara Tillett (Chief, Cataloging Policy and Support Office (CPSO)) has responded to a request for a representative from cataloging at ALC meetings. Gracie Gilliam, cooperative cataloging specialist, Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division, came to the New Orleans meeting; and Millicent Wewerka (Senior Cataloging Policy Specialist) will attend the Spring meeting in Evanston.
Susan Morris (Assistant to the Director of Cataloging) reports:
1) We have cataloged more Africana web sites, including sites on "Portals
to the World: Selected Internet Resources" at http://www.loc.gov/rr/international/portals.html;
and "Ancient manuscripts from the desert libraries of Mali” at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mali/
2) LC will implement Unicode for its OPAC displays when it implement the Voyager
release with Unicode. They already catalog JACKPHY monographs in the RLIN client
that has Unicode.
Juli Beall (Assistant Editor, Decimal Classification Division) reported on progress with translations of DDC.
c) Northwestern: Report distributed at meeting. [See Appendix B.] Lesh noted that they are getting a new version of Voyager (their local system) that will be able to handle MARC-8.
Adjourned at 12:15pm
APPENDIX A
CC:AAM REPORT ON JUNE MEETING IN ORLANDO
by Robert Lesh
David Nelson presented a report on CC:AAM's program on "Library catalogs
and non-Roman scripts: development and implementation of Unicode for cataloging
and public access." The program was presented at the Summer 2004 Orlando
meeting. A short outline of the program may be found at:
http://www.ala.org/ala/alcts/alctspubs/alctsnewsletter/v15n4/programs.htm#Unicode
About 200 people attended the program.
Jim Agenbroad's proposal to expand the character repertoire using MARC8 was revisited. The report was tabled at the 2004 Midwinter meeting in order to : 1) study the system and solicit input from systems experts regarding the technical aspects ; 2) gather input from area studies specialists about prioritizing non-Roman scripts in ALA/LC Romanization tables to be expanded in MARC character repertoire. CC:AAM agreed that it did not have the technical expertise to approve the Agenbroad proposal, and any further action was shelved.
CC:AAM took up the recommendation of the ALC Cataloging Committee to urge MARBI to expand the character repertoire to include the Unicode Universal Character Set (UCS) on an accelerated basis. David Nelson proposed a motion to this effect, and this recommendation was passed on to MARBI.
John Eilts, chair of the task force on developing Islamic law subject headings, reported continuing progress in the expansion of this subject area.
The Feb. 2004 revision of the ALA/LC Chinese Pinyin Romanization Guideline was reviewed and discussed. The revised proposal recommended three changes to the guidelines to improve the consistency of the application of the guidelines. CC:AAM suggested sending the revision back for a clearer statement of the guidelines.
The Committee has several program ideas for Annual 2006:
1) PCC and participation in area studies libraries.
2) Use of Internet in cataloging vernacular resources.
3) Cataloging electronic resources in Metadata using vernaculars.
4) Chinese geographic names.
5) Comparative studies on authority control in Hong Kong and Beijing.
John Eilts suggested beginning a Romanization project for Central Asian languages that formerly used the Cyrillic alphabet. Eilts will lead the project and enlist language experts to work with him.
CC:AAM Chair Shy Deng suggested a program on PCC within area studies libraries in order to raise awareness of PCC.
A change in the meeting time for CC:AAM was suggested. In the future, the meeting would be switched to Sunday afternoon for both Midwinter and Annual meetings. The schedule change was later confirmed by email; the meeting will henceforth be held at 2:00 on Sunday afternoon. Committee members would share the traditional CC:AAM lunch before the meeting.
Giles Martin, OCLC representative and Assistant editor of the Dewey Decimal Classification, presented a draft proposal on the expansion of DDC to cover all the provinces of Indonesia. The Committee will send out the proposal to appropriate groups for comments.
Reports:
Giles Martin presented a report on the OCLC cataloging and quality project.
The project is targeted for release in the 2nd quarter, 2005. OCLC will end
its support of multiscripts Z39.50 client software at the end of July, 2004.
The OCLC Chinese/Japanese/Korean user group is set to review records that
were marked as "mixed text" problems during the Pinyin conversion.
Joan Aliprand reported that RLIN21 was released in June. This software provides support for original non-Roman scripts search. Aliprand also introduced the RLG product RedLightGreen, a tool designed for students using bibliographic information on the web.
Bob Lesh presented the ALC Cataloging Committee report. Work will resume on updating the DT classification schedules for Indian Ocean islands. New LCSH time periods will be required to support the DT classification update. There was an update by Joe Lauer on the Africana Subject Funnel.
Other reports were received in written form or not submitted.
APPENDIX B
Northwestern Africana Cataloging Report for FY 2003/04
by Andrea Stamm
During the past fiscal year, Northwestern staff cataloged 11,992 titles in
12,400 volumes for the Africana collection. This includes 371 serial titles.
Over 400 Nigerian popular videos were cataloged at a less than full level.
That reduced our video cataloging backlog by 25%. The Africana backlog was
reduced to 13,882 volumes (a 11.6 % decrease).
Northwestern now participates in all Program for Cooperative Cataloging components:
BIBCO, CONSER, NACO, and SACO. Roxanne Sellberg, our AUL for Technical Services,
is the current chair of the PCC’s Policy Committee.
This year, we passed the 100,000 milestone in the Africana conference paper
indexing project. The 207 new Africana conference proceedings, resulted in
the indexing of 3,591 additional individual papers. Total figures in our separate
Africana conference paper file are now: 106,162 individual papers in 5,920
conference proceedings.
Africana cataloging staffing has officially remained unchanged. Bob Lesh (cataloging ¾ time)
and Shoshanah Seidman continue to be very productive catalogers. We are also
fortunate to keep, Karen Miller, an original cataloger hired for a second year
on a term position, to catalog Africana materials on a part-time basis.
During the past year, the Catalog Department has been finally able to begin
cataloging some of the Library’s “hidden collections”. Africana
has been the happy recipient of many of these efforts. They include:
Africana posters http://www.library.northwestern.edu/africana/collections/posters/index.html
South African children’s literature (1,800 titles)
Africana chapbooks or “Onitsha market literature” (270 titles)
Africana textbooks (1500 titles)
Africana microfiche (100 titles)
Africana rare books (2 dozen)
The Catalog Department has begun working with the Encoded Archival Description
(EAD), encoding an existing Africana finding aid describing the papers of Dr.
Abdullah Abdurahman. The Winterton collection of East African photographs,
the subject of our second EAD project, will become a digitization project and
will be more difficult to process because there is no pre-existing finding
aid.
Some 130 rare maps of Africa have recently been approved for a second digitization
project. The cataloging is being performed in our Government Publications Department,
with revision in the Catalog Department.
As part of a project to make sure Northwestern’s holdings were accurately
reflected in OCLC, the Catalog Department has been adding our holdings to OCLC
bibliographic records and creating original bibliographic records in OCLC when
there is no match of holdings. Africana accounts for a large proportion of
original records in OCLC. A second project, relating to inputting our volume
holdings of serials into OCLC will soon be launched. Much of the work is being
performed by sophisticated programs, but human review is necessary for 60,000
titles.
Although Africana monographs only account for a portion of this project, you
may be interested to hear about the Library’s subscription 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. This contrasts with the
other TOC method of adding an 856 hotlink to the bibliographic record, where
the contents are available in a separate file, but are not keyword searchable
in our local database. 13,062 bibliographic records were enriched, out of 33,790
sent (a 39% hit rate) last year.
Finally, you have probably all heard that due to a huge overcrowding situation
in the Africana stacks, a large portion of the Africana collection was permanently
transferred to the Lower Level. These materials had new Lower Level labels
attached to each volume. We were fortunate to be able to change the locations
for these materials by a batch correction.
--------
Page Updated April 27, 2005