The Library of Congress announces the availability of several World Wide Web pages relating to the merger of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging and the CONSER Program. The PCC & CONSER Consolidation Update page (URL: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/progcon.html) provides general information and links to several pages with more detailed information. Also newly available are the PCC governance document (URL: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/governce.html) and lists of PCC Policy and Steering Committee members (URL: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/pccpolst.html), which are accessible through the update page. Links to additional pages will be added as the documents become available.
The Library of Congress has implemented an electronic version of the Preassigned Card Number (PCN) program, which supplies publishers with LC control numbers before publication. When new publishers join the program, the current process begins with a request for information by mail or telephone. The request is distributed to or answered by PCN publisher liaisons, who assemble an information kit consisting of a brochure and application forms. The kit is mailed to the publisher, who then completes the application form to request a PCN by mail. This mail, in turn, must be opened and distributed to a liaison who reviews the application, assigns the PCN, adds it to the form, photocopies the form, and mails it to the publisher. The PCN liaison also creates an acquisition record in the Library's Automated Process Information File (APIF) to reserve the PCN for the forthcoming book.
With Electronic PCN (EPCN), all the transactions are handled electronically. Consequently, the time required to respond to inquiries and send out PCN kits disappears. Program information and the application to participate in the program reside on the PCN home page. Thus, the costs of printing and postage currently incurred to support the conventional program are replaced by the comparatively modest costs associated with electronic transmission. The PCN is returned to the publisher by email. Processing of applications is also streamlined. Much of the input work associated with the conventional program is eliminated because the information provided by the publisher on the electronic PCN application form can be converted to a PCN acquisition record with a few clicks of a mouse.
The PCN program is highly popular with publishers of all types and sizes, and the PCN Team processes approximately 20,000 applications each year. Currently ninety-nine participating publishers have begun submitting their PCN requests electronically. These include major publishers such as Macmillan and Houghton Mifflin, academic publishers such as the University of Michigan and the University of Texas presses, corporate publishers such as the American Bar Association, children's publishers such as Disney Press, and others. The EPCN program is expected to speed processing and improve efficiency by eliminating paperwork, postage, and mail time.
The BCALA serves as an advocate for the development, promotion, and improvement of library services and resources to the nation's African-American community; and provides leadership for the recruitment and professional development of African- American librarians.
The director for cataloging, Beacher Wiggins, and two staff members from the Cooperative Cataloging Team, Gracie Gilliam and Cornelia Owens Goode, attended the third National Conference of African-American Librarians. The conference took place July 31- August 3 at the Benton Convention Center, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The conference theme was "Cultural Keepers: Making Global Connections" and included seventy-nine sessions. The conference addressed the issues of literacy and access to information that affect African-Americans and included international pleas for communication and assistance in transferring information across cultural lines. The over 1,000 participants were urged to connect globally through information sharing, fellowship, and networking.
During the preconference, Mr. Wiggins, Ms. Gilliam, and Ms. Goode made presentations during the pre-conference entitled "Cooperative Cataloging Programs at the Library of Congress." The presenters provided an introduction to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) and international cooperative efforts. Moreover, the session also included information on how libraries and technical services librarians can participate in the PCC and what benefits they can derive from membership in NACO, SACO, BIBCO, and CONSER, the component programs of the PCC. The major thrust of their outreach was to target and solicit interest from Historically Black Colleges and Universities to join the program.
Ms. Gilliam and Ms. Goode distributed the PCC information packet containing brochures on the various program components and benefits. As a result they received several expressions of interest and will follow up.
Representatives of the Research Libraries Group (RLG), OCLC, and the Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL), met with LC staff on May 29, 1997, at the Library of Congress to begin planning for the conversion from Wade-Giles romanization of Chinese to pinyin.
Most participants favored declaring an implementation "day 1," after which time Wade-Giles should be abandoned in favor of pinyin. It was anticipated that "day 1" would not occur until at least 1999 because of participants' prior organizational commitments. LC was urged to keep the commnuity informed of its decisions with regard to its implementation preparation and to issue documentation on its application of the pinyin standard.
The meeting agreed that the conversion of existing files should occur as close to "day 1" as possible, but did not want "day 1" to be delayed interminably because of conversion complexities. One strategy discussed was converting by program as many bibliographic and authority records as possible and then converting individually those remaining on an as-needed, as-encountered basis. Views were exchanged concerning which database should be used for the conversion of LC records. Also discussed were the pros and cons of different approaches to the aggregation of romanized Chinese syllables.
The Cooperative Cataloging Team, Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division, sponsored the first NACO Training Course specifically for law librarians on July 15-18, 1997. The course was offered at LC before the ninetieth Annual Meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries held July 19-24 in Baltimore. The Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) and the law catalogers at LC share a longstanding goal of involving more law libraries in cooperative cataloging activities; librarians at the AALL Annual Meeting in 1996 requested customized training to prepare law librarians for participation in NACO.
The course was based on the standard NACO training course but paid particular attention to the cataloging rules and associated LCRI that govern the establishment of law uniform titles and corporate names used in law cataloging. After completing the course, each institution began to work with a trained NACO reviewer for a period of three to six months. Each participating institution expects to contribute approximately two hundred authority records a year to the NAF, significantly improving the file's usefulness for law cataloging.
The participants were from the law libraries of Washburn University, American University, Stetson University, University of Tennessee--Knoxville, University of Houston, University of Arkansas, Little Rock, Seattle University, University of Minnesota, Louisiana State University, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Connecticut, University of California, Berkeley, University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, University of Texas at Austin, and Stanford University.
Carolyn Sturtevant and Gracie Gilliam of the Cooperative Cataloging Team were the lead trainers. Senior catalogers Miroslava Nezar and Vejune Svotelis of the Central and Eastern European Languages Team, Social Sciences Cataloging Division (SSCD), taught the principles of descriptive cataloging, and senior cataloger Sandy Hawkins of the Law Team, SSCD, presented material on law uniform titles. The course participants also visited the Law Team and discussed its cataloging workflow with team leader Margaret Loewinger.
The PCC and the Cooperative Cataloging Team are committed to enabling law libraries to participate in all cooperative cataloging activities, with eventual contribution of name and subject authority records through NACO and SACO and bibliographic records through BIBCO. The AALL NACO training was a very successful first step toward this goal.
LC is beginning to load approximately 52,000 name authority records from the Dance Heritage Coalition. They represent the retrospective authority file of the New York Public Library dance collection and consist of records for personal name headings and uniform title headings for choreographic works. The records were initially processed for the Dance Heritage Coalition by Blackwell North America. The records are coded as "preliminary" (008/33 = value d) and contain a 667 field with the wording: Data contributed by the Dance Heritage Coalition for the New York Public Library dance collection.
Other features of the records are
These records may be used, modified, and upgraded according to normal LC/NACO authority procedures, without referral to or consultation with the Dance Heritage Coalition.
LC's serial catalogers, who work on OCLC rather than on LC's local system, are now able to use an OCLC macro for creating authority records. The macro generates the subfield $5 information in the 642, 644-646 fields in series authority records (SARs) based on the library symbol in the 040 field of the authority record. The OCLC symbol for LC's serial catalogers is "DLC-S."
Until now, only "DLC" has been used in those SAR fields to indicate the LC decisions for all catalogers handling items covered by the series authority records. However, in the interest of production, it was decided not to change "DLC-S" to "DLC."
An example of an SAR created with this macro is no97-46206.
Law librarians around the country are participating in a variety of orientation and training activities in conjunction with the adoption of the new Library of Congress JZ (international law)/KZ (international relations) schedules that have replaced subclass JX. Among these activities were several sessions at the American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting, which was held in Baltimore in July. LC's law classification specialist, Jolande Goldberg, conducted a program on the design of the schedules and how this design lends itself to customization by individual libraries. Golberg also described the progress of implementation at LC, which has included a three-month period of training for catalogers, reclassification of the most important reading room materials, reclassification of incunabula and other rare items, and the initiation of a review of subject headings to bring them closer to terminology employed in the new schedules.
The implementation of JZ and KZ incorporates new technology for using the schedules, as they have been incorporated into Classification Plus, a CD-ROM product published by LC's Cataloging Distribution Service, and their approved weekly additions and changes are now posted on CPSO's home page (URL: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/).
Joan S. Mitchell, editor, Dewey Decimal Classification, and assistant editor Julianne Beall traveled to Copenhagen for IFLA '97. Meetings were held with the Italian, Norwegian, and Russian DDC 21 translation teams. Ms. Beall attended the working meeting of the French edition advisory committee in addition to participating in her various committee/Forest Press representational activities. She completed her tenure as ALA Representative to the Standing Committee of the Section on Classification and Indexing and finished her term as Secretary for the Section; and continued her membership on the Working Group on Principles Underlying Subject Heading Languages. Prior to IFLA, Ms. Mitchell spoke at a seminar at the University of Lund, Sweden, on the topic "Preparing the DDC for Navigation and Browsing in the Electronic Environment." Immediately following IFLA, she traveled to Australia to give the opening address at the twelfth National Cataloguing Conference in Canberra: "The Road Ahead for Library Classification Systems." She also presented talks to cataloging groups in Perth and Adelaide.
The NUCMC Team has recently implemented an Internet data sheet that allows participating repositories to fill out and submit through email data sheets describing their collections for inclusion in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections. NUCMC Team members have also begun adding URLs for Web-based finding aids in the 856 fields of their MARC records. These URLs provide hot links in NUCMC records accessed through the NUCMC RLIN AMC gateway. Finally, the Library's Information Technology Services, in cooperation with OCLC, is currently investigating a pilot NUCMC gateway that will allow Z39.50 access to most manuscript materials in OCLC.
LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE (ISSN 1066-8829) is published irregularly by the Cataloging Directorate, Library Services, Library of Congress, and contains news of cataloging activities throughout the Library of Congress. Editorial Office: Cataloging Policy and Support Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540-4305. Editor, Robert M. Hiatt; Editorial Advisory Group: William Anderson, John Byrum, Roselyne Chang, Angela Kinney, Albert Kohlmeier, John Mitchell, Susan Morris, Geraldine Ostrove, David Smith, Linda Stubbs, and David Williamson. Address editorial inquiries to the editor at the above address or rhia@loc.gov (email), (202) 707-5831 (voice), or (202) 707-6629 (fax). Listowner: David Williamson. Address subscription inquiries to the listowner at dawi@loc.gov
LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE is available in electronic form only and is free of charge. To subscribe, send a mail message to listserv @loc.gov with the text: subscribe lccn [firstname lastname]. Back issues of LCCN, volumes 1-3 are available on LC MARVEL. Volume 4- are available through the LCCN home page (URL: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/lccn/). The back issues on LC MARVEL are being migrated to the web site.
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(07/24/97)