Cataloging and Classification Standing Committee
2008-2009 Annual Report
Submitted by Karen A. Nuckolls, Chair
Wave upon wave of changes took place this past year and will continue through the coming year in the cataloging world. With RDA making its entry on the horizon, and the economic downturn surrounding the law library community, everyone has had to adjust (and continue to adjust) to the fluctuations in cataloging and classification.
The chair was kept busy making sure that the standing committee members were being informed about RDA's release, field 440 being made obsolete, RDA/FRBR cataloger scenarios, OCLC records policy (later withdrawn), full draft of RDA, genre terms, PCC neutral records, and JSC meeting outcomes.
Beacher Wiggins, Director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access, Library of Congress, accepted an invitation to attend the Cat/Class Roundtable to address the RDA testing process. We have five law libraries participating: Chicago; Columbia; Emory; Northeastern; and Stanford. The complete list of testers may be found at: http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/rda/test-partners.htm.
While most subcommittees had a quiet year, a few had some activity to report. The Descriptive Cataloging Policy Advisory Working Group, chaired by Ann Sitkin, continued to wait for the release of RDA, which was delayed.
The Task Group on Vendor-Supplied Bibliographic Records continues to evaluate record sets and to post evaluations to the group's wiki. This year, the group added evaluations for HeinOnline Legal Classics, HeinOnline World Trials, LLMC Digital, and the LexisNexis U.S. Serial Set Digital Collection.
The group has corresponded with different vendors on various issues. Gale agreed to do authority control processing on the MARC records for Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises 1800-1926. The members also corresponded with Cassidy Cataloging concerning the issue of cataloging e-resources as reproductions versus born-digital publications.
The Task Group has also done some informal consulting and answering questions from the law library community. It is fortunate to have two members who were also on the Provider-Neutral E-Monograph Task Group. The group has been asked recently by several libraries to provide feedback for provider-neutral ebook records that they had cataloged using the new provider-neutral guidelines.
A crosswalk for getting current OCLC numbers into original MOML records was developed by several staff at Fordham Law Library and uploaded to the Task Group's wiki.