Cataloging and Classification Standing Committee
2011-2012 Annual Report
Submitted by George A. Prager, Chair, based in part upon contributions by Melissa Beck, Cindy May, Suzanne Graham, Yael Mandelstam, and Cindy Spadoni.
The Cataloging and Classification Standing Committee will have its usual meeting at the 2012 AALL Annual Conference in Boston, on Sunday, July 22, from 7:00-8:30 A.M (HCC Room 202). The Cataloging and Classification Roundtable will be meeting on Tuesday, July 24, from 5:00-6:00 P.M (HCC Room 205). We expect to discuss a variety of topics during the Roundtable. The Chair is pleased to report that Paul E. Frank, cooperative cataloging specialist on the Cooperative Cataloging Team at the Library of Congress, is the TS-SIS section's 2012 Annual Meeting VIP. He will be presenting at two cataloging programs during the conference. For more on Paul, see the announcement at http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/annualmeeting/2012/. All of the groups listed below will also be meeting at the AALL Conference in Boston.
Descriptive Cataloging Policy Advisory Working Group (DCAG).
Melissa Beck is current chair of DCAG. This group works closely with John Hostage, our AALL representative to ALA's Committee on Cataloging: Description & Access (CC:DA), providing feedback on continuing changes, updates, and new developments in RDA. John continued to keep us updated on revisions under discussion by the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC) and CC:DA, and solicited our comments and suggestions as appropriate.
As reported in last year's report, DCAG worked with John to develop two proposals related to law cataloging. The first proposal was for revising RDA 6.29.1.21, Reports of one court. This proposal has been accepted by the the JSC, and its provisions incorporated into the April 2012 revisions of the RDA Toolkit. It will greatly simplify the cataloging of law reports. The other proposal was for revising several sections of RDA 16.2.2 relating to place names in Australia, Canada, US, etc. This proposal was submitted to CC:DA in late 2010, and is undergoing further revisions.
The DCAG listserv has also served as a forum for an ongoing discussion on how to develop a set of RDA-related online training materials, tools and resources specific to law cataloging. Various members of the Advisory Group have stepped up to serve, and are in communication with one another (in most cases by virtue of their membership in another standing Committee or Working Group) regarding the various means to work on such online aids.
Melissa Beck, DCAG's chair, has been serving as the primary organizer for the upcoming RDA for Law Catalogers Workshop, which will be held Saturday, July 21, 2012 during the AALL Annual Meeting (HCC Room 207). Four additional DCAG members will be instructors at the workshop: Lia Contursi, John Hostage, Patricia Sayre-McCoy, and George Prager. Paul Frank, TS-SIS Conference VIP, will be the other instructor.
The DCAG's list of current members and other information is available at: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/committees/cataloging/descriptivecataloging/.
Classification and Subject Cataloging Policy Advisory Working Group (CSCP)
The SACO Funnel Project, The Member Question Forum Project, and the Genre/Form Project are all initiatives of CSCP, and are discussed below.
SACO Funnel Project
Suzanne Graham is the coordinator of the SACO Funnel Project. This law funnel encourages law librarians to continue to develop Library of Congress subject headings and classification numbers for law-related topics. Any law librarian is welcome to submit a proposal by emailing the form to the funnel coordinator. The funnel administrators make initial assessments and adjustments before posting viable submissions to the CSCP electronic list for wider comment. Vetted proposals are refined, and the funnel coordinator submits them to SACO for consideration.
A TS-SIS sponsored program at the AALL Annual Meeting entitled "Creating Legal Subject Headings" is scheduled for Sunday, July 22, 1:30-2:30 in HCC-Room 202. Presenters include Suzanne Graham, Paul Frank, and George Prager. A description of the program is available at: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/annualmeeting/2012/programdescriptions.htm#creatingheadings. We hope that this program spurs a flurry of submissions to the funnel.
The funnel project will be further publicized in an article that Suzanne and George are co-authoring for a pending issue of Spectrum.
SACO Funnel Project volunteers include Kathy Lin, Cindy May, Caroline Young.
Member Question Forum Project (Ask An Expert)
The coordinator is Cindy May. This project established a forum where TS-SIS members can submit questions on law classification or subject headings and have them reviewed and answered by CSCP volunteers.
Members of this task group created a submission form, and webmaster Martin Wisneski linked it to the TS-SIS website. The link reads: "Get Your Classification and Subject Heading Questions Answered!" Submitted forms are automatically emailed to project volunteers, who then discuss the questions among themselves and provide answers. Over the course of the year the forum received and answered seven queries, generally after significant consultation. Aaron Kuperman has been especially active and helpful in crafting answers to submitted questions.
Member Question Forum Project volunteers: Jolande Goldberg, Aaron Kuperman, Kathy Lin, Cindy May, Karen Selden.
Genre/Form Project
This project is co-chaired by Yael Mandelstam and Robert Rendall. The group has been developing strategies for identifying WorldCat records for retrospective application of law genre/form terms. The plan is to add the appropriate terms to WorldCat and then get a crosswalk between the OCLC numbers and the law genre/form terms so individual libraries can globally merge these terms into their existing records. Originally the group also planned to post the strategies on the AALL TS-SIS site for libraries that prefer to run these strategies locally. However, this may need further discussion since the strategies are not foolproof, requiring careful analysis and cleanup of the search results before the terms can be globally added to the records.
In the past year the group developed strategies for several terms, and Ed O'Neill from OCLC and Yael are currently testing these strategies on a small sample of WorldCat records. Yael is using MarcEdit and Excel to analyze and cleanup the data she receives from Ed. The process is quite challenging and will become even more demanding when the search is performed on a much larger section of WorldCat, but it should be effective.
Genre/Form Project volunteers: Melissa Beck, Lia Contursi, Jolande Goldberg, Suzanne Graham, Joni Herbst, Tom Latuszek, Yael Mandelstam, Ellen McGrath, Keiko Okuhara, George Prager, Robert Rendall, Pat Sayre-McCoy, Sallie Smith, Jessie Tam, Christina Tarr, Sally Wambold, Caroline Young.
Other CSCP News
The Classification and Subject Cataloging Policy Advisory Working Group Meeting is scheduled for Monday, July 23, 7:00-8:30 in HCC-Room 301.
Due to employment uncertainties, Cindy May will be retiring as chair effective July 1, but fortunately the extremely capable Suzanne Graham has agreed to succeed her as chair. We extend our thanks to Cindy for the excellent job she has done, and hope that she can remain active in CSCP.
The group's webpage includes a current membership roster, and is available at: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/committees/cataloging/classification/.
Task Group on Vendor Supplied Bibliographic Records (VBR)
This group is chaired by Cindy Spadoni.
The Task Group analyzed and made recommendations on the following vendor record sets:
- Practising Law Institute (PLI) records for their ebook library, PLI Discover. Marketed almost exclusively for law firms, these records will be made available for free to anyone (with the product) who wants them. The group's main recommendation to PLI was that monographs and serials be treated in a more consistent manner.
- Proquest Legislative Insight, a product taken over from LexisNexis. Proquest asked the Task Group to advise them on their records. Alan Keely worked with a senior cataloger at Proquest on this project. The Vendor Group's main problem was figuring out what Proquest was using as the basis of their cataloging records--PDFs or the actual legislative documents. Proquest was also not following provider-neutral standards. VBR continues to work with the company on these records.
- MOML Primary Sources II, a new set of records from Gale. VBR advised Gale on what needed to be done with the records to make them provider-neutral. Gale has followed the group's recommendations and made revisions to the records. The Task Group has also asked Gale for a chance to review a new set of records they will be creating next year for one of their new products. Gale has agreed to allow us to analyze the records when they are available (March 2013).
- Cassidy Cataloguing: there was a lot of discussion, centered around the Hein Online records, regarding Cassidy's failure to follow provider-neutral standards. The agency creates a mixture of AACR2/provider neutral records. The Task Group is still working with Cassidy on the best resolution of this issue.
The Task Group added four new members since the 2011 AALL Conference: Eric Parker (Northwestern), Cate Kellett (Yale), Andrea Rabbia (Syracuse), and Akram Sadeghi Pari (University of Cincinnati).
VBR's Website is at: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/committees/cataloging/vendorbibrecords/.
Other Groups
New Cataloger's Roundtable (Sean Chen, chair).
Web page: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/committees/cataloging/newcatalogers/.
Rare Book Cataloging Roundtable (Sarah Yates, chair).
Web page: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/committees/cataloging/rarebook/.
Heads of Cataloging in Large Libraries Roundtable (Chris Tarr, chair; Michael Maben, statistics coordinator).
Web page: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/committees/cataloging/headsofcataloging/).