Technical Services Special Interest Section

Marie E. Whited
Lillian Goldman Library
Yale Law School
marie.whited@yale.edu

The Subject Analysis Committee met in San Diego during January, 2004 and in Orlando during June, 2004. SAC meetings consist mainly of reports from their subcommittees and from their representatives to and from other library groups.

SAC Subcommittee on Subject Analysis Training has finished its work on the training course for subject headings. The course was presented in Orlando and received excellent reviews. It will be ready for use sometime during the fall and will be available from ALCTS and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. Thirty trainers from the United States have been trained and three from Canada. The course is necessary for any beginning cataloger and is helpful for advanced catalogers.

SACO has changed its guidelines for participation. Please see http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/sacofaq.html
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/saco/tgsacoprog_sc.html

Here is more information:

1. What options do I have if I have need of a subject heading and my institution decides not to become an institutional member?
A cataloger from a non-PCC participating institution who needs a subject heading not available in LCSH or an LC classification number not found in the LC schedules now has the following options available for sending forward a proposal to SACO. 1) Contact a nearby institution that is currently a PCC member and request to submit your new proposal through their contribution mechanism. The second alternative is for your institution to 2) explore entering into a SACO funnel cooperative project and make contributions through an active subject funnel. See the response to SACO funnel question #12 below.

We can no longer submit subject headings unless we follow the guidelines above.

The Task Force on Named Buildings and Structures is examining whether or not these headings should be in the name file or in the subject file or in both. They are looking at a list of structures and their headings in order to see patterns of use. Reference structure is being studied along with where structures fit into the Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records.

The Subcommittee on Semantic Interoperability continues its work. They presented a program on a couple of successful projects. One is MACS (Multilingual Access to Subjects). This is a European subject heading list using French, German and English and its URL is http://infolab.kub.nl/prj/macs/. The second is WilsonWeb which maps multiple vocabularies into a single thesaurus. Semantic interoperability projects are used to improve user retrieval across various languages, subject vocabularies and classification schemes. The members are evaluating some projects, writing a glossary and bibliography.

OCLC has asked SAC to form an advisory subcommittee for FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology. FAST can be used by personnel without extensive training and sets of LC subject headings can be converted into FAST headings. Please see http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/fast/.

During my report to SAC, I mentioned the "inherently legal" subject heading subcommittee. Other libraries would love some help here and want us to work on that.

The IFLA liaisons reported on the development of virtual clearinghouse of subject access tools. The list will include thesauri, subject heading systems and classification systems. It will eventually be on IFLANET and will be annotated.

The SAC Subcommittee on Subject Reference Structures in Automated Systems finished their work in San Diego. It is hoped that library systems will use the guidelines to development better subject heading indexes. III members have started to work in proposing some of the changes to their vendor.

The Library of Congress reported that new print editions of KF and of Q have been published. "Aged" has been changed to "Older people", "Australian aborigines" to "Aboriginal Australians"; "Tasmanian aborigines" to "Aboriginal Tasmanians". There have been many changes to headings in the discipline of botany. "Divide like" notes have been discontinued in Classification Web. The KB schedule for religious law will be published later this year. It includes KBR/KBU Canon law, KBM Jewish law, KBP Islamic law, KB Religious law in general. Aboriginal Australians have been moved from GN to DU - check the weekly classification lists and the Web.

SAC is forming a subcommittee to work with PCC to develop a program on classification.