Technical Services Special Interest Section

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Marie E. Whited
Law Library of Congress
mwhited [at] loc.gov

Subject Analysis Committee meets Sunday morning and Monday afternoon at both the midwinter and annual meetings. The SAC meetings consist mainly of reports from subcommittees and liaisons. The Library of Congress report is an important part of the meetings. This past year, in addition to general news from the Library of Congress, the liaison, Lynn El-Hoshy, reported on the following items of interest in subject cataloging:

• --Contributions in [specific field or discipline] under names of persons has been eliminated
• --Views on [specific field or discipline] can now just be used under the two personal name subjects headings Jesus Christ and Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865
• 655 second indicator "0" for form/genre headings from LCSH has been implemented at LC

Please note that the above changes should now be reflected in Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings.

• 28th edition of Library of Congress Subject Headings is now available.
• Subject headings for drug addiction and smoking have been revised to reflect current terminology, i.e. Cigarette habit is now Smoking or Nicotine addiction. See weekly lists 13 and 19 (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso)
• 5 new editions of the printed classification schedules have been published including H

Other items reported of interest to law catalogers include

• LC adding machine-generated table of contents to records
• Cornell will be doing cataloging in publication for Cornell Press titles
• Government-designated parks, forests, etc. will continue to be in the subject authority file but if they author a work, they will appear in the name authority file with the qualifier (Agency)
• Indian tribal names will be tagged 151 (geographic name) and can be used as jurisdictions with the MARC indicator set to "1". (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/tribes.html)

Cataloging Policy and Support Office has announced a new policy for prioritizing queries:

1. Responses to queries on LC cataloging policy and practices
2. Follow-up on suggestions for improvements to CPSO documentation and training
3. Resolution of authority record problems and correction of corresponding headings in bibliographic records relating to current cataloging
4. Consolidation/deletion of duplicate name, series, or subject authority records
5. Errors in subject analysis (subject headings or classification)
6. Typographical errors and errors in content designation that do not affect access in either a bibliographic or authority record
7. Other

Please read the full report at http://www.loc.gov/ala/ as it has a lot of interesting information.

SAC's Task Force on Named Buildings and Other Structures was established to review the policies related to establishing buildings and other structures in the subject authority file. They were to determine if it would be appropriate to move headings for these structures to the name authority file. The Task Force concluded that it could not make a recommendation on where the authority records for structures should be located. More information is needed for structures not in the Americas or Western Europe. They did recommend that an art funnel for SACO to work with the NACO art funnel in determining where individual structure proposals should go and for these two groups to collect examples. They felt that more examples should be published to assist catalogers in formulating the headings and that more training should be provided for those contributing structure headings. They recommended the creation of an ARLIS (Art Libraries Society of North America) Cataloging Advisory Committee liaison to SAC.

The SAC IFLA's Classification and Indexing Section representatives reported that IFLA has established a working group to study extending the FRBR model to subject authority records. IFLA has three other working groups dealing with multilingual thesauri, subject access tools, and minimal requirements for subject access by national bibliographic services.

Subcommittee on LCC Training Materials plans on presenting preview section of the new classification training workshop at ALA annual 2006 and a pre-conference in 2007. They are working on an outline and the course will focus on general classification with a special focus on schedules H, N and P. It will also include practices for special types of materials, i.e. serials, biographies, works about other works, etc.

The FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Headings) Subcommittee reviewed a sample of bibliographic records where the LC subject headings were converted to FAST headings. These FAST headings were created and added to the records by algorithms. The headings reviewed indicated some problems in the conversion but not a great many. The Subcommittee advises the FAST program on the scope and suitability of FAST vocabulary, on the FAST use of authority format, on documentation and on other relevant topics. Information can be found at http://fast.oclc.org. The idea is to develop a vocabulary that can be used by personnel without extensive training.

SAC's Subcommittee on Semantic Interoperability is close to finishing its charge and is working on editing their report. They have identified about 36 projects and are developing evaluation criteria for projects to use. There will be both a bibliography and a glossary with the final report. The goal is to create some documents to provide guidance to the creators of semantically interoperable vocabularies and systems. Renardus (http://www.renardus.org) is a good example of a successful semantic interoperability project and it provides integrated search and browse access to records across Europe. The final report should explain the work of this subcommittee in more detail and it should be available by January 2006.