July 17, 2000

The meeting was called to order at approximately 7:00 a.m. by Chair, Chris Long.

Report of the Chair. The Chair briefly reviewed the educational programs sponsored by TS, including several shared with OBS. There was one announcement: Pat Sayre-McCoy, Chair of the TS-SIS Education Committee, invited all TS members to attend the Committee=s meeting on Wednesday.

Liaison Reports.

a. SAC (Melody Busse Lembke) AALL's representative to ALA's Subject Analysis Committee reported on SAC's Mid-winter reports on proposed headings revisions. One proposal in particular was to replace the subject heading 'Poor' with 'Poor People.' Marie Whited added that she was part of this Task Force which was asked to comment on the viability of about 30 headings. The group's recommendation was to retain 'Poor.' Other headings considered were 'Corporate Power' and 'Corporate Welfare.' The report of the Task Force is available on ALA's Cataloging and Classification Section Web site (http://www.ala.org/alcts/organization/ccs/sac/subjecta.html).

Melody continued that there are several SAC subcommittees exploring metadata. One is interested in classification, another in subject analysis. The draft report of the Subcommittee on Metadata and Subject Analysis, Subject Data in the Metadata Record, Recommendations and Rationale, can also be found through the CCS Web site.

The law community was asked for our input as the law sections of Dewey are reviewed, partly resulting from LC's revisions of international and comparative law and European law. A discussion paper is available at (www.oclc.org/fp).

SAC has drafted a letter to LC requesting a thesaurus view of LCSH via the Web. Hopefully by the year's end LC's authority records will be available via Z39.50.

b. CC:DA (Bill Benemann) AALL's representative to ALA's Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access reported also from ALA Mid-winter. The KJ-KKZ 2000 edition was to have been available this Spring, so it should be distributed soon. KBR (History of Canon law) and KBU (Canon law) are in the final stages of development; KBP (Islamic law) is in an advanced stage of development. KBM (Jewish law) is in development. See also LC update, following.

LC has said that it no longer has the capability of guaranteeing the uniqueness of call numbers, because there is 'no direct counterpart' in the ILS to the card shelflist mechanism currently in use.

Forthcoming AACR2 revisions are mostly for electronic resources. The report to the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR, Revising AACR2 to Accomodate Seriality, is available on the Web at 'www.nlc-bnc.ca/jsc/ser-rep0.html). The law community is being asked for help in understanding 'integrating resources.' Bill also mentioned that AACR2 updates are available for download from ALA at (http://www.ala.org/editions/updates/aacr2/).

There was a pre-conference on metadata at ALA. Other areas of discussion included proposed changes in treatment of titles of nobility vs. titles of honor; cataloging of cartographic material; optionality of parts of the statement of responsibility; a question of punctuation and ISO standards; major vs. minor changes in title and when to make a new record (it was pointed out that more help is needed when changes are minor). The report of a task force on non-roman headings as optional access points is available, but no source was given.

A new cataloging code from the Vatican can be downloaded via ftp: Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Early-Modern Manuscripts (ftp://165.134.156.3/vatican/).

LC Update on Religious Law Schedules (Jolande Goldberg)

Canon law history and Catholic Church law will be released in early Fall, 2000. LC will also be reclassifying this area to a larger extent than some other areas. The schedule is bi-lingual and will be posted on their Web site (http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/ktm.html [Webmaster's note: link not working as of 4/25/2001]). It may be posted by November. The Islamic class and the Jewish class have been prepared with cooperation from Harvard and New York University, respectively. Jolande wished us luck with the new schedules - "It is difficult material and most Jewish and Islamic material at LC is handled by language experts in the main [LC] library."

Revisions are coming for the B schedules, introducing the vernacular into them to aid catalogers in understanding the material being cataloged. To the question, "Is psychology coming out of B?" Jolande replied that she was not sure. Another question was where would we want it, in R? Jolande reminded members of the religious law program on Monday, with the Cataloging Issues Roundtable to follow.

Task Force and Subcommittee Reports

a. 'Great Britain' vs. 'England' (Marie Whited) - The Task Force submitted a report, recommending that LC continue and codify its policies, essentially that AGreat Britain@ would continue to be used as a subject heading and for geographic subdivision for works on the law of England and Wales since their union in 1536. The names of the constituent countries would still be used for works limited in geographic scope. A proposed revision to SCM:SH H955 was distributed. The group voted to accept the Task Force's report.

b. Administration - As this subcommittee was never constituted due to email problems, a discussion ensued as to why the subcommittee is needed. It had been charged with handling issues relevant to the use of paraprofessionals for copy cataloging. Several members indicated that this subcommittee’s work would be relevant to them.

c. Inherently Legal Subject Headings (Pam Deemer) - This subcommittee was created in 1999, with about 12 members, charged with creating references from headings with 'Law and legislation' subdivision to legal term subject headings. Suggestions have been received for their approach, including: a. examining LCSH for inherently legal terms and asking LC to make appropriate cross-references; b. asking LC to add cross references when new legal terms are added and work retrospectively on the existing ones; and c. urge a single qualifier 'law' to replace the three existing ones: (Law), Law and legislation, Legal status, laws, etc. Pam requested help from the group on determining their focus. The suggestion was made to recommend specific headings needing attention to the subcommittee, and focus on concrete improvements.

d. Description and Entry (Chris Long) - Chris distributed a report from Kathy Faust, Chair of the Subcommittee. The Subcommittee was charged with looking at 'main entry' jurisdiction concepts in anticipation of AACR3, specifically whether collective uniform titles such as 'Laws, etc.' and 'Treaties, etc.' are working. A majority of the email discussion participants favored abandoning these two uniform titles, but no consensus was reached. Several suggestions for further steps followed: consult with the reference community, especially RIPS-SIS; abolish this subcommittee and reconsider whether we need to think again; try harder to educate ourselves and our reference colleagues; plan a program to do so; hold concentrated discussion to determine our own position. It was pointed out that uniform titles are not handled well by current integrated library systems, and the current situation is therefore not a good basis for training or polling reference people. Various educational possibilities were discussed, including roundtables and institutes. Finally a motion was made and carried to abolish this subcommittee 'for the time being.'

New Business

a. Program planning for 2001 and 2002: Members were reminded of the August 14 deadline for program proposals. Several efforts were mentioned as underway, including a technical services institute for Minneapolis.

b. Basic Law Cataloging Program: (http://www.aallnet.org/prodev/rfp.asp) has an rfp for a 2 1/2 day event intended to be presented for the first time in Fall, 2001.

Other Discussion

Rhonda Lawrence raised the question of discussion and SIS committee time at the annual meeting. Discussion followed, with mention of using the listserv to a greater extent, conflict with educational programs, possible resolutions to AMPC asking for freer access to meeting time, and ALA's approach to this question, which permits easier personal planning and conflict avoidance since it remains fairly fixed from year to year. There was general agreement that discussion groups, by whatever name, are better vehicles than programs designed to attract broad attendance. An informal subcommittee formed to work on proposals to the Executive Board.

The meeting was adjourned at approximately 8:45.

Minutes recorded by John Bissett,
Washington and Lee University
bissettj@wlu.edu