ex-officio members from the Library of Congress and the National Library of Canada. The other official participants in the meetings are representatives and liaisons to the U.S. MARC Advisory Committee. These include ALA representatives from groups such as CC:DA, SAC and the Public Library Association; bibliographic utility representatives from OCLC, RLG, and A-G Canada; national library representatives from the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the national Library of Medicine, and the national libraries of Canada and Australia; and finally liaisons with other non-ALA organizations. This is where I fit in, along with representatives for audio-visual catalogers, system vendors, music librarians, archivists, and more.

The MARBI meetings are open meetings. Interested people are invited to attend and encouraged to participate in the discussions. Diane Hillman, our own MARBI Representative from 1989-1995, is a very active and respected participant. Even though she left her law library, she is still looking out for our interests. In New Orleans, she reminded the group that they still had not added the section symbol to the MARC character set, a cause she has championed for years. In addition to Diane, our own Ellen Rappaport, who describes herself as a MARBI groupie, spoke up about MARC Holdings issues. I also saw a few other law librarians in the room, and encourage you to attend MARBI meetings if you get a chance.

MARBI meets for three half-day meetings during ALA and ALA Midwinter. Proposals and discussion papers are presented and considered at these meetings. Proposals can be approved, rejected, modified, or returned for further revision. Discussion papers are just that. Their purpose is to define the concerns of the group and assist with the drafting of proposals for future meetings. Once a proposal is approved, it must still be implemented by the national libraries, by the utilities, and, hopefully, by the local system vendors. Proposals, discussion papers, minutes, and more are available at http://www.ala.org/alcts/organization/div/marbi/marbi.html.

A Newcomer Goes to MARBI

During the trip to New Orleans, and my first round of meetings, I was nervous about the intimidating group that I was to join. I was an outsider, since most of the participants are librarians who have known each other and worked together on ALA tasks for years. But many of them welcomed me warmly. While reading the nine proposals and seven discussion papers for the meetings, I marveled at their detail. The discussions were often fascinating and were continuously grounded in the theory behind the details. Before the meetings it seemed that attending three 3 1/2 hour meetings would become tedious, but in reality the time passed quickly. You probably will not believe me, but I was a little disappointed that some of the discussions were not longer! While I am still in awe of the group of participants, I look forward to ALA in June, with its three 3 1/2 hour meetings.

Since I was just getting my feet wet at this round of meetings, I was glad that there was little in the proposals/discussion papers that was of particular interest to law librarians. One proposal did mention loose-leafs. The issue in question was part of Proposal no. 2002-03, made at the request of OCLC/CORC. It added new subfields to field 046, including one for date modified. It was specifically designed to meet the needs of creators of Dublin Core records that contain dates with no place to go in current MARC records. This could concern law librarians since loose-leafs are now under the umbrella of integrating resources along with electronic resources. (See below.)

The proposal specifically stated that this subfield would not be used for changes to loose-leaf publications. I solicited feedback about this from law librarians on the TS-SIS and OBS-SIS discussion lists. Rhonda thought this field could be valuable if used to record the date when changes in the record were made by a librarian who had seen changes in the work. But the intent of this proposal is that this date could be for any change, not just one that caused a revision to the bibliographic description. Most of you who responded to my e-mail were very definite in your opinion that you did not want to include loose-leaf dates modified in bibliographic records. The MARBI group did not see these subfields as having any usefulness outside of CORC.

Thanks very much to all of you who responded to my e-mail. I was surprised and heartened by the number of you who did. I am counting on you to let me know how you want me to represent you. Hopefully we will have some good debates about MARC issues that directly affect our work.

Change Is in the Air

Two proposals of importance to law librarians were approved last June. During AALL Rhonda described them to us in her MARBI Report (http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/commrept/2001/marbi2001.htm) and in a seriality program and roundtable discussion. If you missed the roundtable, you missed one of the liveliest meetings I've ever participated in at AALL! Proposal 2002-04 makes the 260 field (Publication, Distribution, etc.) into a repeatable field and provides a means for coding earliest, current and intervening publishers.

The second proposal, Proposal 2001-05, provides a new bibliographic level code for integrating resources. It also provides new coding for describing their serial-like aspects. An integrating resource is described as "a bibliographic resource that is added to or changed by means of updates that do not remain discrete and are integrated into the whole. Integrating resources may be finite or continuing. Examples include updating loose-leafs and updating Web sites" (p.2 of proposal). What a huge change! Finally we will have a means for cataloging loose-leafs without forcing them into a monograph shape.