Topical Discussion Group Recommendations

The Library of Congress Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium was both provocative and extremely productive. The conference, held on Nov. 15-17, 2000, featured eleven breakout sessions, or Topical Discussion Groups, that addressed major challenges facing catalogers and their allies in the vendor and publisher communities. Each Topical Discussion Group (TDG) presented a set of recommendations to the final plenary session of the Conference, and the recommendations were later circulated for additional input from all Conference participants. The summaries of the TDGs' work, revised to take the Conference participants' comments into account, are now available for all members of the library and information communities to read.

You can view the recommendations in PDF format by clicking on the names of the Topical Discussion Groups below:

The Library welcomes comments on the TDG recommendations from interested readers at any time. Please email comments to John Byrum, chair of the Conference Organizing Team, at jbyr@loc.gov. Library management and staff are now developing a plan for addressing the many recommendations, in order to determine which are feasible to adopt in the short and long terms. Some of the recommendations would require the Library to seek additional funding or other resources in order to implement them, and some recommendations are in conflict with each other. The Library cannot guarantee that all the recommendations will be carried out, but it does assure all readers of the Conference Web site that their comments will be considered, as plans evolve.

– Beacher Wiggins, Director for Cataloging, Library of Congress