BIBCO-At-Large Meeting

Summary report

ALA Annual Conference, June 27th 1999

The second BIBCO-At-Large meeting was held 11:30 A.M.-12:30 P.M. on Sunday, June 27, 1999 at the Sheraton, New Orleans and opened with Ana Cristán (LC) reporting on the status of the BIBCO program.

Cristán announced that the Cataloging Policy and Support Office (CPSO) at the Library of Congress will suspend publication of the Subject Headings Weekly List of new and changed subject proposals beginning with what would have been list number 9928 as part of the preparations for the conversion to an integrated library system (LC ILS). The Weekly Lists will resume with list 9936 dated September 1, 1999. Libraries participating in the SACO program should continue to submit proposals through the normal channels with all proposals submitted during the "no-list" period appearing on list 9936 and subsequent ones. Cristán reported that requests for literary author numbers would continue under the new LC ILS and that for the foreseeable future the procedure of reporting bibliographic file maintenance (BFM) would also continue. An announcement from CPSO on both of these matters is forthcoming.

The results of the recent PCC Policy Committee (PoCo) elections were announced with Larry Alford (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) becoming the new BIBCO representative to the PoCo.

On behalf of the PCC and the BIBCO Program Cristán thanked and acknowledged the work of the five current members of the BIBCO Operations Committee who will be rotating off in September: Bill Garrison (Colorado), Margaret Shen (Cleveland Public), Joan Swanekamp (Yale), Pat Williams (Chicago), and Pete Wilson (Vanderbilt).

As a follow-up on action items stemming from the April 1999 BIBCO OpCo meeting Cristán reported that a request for volunteers has been posted for those PCC members interested in serving on a series working group to study the impact of eliminating the 490/830 series field combination when the only difference is the series numbering. She reported that the PCC Steering Committee wants this group to focus on this issue; and that a report is be drafted by November 1999 in time for the annual PoCo meeting. An announcement was made regarding the upcoming "Training the BIBCO Trainer" for the fall of 1999 also as a follow-up of the OpCo action items. Expressions of interest should be sent directly to the BIBCO coordinator and should include evidence of full institutional support.

The second item on the agenda focused on the report from the Working Group on Statistics (Pete Wilson (Vanderbilt), Jain Fletcher (UCLA), and Kate Harcourt, Chair (Columbia)). This group was formed as a result of discussions at the BIBCO OpCo meeting in April 1999 and was charged with investigating how BIBCO libraries report their PCC-contributed records as either original input or as upgrades and recommending standard practices for reporting these statistics. The Working Group circulated a draft proposal that categorized records based on the work performed (see figure 1). Reporting was especially problematic if vendor records were used as the basis for PCC records. One line of reasoning for identifying these records as original cataloging rather than as upgrades held that vendor records are usually not created by catalogers; vendors may not follow AACR2 rules, and often the issuer does not have the item in hand. Some audience members noted that often local policies cause differences in the counting of upgraded vs original records; nevertheless, a consensus of opinion to count vendor records as original not as upgrades for PCC statistical purposes was reached.

Other areas of the proposed draft were discussed; many audience members felt that national library bibliographic records used as copy should be considered as upgrades rather than original regardless of the language of the subject headings and the availability of a call number, arguing that often English language full level cataloging needs to have just as much work performed to achieve PCC standards. A counter point was made that it would be best to allow catalogers to use their own judgement to determine which records are to be counted as original and which should be counted as copy regardless of origin but based on the amount of work performed. The audience seemed to favor the development of a checklist to enumerate what kind of changes would denote a record as being reported as either original vs. upgrade and that this checklist should be posted to the BIBCO Home Page. This discussion will be factored into the Working Group's final report which will be available in August.

PCC Statistics: Draft Proposal
Record Type:	PCC original core	PCC original full	Copy upgraded to PCC core	Copy upgraded to PCC full
New original cataloging			N/A	N/A
Upgrades to vendor records e.g. Casalini			N/A	N/A
Non-English language records (with 040 $b coded for the language of cataloging), e.g. French National Library records	N/A	N/A
Upgrades to RLIN acquisitions records			N/A	N/A
OCLC & RLIN full level copy*	N/A	N/A	N/A
OCLC & RLIN less than full level copy**	N/A	N/A
LC minimal, LCCODE or CIP	N/A	N/A

*Includes OCLC encoding level I, blank,1, L, or RLIN CC91XX
**Includes OCLC 2, 5, 7, K, M or RLIN 95XX or 99XX

Next on the agenda, Iris Wolley (Cornell) described the use of the core record at Cornell University and how other BIBCO libraries should consider increased use of the core record in their individual workflow. Wolley indicated that Cornell joined BIBCO in the Fall of 1996 and immediately decided to adopt the core record as the standard by which their collections would be cataloged. Use of the core record has become quite successful, and Wolley shared the processes by which Cornell switched to core. She stressed that first and foremost the decision to use the core record must involve: administration commitment to BIBCO, an organized implementation, involvement of all library sections, training, and allowing catalogers to use their judgement in deciding whether to create records at the core or full level. Visit the Cornell University Library's core record implementation site on the web.

The last segment of the meeting was devoted to a three-pronged presentation on the Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) given by Celine Noel (University of North Carolina), Jeffery Sowder (Columbia), and Sally Sinn (National Agricultural Library). CORC, an OCLC development offers the first flexible web-based cataloging toolkit that allows for MARC catalog record input while incorporating other resource description frameworks such as Dublin Core Metadata (DC). CORC offers the potential to create and store resource descriptions for electronic resources in nonMARC and because of its "crosstalk" environment CORC is able to integrate MARC and DC records in a single system. Libraries can thus describe a single resource and create a MARC record for their OPACs and a DC metadata record for other purposes. To use CORC it is necessary to have a recent version of a standard Web browser because of the Java scripts which CORC employs. There are features in CORC which are "BIBCO-friendly"; namely, CORC offers the availability of a linked authorities component for headings and authorized classification schemes. CORC also allows a contributor to mark an incomplete new record as "private", which signifies that the contributor has the intent to catalog the resource; the resource's title and URL are indexed and displayed in searches, thereby alerting other users that a record is already in process. This is especially significant for cooperative projects like BIBCO because it could cut into one of the remaining areas of duplication of effort. For more information on the CORC Research Project visit the CORC home page.

Pictures of some of the attendees at the BIBCO-At-Large meeting