PCC Standing Committee on Training

Minutes, ALA Midwinter Meeting

January 10, 2004, San Diego, CA

Present: David Banush, chair; Robert Bremer, Ana Cristan, Greta de Groat, Ed Glazier, Frieda Rosenberg, recorder; Becky Uhl, Rachel Wadham.

The meeting began with introduction of new members Greta de Groat, Stanford, and Becky Uhl, Arizona State University. Their service has already begun; Greta is liaison to the Continuing Education Implementation Group, and Becky is working on a team producing BIBCO documentation. A contract has been signed with LC to complete the work of revising, reformatting, and reviewing the document by September 30, 2004.

Document maintenance plan. David met with Carlen Ruschoff, Charles Wilt, Bruce Johnson, Les Hawkins, Ana Cristan, and Katherine Mendenhall of CDS to review the PCC/ALCTS documentation and courses, including the name and title authority and basic subject cataloging courses. A proposal to form a combined committee from existing groups to maintain the documentation will be drafted by David. The new group will include one or two members of the SCT.

Basic subject cataloging using LCSH workshop. During this conference, a run-through of the course material was held at UCSD to gather additional feedback. At the Orlando conference, Lori Robare and a team 3 other trainers will present the course. Ana commented that the course has good content and only needed stylistic changes such as animation and some of the notes moved into slides. Ana and the group met again Sunday to decide such matters and to begin discussion on a train-the-trainer session. David commented that cooperative handling between PCC and ALCTS is necessary because the PCC lacks the support and marketing infrastructure to offer these courses on its own.

Ed asked about details of training and financing. Ana responded that the materials will be mounted on the CDS web site, ALCTS and others who would sponsor subject analysis workshops will buy the materials from CDS and may then charge attendance fees as appropriate. While CDS did not pay for the development of the training materials, it will distribute the material, and following the SCCTP model, on a cost recovery basis. If there is a net profit beyond that, the money will be used as a "trust fund" for PCC use. It is expected that those funds will be used for further course development and maintenance, as determined by the BIBCO and NACO coordinators and with a newly developed group under the auspices of CCS.

David commented that many regional training opportunities are missed if courses are presented only in conjunction with national conferences. Ed suggested a market study on pricing and options for location. Robert commented that SCCTP regional workshops had worked well. We do not know yet whether or how the PCC and/or ALCTS might be involved in series training, but a group is working on this. David pointed out that one of the goals of PCC/ALCTS training is inducement of more people to join the PCC, even though materials are PCC neutral.

The fact that completion of the CCS/PCC Name Authority Training course does not reduce the time commitment for NACO training still troubles some. Ana speculated that if the new workshop is successful a two-day NACO course could be created for those who had been through the other course. Ed suggested "chunking" the content, removing an additional piece for separate training. Once the course is available for widespread use, after Summer 2005, a reassessment of the NACO Training workshops can be made.

PoCo outcomes. A major discussion topic was the report on international participation discussed at our last meeting, especially the observations about barriers and obstacles to PCC participation. The Steering Committee will look at the report and decide on a response. Examples of issues to be resolved are use of LCRIs and the formulation of country names.

Ana reported that the current definition of PCC as an "international program is at stake, since it is an English-language catalog/AACR2/LCRI based program that aspires to be international. As requests for participation come from non-English catalog users the matter becomes more complex. More discussion with PoCo is likely. In the offing are a third edition of AACR and IFLA cataloging rules, that may help internationalize PCC, but they are still some years away. Some required authority procedures which do not make sense for international participants may be revised as consultation with CPSO warrants. A "wait and see" attitude is advised.

SACO. The question is whether it should be formalized into a program. A Task Group on SACO development has been working on a program, but the program will differ from other PCC programs in that formal training will not be mandatory for contributors. One of the reasons is that subject headings will always be under LC review.

Ed asked about the reasons for formalizing the program. Ana responded that the resources that LC expends processing proposals from PCC partners is only justified if there is support for SACO as an official component of the PCC. Ana stated that while the PoCo had not shown strong support for a formalized program, as BIBCO coordinator, she believes that subject development is an integral part of the BIBCO record and therefore a mechanism to facilitate contributions of subject proposals must be a component of the PCC. There was further discussion about possibilities for organizing the effort through subject funnels, which could be coordinated by BIBCO institutions; the need for quotas and further PCC affiliation on the part of contributors. Further discussion will be raised with OpCo (in May).

Draft Report from the Task Group on the PCC Role in Metadata Training. The task group report, due in October, has not yet been widely discussed. David observed that PCC involvement was not really addressed; that sharing, which is the basis of the PCC, is not contemplated for metadata. However, if metadata will be a growing part of our work, the PCC needs to think about at least supporting, if not developing or providing, metadata training, perhaps oriented toward general functions rather than particular schemes. To Ed's suggestion that PoCo needed to confirm what was really a new direction for PCC, Greta added that PCC might take the immediate role of monitoring and supporting the efforts, and revisit the need for their involvement later. Factors influencing the development of metadata training will be strong library interest in it, the expense of existing training, the future of MARC, the number of competing metadata standards, and the importance (or lack of importance) of PCC authentication to the library community.
Action: David will write back to Bill Garrison, the task group's chair, referring some of our comments.

Name and Title Authorities Training. Rachel introduced the topic of this cooperative ALCTS/CCS/PCC and described some of the content, which now exists in a developed outline as well as brief content for some modules. There will be a section on uniform titles, but not series. Online training with a personal "mentor" who could answer questions seems a practical and effective model. The group is planning a debut of the model at Orlando, and the full course at Annual 2005.

Continuing education effort. Greta reported that a group composed of Steve Shadle, Karen Letarte, Cinder Johansen, and Lauren Pinsley was developing course ideas in the bibliographic control of electronic resources. Some of the courses were:

MARC-AACR2 cataloging of electronic resources, including machine generation
Overview of 21st century bibliographic control: open URL, digital libraries
Thesaurus design
Digital library design with project-based components, creating roadmaps, choosing metadata
Philosophy and approach to asset management for the 21st century: evaluation skills, statistics, local skill development.

The group will run until 2006, but will have an ongoing review task subsequently. It has contacted Steve Miller to design a two-day course with exercises; outline is due in March, revisions by August, and to be presented this fall. [Subject of course?]

Integrating Resources Manual. There was a brief discussion on some suggested changes to the documentation. Ana can receive comments, and would welcome them particularly from those who have taught the SCCTP Integrating Resources course.