LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE

On Nov. 7-8, 2002, the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC)'s Policy Committee (PoCo) held its annual meeting under chair Bob Wolven (Columbia University). Wolven opened by noting that at this session, PCC reached a watershed. After ten years, many of the original program goals have been accomplished. Instead of focusing on rapid expansion and rethinking of standards, the PCC has turned its concentration to strengthening the underpinnings of the program and building for the future: broadening coverage of records in designated subjects, languages, and formats; improved training for all catalogers; and, adapting standards to meet changing needs. This shift in perspective should allow the PCC to sustain its successes while infusing new energy into its activities.

In support of these priorities, PoCo members discussed the topic of "managed growth" for the future development of the PCC's component programs: NACO (covering name and series authorities), SACO (subject authorities and class numbers), BIBCO (full- and core-level monographic records), and CONSER (serials).

In specifically addressing these issues in the NACO program, PoCo decided to re-institute the original requirement of annual production quotas for NACO member institutions other than funnel projects. For small libraries, the approved numerical target is one hundred new and/or updated records; two hundred new and/or updated records for large libraries and ARL members. PoCo also agreed to apply these numerical goals retrospectively and agreed that the "at risk" institutions should be quickly notified and provided with options to help them resolve the situation, e.g., joining a funnel project, retraining, merging statistically with a parent institution, or concluding membership.

CONSER also is faced with concerns about membership growth, given its focus on international participation in training and its continuing education programs. Desires to concentrate on improving language and subject coverage have prompted discussions about targeted growth and the possibilities of redefining or further defining levels of membership. PoCo, therefore, approved formation of a task group to examine CONSER's growth issues. Also approved was the formation of a task group to determine the needs for instituting a SACO program that would parallel parameters set for the other component programs to include training, numerical quotas, documentation, and a cost-effective mechanism for contribution and distribution of subject authority records.

Chairs of the three PCC Standing Committees (Automation, Training, and Standards) presented reports and approval was given to appointment of a joint task group to study issues related to international participation in the PCC, examining barriers that may exist as well as examining potential solutions for removing those barriers. PoCo also approved the formation of a task group to identify what language and subject areas are not being adequately covered by PCC cataloging with a view that the findings will aid in focused recruitment and facilitate increases in contributions by current members.

One of the major outcomes of the PoCo meeting was the decision that the PCC should take the lead in the development of particular training initiatives that go beyond the immediate needs of the PCC membership. PCC will join with the Association of Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) in developing and presenting these training opportunities. PoCo agreed that documentation produced by PCC will be published by the Library of Congress Cataloging Distribution Service.

PoCo devoted considerable time and attention to discussion of the program's strategic and tactical plans, now up for renewal. Further development of these documents will follow with the goal of having them ready for final approval in early February, following presentation of the plans at the PCC Participants' Meeting to be held on Jan. 26 in conjunction with the American Library Association's 2003 Midwinter Meeting.

As a final order of business, Carlen Ruschoff (University of Maryland, College Park) was unanimously elected chair-elect of the PCC Policy Committee.

Over the past year Barbara Tillett, chief, Cataloging Policy and Support Office, has frequently traveled abroad as an invited presenter on projects underway at the Library of Congress, in the International Association of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), and in the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR. In October, in conjunction with a trip to Vietnam and mainland China, Tillett visited Hong Kong under the sponsorship of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Lignan University. She spoke on Functional Requirements of Bibliographic Records (FRBR) at the meeting of the Hong Kong Library Association and was the keynote speaker at the opening ceremony of the Hong Kong Cooperative Authority Network (HKCAN), a consortium of eight general and special libraries, of which one is a NACO participant, that share a cooperatively created and maintained authority file. In their name authority records HKCAN libraries include traditional Chinese headings in authorized form as 7XXs and provide cross references for variant forms, including forms in simplified Chinese characters. Tillett spoke on a "Virtual International Authority File" and the potential for the HKCAN local file to be connected virtually to an international file.

In November Tillett traveled to Rome as consultant and speaker at a two-day workshop sponsored by ICCU (the Central Institute for a Union Catalog for Italian Libraries and for Bibliographic Information, a network of libraries that share bibliographic information and help maintain the Italian SBN database) and the Commissione permanente per l'aggiornamento della RICA, the group that formulates Italian cataloging rules. The first day of the two-day workshop was devoted to discussions of changes to RICA (the Italian cataloging code)and preparations for the IFLA International Meeting of Experts on an International Cataloguing Code (July 2003). Tillett spoke about the strategic plan of the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR and IFLA's work toward an international cataloging code. The second day of the workshop was devoted to the Italian authority files, and Tillett spoke about the Virtual International Authority File project (LC/OCLC/Die Deutsche Bibliothek) and the possibility of a future Italian connection.

At the request of the American Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil, and with funding from the U.S. Department of State, Carlos Olave of the Library of Congress Hispanic Division went to Brazil to conduct a series of workshops in Portuguese on Library of Congress Subject Headings. Although a number of Brazilian libraries have adopted the LCSH system, they have translated LCSH into Portuguese for their catalogs in varying ways. This has led to very different subject cataloging schemes throughout the country and has created problems in understanding and applying LCSH.

Workshop LCSH: Cabecalhos de Assunto da Biblioteca do Congresso dos Estados Unidos da America, was given in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Brasilia from Oct. 24 to Nov. 7, 2002. Participants in Sao Paulo included twenty-eight librarians from Binational Center libraries who attended the Seventh Seminar of Binational Center Librarians at the Alumni Association in Sao Paulo. In spinoff programs in Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia, audiences consisted of one hundred librarians and library science professors.

The main objectives of the three-day workshop were to introduce Brazilian librarians to the nature and structure of Library of Congress Subject Headings and to improve the quality and consistency of the application of LCSH in Brazilian libraries. The workshops covered: subject analysis and assignment of headings; nature and structure of Library of Congress subject headings; subdivisions and free-floating subdivisions controlled by pattern headings; and geographic headings and subdivisions.

Each workshop ended with a history and overview of LC's collections, with an emphasis on the Luso-Brazilian collection through an online presentation of LC's "Portals to the World" and its Brazilian Portal.

Aida Freire of the Casa Thomas Jefferson in Brazil and Ana Cristan of the Cooperative Cataloging Team laid the financial and planning groundwork for Mr. Olave's visit. Lynn M. El-Hoshy, senior cataloging policy specialist, Library of Congress, prepared the LCSH workshop manual used in the sessions. Mirian Carani, a Brazilian intern of the Hispanic Division from the Universidade Estadual Paulista, Faculdade de Ciencias Agronomicas, provided the translation from English into Portuguese with support from the Vitae Foundation.

Two meetings at ALA Midwinter in Philadelphia will discuss progress in "Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan." The LC Conference 2000 Action Plan Forum on Sunday morning, Jan. 26, from 10:00 am to noon in the Philadelphia Convention Center, Room 102A, will provide a setting for work item leaders to share information on their progress. This is an invitational meeting with limited space for observers. On Sunday afternoon from 4:30 to 5:30, the RUSA/LC Forum on Digital Reference in Loews Philadelphia Hotel, Regency Ballroom C, will feature Prof. Marcia Bates, Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, and a reactor panel to discuss her report, "Research and Design Review: Improving User Access to Library Catalog and Portal Information," which she drafted as part of Work Item 2.3 ("Explore ways to enrich metadata ..."). Catalogers and reference librarians are cordially invited to attend.

The Library of Congress Portals Applications Issues Group (LCPAIG) was formed in autumn 2002. Its charge is to search for portal products that would best meet the reference and research needs of Library of Congress staff and users and to promote the Bibliographic Control of Web Resources: A Library of Congress Action Plan (available at URL http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/actionplan.html [December 2002]). Work item 2.1 calls for development and enhancement of portal functionality for the benefit of the library community in general. The LCPAIG Web site was constructed to help support this group's dual purposes. The URL for this resource is(URL http://www.loc.gov/catdir/lcpaig/paig.html [December 2002].

The LCPAIG Web site lists the goals, tasks, and members of the Library of Congress Portals Applications Issues Group. It also presents a list of some selected portal products with links to the Web sites of the vendors and the products themselves. In addition, the site also includes a list of examples of portal systems used by libraries and links to selected Web resources that discuss issues regarding library portals in general. LCPAIG will continue to make additions to all of these lists of portal products, vendors and resources. Also under development and to be added later is an inventory of both essential and desirable features of a successful portal application; this will provide a checklist of functionality that might assist libraries in evaluating portal products.

Mention of and linking to portal products and their creators or vendors does not constitute an endorsement by the Library of Congress of any of the products, but rather are given on this Web site as a convenience.

The LCPAIG welcomes comments on the content of its Web site as well as suggestions for its further development. Direct suggestions to Gary Huggens, automated operations coordinator, Social Sciences Cataloging Division, at: ghug@loc.gov.

The Library's Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) is pleased to announce two new projects to provide enhancements of catalog records. The first, the Reading Group Guide project, represents another outgrowth of BEAT's use of ONIX data and has resulted in linking of forty-four catalog records for Houghton Mifflin publications to their associated reading group guides on the Web. This experimental BEAT project provides links to these discussion guidelines or topics for book groups for which the information is not on LC's Web server as it is with the Table of Contents and Publishers Description projects. Therefore, the bibliographic records in this project will be closely monitored by BEAT to determine the reliability of the URLs involved. For example, go to the Library's Web OPAC (http://catalog.loc.gov/) and do a title search for The Walking Tour by Kathryn Davis, 1999. A link to the reading group guide is provided from the brief record display.

The other new project recently initiated is the HLAS Reviews project. A separate database of records created for the Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS) is available for searching through the Library's integrated library system and includes reviews for most of the titles listed in this serial. These summaries are especially rich for natural language keyword searching. A few reviews are in Spanish. The purpose of the BEAT project is to extract reviews for monographs in the HLAS database and insert them into the corresponding records in the LC bibliographic database. This project began with reviews listed in the two most recent printed volumes of HLAS, v. 57 on social sciences and v. 58 on humanities. The initial application yielded enhancement of 5,995 LC bibliographic records. The Library of Congress Cataloging Distribution Service is redistributing these enriched records. For more information about HLAS, visit the HLAS Web site at URL http://www.loc.gov/hlas/ [December 2002]. For example, go to the Library's Web OPAC and do a title search for Foro : el Desarrollo Agroindustrial. When the brief record is displayed, click on the "Full record" tab at the top of the record to see the "Review" field.

Two BEAT table of contents (TOC) projects (ONIX and Digital- TOC) passed a milestone during the week of Nov. 11 when the one- millionth visit to a TOC file on the LC Web server was made. There are approximately 34,000 ONIX TOC files and another 10,000 Digital TOC files available on the LC Web server that are linked to the corresponding bibliographic record in the LC bibliographic database and vice-versa. During peak searching times, around two hundred TOC files are accessed an hour. This figure averaged around sixty an hour just nine months ago, demonstrating the quick rise in availability and use of TOC information in these records as the links are made and the records get redistributed to the utilities or searched in the Library's Web OPAC.

For more information about these and other bibliographic enhancement projects, visit the BEAT Web site at (URL http://www.loc.gov/catdir/beat/.)

LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE (ISSN 1066-8829) is published irregularly by the Cataloging Directorate, Library Services, Library of Congress, and contains news of cataloging activities throughout the Library of Congress. Editorial Office: Cataloging Policy and Support Office, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540-4305. Editor, Robert M. Hiatt; Editorial Advisory Group: Julianne Beall, John Byrum, Roselyne Chang, Jurij Dobczansky, Les Hawkins, Albert Kohlmeier, Susan Morris, Geraldine Ostrove, William Starck, Valerie Weinberg, David Williamson, and Roman Worobec. Address editorial inquiries to the editor at the above address or rhia@loc.gov (email), (202) 707-5831 (voice), or (202) 707-6629 (fax). Listowner: David Williamson. Address subscription inquiries to the listowner at dawi@loc.gov.

LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE is available in electronic form only and is free of charge. To subscribe, send a mail message to listserv listserv@loc.gov with the text: subscribe lccn [firstname lastname]. Back issues of LCCN are available through the LCCN home page (URL http://www.loc.gov/catdir/lccn/).

All materials in the newsletter are in the public domain and may be reproduced, reprinted, and/or redistributed as desired. Citation of the source is requested.