During the ALA Mid-Winter Conference in Washington, I attended two meetings of the Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC: DA) as the Society's representative as well as a working session of its Task Force on Metadata. Additionally, I was one of the three persons appearing on behalf of the Society at two meetings of the MARBI Committee in regard to the extensive changes to MARC that were the subject of a joint US/Canadian meeting in Toronto in October.
The two CC:DA sessions were taken up almost exclusively with the representation of Task Force and representative reports as this is the modus operandi of CC:DA which does not generally undertake the substance of its work at the committee table. Much of what is presented by the various representatives (from the Joint Steering Committee, LC, OCLC and RLG) is for informational purposes only. Because of this approach and because neither agendas nor reports are distributed much more than a few weeks in advance of the meeting (or distributed during it), it is very difficult as a liaison to seek input from the archival community prior to the meeting. On the other hand, few issues of substance are decided at a single meeting and very few are of immediate concern to the archival community.
This meeting was no exception to the latter rule as we received/heard reports from Task Forces or representatives on the following subjects: cataloging works intended for performance; cataloging conference proceedings, bibliographic description of interactive multimedia works, the IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, progress on the publication of an electronic version of MCR2, activities at LC, OCLC, RLG, the Joint Steering Committee on AACR2, and other ALA groups, and revisions to the AACR2 glossary. Relevant portions of this report will be posted to various archival lists with an offer to provide copies of any documents that may be of interest to any readers.
The Sunday morning meeting of CC: DA's Task Force on Metadata proved both more personally stimulating and archivally significant. Archivists are, or should be concerned, with the development of metadata standards like the Dublin Core and the header specifications of various SGML DTDs like EAD and TEI as a tool for electronic searching across institutions and collection types It is clearly a concern of the bibliographic community. Having contributed some apparently useful comments on archival practice and my own experience with SGML headers I found myself appointed to the Task Force and a member of group that will prepare a white paper on the interrelationship of various metadata standards.
The ALA Annual Conference was held in San Francisco
with CC:DA meetings on June 28
and 30. The opening meeting centered on three reports. Brian Schottlaender,
ALA representative to the Joint Steering Committee on the Anglo-American
Cataloguing Rules (JSC) lead the group through a discussion of and several
votes on rule changes to AACR2 that had been submitted to the JSC. These
consisted primarily of proposals that would incorporate into AACR2 certain
rules on serials cataloging that now only exist as Library of Congress
rule interpretations. David Epstein of ALA Press once again reported on
progress in the publication of an electronic version of AACR2. The hypertext
electronic edition should be available during calendar year 1998 using
Folio software. Kathy Gerhart, CC:DA's liason to MARBI reviewed current
activities of that committee. See the report of SAA's MARBI representatives
for a discussion of relevant issues.
Following the general committee session, the CC:DA Task Force on Metadata met to discuss how catalogers might influence or utilize current efforts to embed metadata within electronic documents. Committee member John Attig has created a very interesting web site around this issue with sample catalog entries that reflect Dublin Core and TEI header metadata standards at http://www.libraries.psu.edu/iasweb/personal/jca/dublin/index.htm.
The second committee session on June 30 featured a joint meeting with MARESI to discuss metadata issues, specifically those raised by ALCTS Metadata Task Force. The discussion was exploratory and interesting but inconclusive. Clearly, this is critical issue for all who are interesting in providing external access to their collections. Those who catalog archival and library collections are suddenly finding themselves and their descriptive practices functioning in a much larger, less structured, less experienced, and more open arena (the internet).
The meeting concluded with a report on the forthcoming lnternational Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR (also known as the AACR2000 Conference) to be held in Toronto October 23-25, 1997. Eight discussion papers have been commissioned that will form the basis of the discussion by an invited group of participants. They are available electronically at http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/jsc/index htm.
Michael Fox
August 22, 1997