Announcements and Reports

CC:DA Activities at ALA Midwinter Meeting in New Orleans

CC:DA held two meetings in New Orleans. The Saturday afternoon meeting featured reports from the Library of Congress Representative, from the IFLA Committee on Cataloguing, and from the ALA Representative to the Joint Steering Committee, Matthew Beacom, who reported on the October 2001 meeting of JSC in Ottawa, Canada.

The Monday morning CC:DA meeting included reports from the following Task Forces:

• Task Force on ONIX International: This Task Force was charged to review the emerging ONIX International metadata standard. They presented their final report to CC:DA at this meeting.
• ISO Harmonization: This Task Force has been charged to examine the conformity of AACR2 to various ISO standards, including the use of ISO symbols for metric units and the presentation of dates. The Task Force gave its final report at this meeting.
• Uniform Resource Identifiers and AACR2: This Task Force was formed after discussion at Midwinter and charged to examine the role of resource identifiers and how AACR2 might include provision for them in the rules for bibliographic description. The Task Force presented an interim report.

In addition, two Task Forces — on an Appendix of Major and Minor Changes and on Specific Characteristics of Electronic Resources — reviewed the status of their ongoing work.

The Monday meeting also included:

• an update on publication plans for AACR2 from Don Chatham of ALA Editions
• a rule revision proposal from the ALCTS Media Resources Committee concerning rule 7.0B, Sources of information for motion pictures and videorecordings
• a rule revision proposal from the Program for Cooperative Cataloging concerning rule 26.3A6, Abbreviations in headings and references
• proposed revisions to the document “How to Submit a Rule Change Proposal to CC:DA” and to the CC:DA Procedures
• reports from the MARBI Representative, Mark Watson, and from the CC:DA Webmaster, John Attig.

Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR Meeting in Ottawa, Canada

The Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR, chaired by Ann Huthwaite, held a meeting in Ottawa, Canada, 15-17 October 2001. Major agenda items included revisions to Chapters 3 (cartographic materials) and 12 (serials and integrating resources) of AACR. A report of the outcomes of this meeting is available on the JSC Web site.

New Task Force Appointed

The Task Force on Consistency Across Part I of AACR2 has been charged to compare rules across the chapters of Part I of AACR2 and identify discrepancies and inconsistencies. The Task Force is to evaluate these differences and recommend rule revisions when warranted. The Task Force is also to identify rules that are generally applicable which could be moved to Chapter 1. The Task Force will present its recommendations for parts of the rules as they are ready, beginning at the 2002 Annual Conference.

Functional Analysis of the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Holdings Formats Posted

In 2001, the Network Development and MARC standards Office at the Library of Congress commissioned a study to examine MARC 21 from several perspectives:

• the FRBR model,
• the AACR cataloging code model
• a set of user tasks that the format might logically support.

The study used the models from the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the related The Logical Structure of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules for the work which was carried out by the consultant who was largely responsible for the those studies, Tom Delsey, of Thomas J. Delsey consultancy. By sponsoring this analysis and making it available, the MARC Office and others can use the information when analyzing or making decisions related to format maintenance, system implementation, and data sharing. The study will be an important tool for continuing development of MARC 21.

The Network Development and MARC Standards Office would like to learn about research or experimentation that users undertake using information from this document. Over time either a list of projects and/or a bibliography of studies will be compiled.

[from the MARC Standards Web site]

The study is available as a series of Adobe Acrobat .PDF files. The URL for the introductory page is http://www.loc.gov/marc/marc-functional-analysis/functional-analysis.html.