Announcements and Reports

CC:DA Activities at ALA Annual Conference in Atlanta

CC:DA held two meetings during the ALA Annual Conference in Atlanta, GA. The agenda of the meetings is available.

The meeting included two special events related to the IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records:

• Barbara Tillett, of the Library of Congress, gave a presentation entitled “The FRBR Model.” She gave an introduction to the Functional Requirements model and described related activities in applying the model. The PowerPoint slideshow from her presentation is available; you may need to save the file and open it in PowerPoint.
• CC:DA and MARBI held a joint meeting to discuss the Functional Requirements model and its application. The session included remarks by Sally McCallum, of the Library of Congress, Glenn Patton, of OCLC, and Tom Delsey. A report of this meeting is given below.

Other CC:DA activities and actions included:

• Approved the minutes from the Midwinter meetings in New Orleans, and affirmed actions taken by electronic mail since Midwinter;
• Heard a report from the Library of Congress Representative, Barbara B. Tillett;
• Received an update from Don Chatham, Associate Executive Director of ALA Publishing Services, on plans for publication in August or September of the 2002 revision of AACR;
• Heard a report from the ALA Representative to the Joint Steering Committee, Matthew Beacom. Matthew reported on the May 2002 meeting of the JSC in New Haven, Conn.;
• Approved a recommendation to JSC for an optional rule to add names and dates of incumbency to headings for heads of government and of international organizations;
• Approved proposals from the Map and Geography Round Table on capitalization of the word Earth in AACR and on recording dimensions of cartographic materials; these proposals will be forwarded to the JSC for their consideration;
• Discussed, but did not approve, a proposal from the ALCTS Media Resources Committee on sources of information in Chapter 7
• Heard a report from the Task Force on an Appendix of Major and Minor Changes, and accepted their recommendation that they revise the appendix for publication as a separate document, provisionally titled Guidelines for When to Make a New Record;
• Received a report from the Task Force on Specific Characteristics of Electronic Resources on their continuing discussions on the rules for areas 3, 5 and 7 in Chapter 9;
• Heard a report from the Task Force on Consistency across Part I of AACR, and discussed a number of general issues relating to consistency in Part I;
• Heard reports on planning for a program for the 2003 Annual Conference in Toronto and a preconference for the 2004 Annual Conference in Orlando, both on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records;
• Approved revisions to “How to Submit A Rule Revision Proposal to CC:DA” and to the CC:DA Procedures;
• Received a report from the MARBI Representative, Mark Watson;
• Agreed to form a Task Force to review a document on the use of multiple ISBDs, which will be circulated by the ISBD Review Group later this year; and
• Acknowledged the contributions of two outgoing voting members, Brad Eden and Susan Hayes, and announced the appointment of two new voting members, Jay Weitz and Matthew Wise, and the re-appointment of Kristin Lindlan as chair for 2002/2003.

CC:DA and MARBI Hold Joint Meeting to Discuss FRBR and MARC 21

CC:DA and MARBI held a joint meeting during the ALA Annual Conference in Atlanta, GA. The topic of mutual interest was the IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records and MARC 21. This topic was triggered by the release earlier this year of a model (see below) prepared by Tom Delsey which compared the FRBR entities with the MARC 21 bibliographic and holdings formats and with AACR2, as well as proposing some extensions to the FRBR model. The joint meeting included remarks by Sally H. McCallum of the Network Development and MARC Standards Office at LC, by Glenn Patton of OCLC, and by Tom Delsey, and discussion by the committees and observers.

Background: The following are some background documents:

• Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
  [also avaiable in PDF format]
• Tom Delsey, “Functional Analysis of the MARC 21 Bibliographi and Holdings Formats”
• Network Development and MARC Standards Office, Library of Congress, “Displays for Multiple Versions from MARC 21 and FRBR”
• Knut Enga and Eeva Murtomaa, “Data mining MARC to find: FRBR?”

Summary of the Presentations:

• Sally H. McCallum, LC
• Glenn Patton, OCLC
• Tom Delsey

Discussion

MARBI Discussion Paper No. 2002-DP08: The MARBI agenda also included a relevant discussion paper on “Multiple Versions, FRBR, and MARC”. This paper reported work done by the Joint Steering Committee’s Format Variation Working Group, and alternative methods for supporting collocation of expressions within the MARC 21 formats.

Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR Meeting in New Haven, Connecticut

The Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR, chaired by Ann Huthwaite, held a meeting in New Haven, Conn., 13-15 May 2002. The entire meeting was held in executive session and dealt primarily with strategic planning issues for JSC and for AACR2. A report of the outcomes of this meeting is available on the JSC Web site.

New Task Forces Appointed

The CC:DA/MARBI Program Planning Task Force for Annual 2003 has been charged to plan a program on the role of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records for the 2003 Annual Conference in Toronto.

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.