The Bib Blog

As reported by George Praeger on the AALL TS-SIS discussion list:

Esteemed colleagues,
MARC 21 Update No. 10 (October 2009) has recently been integrated into the documentation for each of the Online Full and Concise formats that are maintained on the MARC website (www.loc.gov/marc/). Changes to the documentation resulted mainly from MARBI proposals that were approved at the ALA Midwinter and ALA Annual Meetings in 2009. These changes are indicated in red in the Online Full version of the formats.

Each format also has an appendix, “Format Changes for Update No. 10 (October 2009)” that lists all the fields with changes that are part of the update.

Some major changes to the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format are:
1. New fields 336 (Content Type), 337 (Media Type), and 338 (Carrier Type). These will replace the GMD used in field 245 if/when RDA is implemented.

2. New field 588 (Source of Description Note), which will replace the general 500 note for information such as Source of title, and Description based on notes.

3. Subfield $x (ISSN) in series statement in 490 has been made repeatable, so that ISSNs may be given for both main series and subseries in the same 490 field.

4. Field 787 has been renamed from “Other Relationship Entry” to “Nonspecific Relationship Entry.”

Some major changes to the Authority Format:
New fields: 046 (Special Coded Dates), 336 (Content Type), and a block of fields 370-377 for various new elements in authority records relating to Group 2 FRBR entities.

In the United States, the new fields in the MARC 21 Bibliographic & Authority Formats will usually not be used until the changes are implemented by OCLC, LC, and the PCC.

For more on any of these fields, refer to the MARC 21 formats, the relevant MARBI Discussion papers and Proposals, and/or my last MARBI report, available at: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/representatives/2009/marbi2009.htm

George

The International UDC Seminar 2009 entitled “Classification at a Crossroads – multiple directions to usability” took place last month in the Koninklijke Bibiotheek in the Hague. The presentation slides and most of the MP3 recordings of the presentations are now available.

Some selected highlights:

• Illuminating chaos: using classification to harness the Web / Dagobert Soergel, University of Maryland (USA)
• Concepts and terms in faceted classification / Vanda Broughton, University College London (UK)
• Open Web standards and classification: foundations for a hybrid approach / Dan Brickley, Vrije University Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
• Visual analysis of classification scheme / Veslava Osinska, Nicolaus Copernicus University (Poland)
• UDC and folksonomies / Alenka Šauperl, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia)

Looks like some very interesting activity.

Interesting news reported in Marshall Breeding’s Library Technology Guides:

Two Academic Libraries Announce SkyRiver Implementations

“Two well-established academic libraries, Michigan State University and California State University, Long Beach are the first libraries to publicly announce that they are fully operational using SkyRiver as their exclusive cataloging service. Both libraries are looking to SkyRiver to substantially reduce the costs associated with cataloging. Michigan State University is SkyRiver’s first ARL development partner.”

Interesting initiative providing a potential alternative to the ‘controversial’ RDA implementation.  James Weinheimer, Director of Library and Information Services at the American University of Rome, has proposed the development of the Cooperative Cataloging Rules which will essentially grow out of the Library of Congress Rules Interpretations (LCRI).  The questions raised in yesterdays official announcement are excellent and would have been a welcome way to start the development of RDA had that process been more inclusive from the start.

Weinheimer states that many libraries will not be in a position to implement RDA and hopes that this cooperative effort can lead to improved bibliographic control sans RDA.  A wiki has been set up with this request:

The “Cooperative Cataloging Rules” is now available at http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/. We want to announce its existence and to put out a general request for professional metadata creators to participate. The site has two primary purposes: 1) to offer a serious alternative to RDA and 2) to offer a place for sharing bibliographic concepts within the general metadata community.

The reasoning behind this initiative is certainly sound but the timing may not be that great. Definitely worth consideration though and there is a thread underway at the NGC4LIB discussion list that likely prove to be excellent reading. What’s happening with RDA anyway? Short of a call for implementation survey participants there has been little dsicussion or progress updates …

Just a quick note.  The presentations from the CLA pre-conference ‘From Rules to Entities : Cataloguing with RDA’ are available on the TSIG wiki.

Terry Reese, the developer of MarcEdit, gave a presentation and hosted a Q&A at the recent American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) conference in Washington, D.C.  It was great to hear him speak about his “magic wand for MARC records“.

One of the questions raised at the Q&A session dealt with moving data from one field and replacing it with another.  The example was moving the date from 260 subfield ‘c’ to 008/07-14.  Terry blogged about this and describes the procedure at Terry’s Worklog.

This “sadly not documented” feature should prove to be a very useful MarcEdit function.  Thanks Terry!

Cataloging Back to the Future: FRBR & RDA is a presentation given by Dr. Robert O. Ellett, who is a lecturer at the School of Library & Information Science, San Jose State University and a Catalog Librarian at the Joint Forces Staff College, Norfolk, VA. It was given at the American Library Association ALCTS Preconference held in Chicago, on Thursday, July 9th, 2009.

The other presentations focus on “practical information on the descriptive cataloging of digital media” which may also be of interest to some.

In addition to their group of pre-conference papers, the RDA Implementation Task Force delivered a second collection of presentations at the ALA conference that will be of interest to RDA enthusiasts.

Under the title “Look Before You Leap: Taking RDA for a Test Drive” the ALCTS Task Force hosted six presentations:

• Comparing RDA and AACR2 / Tom Delsey (RDA editor)
• Overview of RDA online and creating workflows / Nannette Naught (IMT, Inc.)
• RDA in LIS education / Christine Oliver (McGill University)
• MARC in RDA / Sally McCallum (Library of Congress)
• RDA in an ILS (in three parts: pt. 1; pt. 2; pt. 3) / John Espley (VTLS)
• Testing RDA / Barbara Bushman (National Library of Medicine)

This collection of presentations was delivered as part of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) RDA Implementation Task Force Pre-Conference at the American Association of Libraries (ALA) called “RDA, FRBR, and FRAD: Making the Connection.”

These are the presentations currently available:

• Group 1 Entities and Relationships / Barbara Tillet
• FRBR Quiz / Ana Lupe Cristan
• Group 2 Entities and Relationships / Robert Maxwell
• FRAD Attributes and Relationships / Glenn Patton
• FRBR and FRAD as Implemented in RDA / Tom Delsey

A great way to venture below the surface of RDA and get a better understanding of what an entity/relationship model is all about and have a closer look at the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD).

There are a couple of other presentations that have yet to be posted and will likely be made available soon at the ALA presentations wiki.

The Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA has issued a document outlining the changes made to AACR2 as a result the RDA development process.

“This document lists changes made to AACR2 instructions during the development of RDA as noted at JSC meetings and in JSC correspondence.

This document does not cover RDA elements for which there is no equivalent in AACR2 (e.g., Production statement; Uniform Resource Locator), or AACR2 instructions that have been generalized in RDA to cover a wider range of resources.

The instruction numbering used corresponds to 5JSC/RDA/Full draft (November 2008). Where instructions differ from what is in the draft, a note such as “(Note: Instructions changed at March 2009 meeting)” has been provided.“