LC Cataloging Newsline v8n12 (December 2000)
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/lccn/lccn-v8n12.txt

                      LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE
         Online Newsletter of the Cataloging Directorate
                       Library of Congress
Volume 8, no. 12          ISSN 1066-8829            December 2000
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                             CONTENTS

     Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the
                          New Millennium
                  The Library Catalog and the Web
      Assessing Current Library Standards for Bibliographic
                      Control and Web Access
                African American Subject Headings
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   BICENTENNIAL CONFERENCE ON BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL FOR THE NEW
                            MILLENNIUM

     The Library of Congress Bicentennial Conference on
Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium attracted one hundred
thirty-six leaders in cataloging and library systems to the Library
Nov. 15-17, 2000.  This invitation-only conference had two goals:
to develop an overall strategy to address the challenges of
improved access to Web resources through library catalogs and
applications of metadata and to identify attainable actions for
achieving the objectives of the overall strategy.  The conference
featured nearly thirty papers, including a keynote address, an
after-dinner speech, four discussion papers that were posted on the
conference Web site to give all participants a shared background,
sixteen papers delivered by speakers at the conference plenary
sessions, and prepared remarks by seven panelists reacting to the
presentations.  The plenary sessions were organized under five
major topics: The Library Catalog and the Web; Assessing Current
Library Standards for Bibliographic Control and Web Access; Future
Directions; Experimentation; and Exploring Partnerships.  (See
summaries of the plenary sessions in separate articles in this and
later issues of LCCN.)  After hearing the papers and panelists'
reactions on these topics, the conference participants divided into
eleven breakout sessions, or Topical Discussion Groups, to draw up
recommendations for addressing eleven major challenges for
bibliographic control in the digital age.

     The Cataloging Directorate planned the conference to honor the
Library during its bicentennial year.  Both the program and the
participant list testified to cataloging's past achievements, as a
number of former Library of Congress employees attended,  including
former associate librarian Henriette Avram; former directors for
cataloging Lucia J. Rather and Sarah E.  Thomas; and William
Gosling, William Moen, Arlene Taylor, and Sherry Kelley.  At the
same time, the conference was intended to help the Library of
Congress and the entire bibliographic control community prepare for
the future, and in his opening remarks on Wednesday morning, Nov.
15, director for cataloging Beacher Wiggins noted that in many
respects, the conference planners had anticipated the
recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences report LC21: A
Digital Strategy for the Library of Congress.

     The conference received major financial support from
netLibrary, EBSCO Information Services, and the Gale Group, with
additional support from other library vendors and publishers: 3M
Library Systems, Blackwell's, Blue Angel Technologies, Bowker,
Brodart, Epixtech, Ex Libris, H.W. Wilson, Ingram Library Services,
MARCIVE, OCLC, Inc., VTLS Inc., Wiley, The Library Corporation, and
the Library of Congress Cataloging Distribution Service.  The
Conference Organizing Team (COT) was chaired by  Regional and
Cooperative Cataloging Division (RCCD) chief John Byrum.  Other COT
members were Cornelia Owens Goode, cooperative cataloging program
specialist on the Cooperative Cataloging Team, RCCD; Bruce Johnson,
senior library information systems specialist and leader of the
Cataloger's Desktop/Classification Plus Development Team in the
Cataloging Distribution Service; Judy Mansfield, chief of the Arts
and Sciences Cataloging Division; David Williamson, cataloging
automation specialist for the Cataloging Directorate, and former LC
cataloger Ann Sandberg-Fox, now an independent library consultant
and trainer, under a contract with the Library.

Keynote Address

     Michael Gorman, dean of library services at California State
University, Fresno, gave the keynote address, "From Card Catalogues
to WebPACS: Celebrating Cataloging in the 20th Century," an
overview of the development of library catalogs in the 20th century
from his perspective as one of the editors of AACR2, the Anglo-
American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition, which LC applies in
accordance with an international agreement that includes the
national libraries of Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Gorman said that in this "century of erratic progress in
cataloguing," the story of cataloging is the story of standards and
of the means by which catalog records are communicated.  In a
resounding endorsement of cataloging standards, he reminded all
participants that "effective cataloguing involves controlled
vocabularies and adherence to the standards that have evolved in
the past 100 years."

Video and Gala
     Conference participants enjoyed the world premiere of the
video "How the Web Was Won," produced by Joan Biella and
videographed by Henry Lefkowitz, both senior catalogers on the
Hebraica Team, RCCD.  The heroine "The Website" was played by
cataloger Robin Dougherty of RCCD's Middle East and North Africa
Team.  Other stars included senior cataloging policy specialists
Lynn El-Hoshy and Kay Guiles of the Cataloging Policy and Support
Office, with their acting division chief Tom Yee; Coop Team members
Sami Kotb and John Mitchell; and many members of the Special
Materials Cataloging Division.  Much of the music consisted of
lyrics by Hebraica Team cataloger Peter Kearney, set to melodies
from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore.

      The conference gala dinner in the Great Hall of the Thomas
Jefferson Building on Thursday evening, Nov. 16, featured Clifford
Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked
Information, as the after-dinner speaker.  Lynch defined
bibliographic control as support for "finding things" and suggested
that the public was willing to underwrite libraries and related
services because they want to "find things."  He saw the
application of the human mind to organize and describe material as
a well-established and honorable tradition.  Looking to the new
millennium, he said, there is no doubt that the vast majority of
works to be created will exist in digital form, and we will need to
be able to apply new tool kits to these works.  Lynch concluded
that the context of bibliographic description is different now, and
we ignore the context at our peril.

Calls for Action

     Each conference participant chose a topical discussion group
(TDG) that met in breakout sessions to address a major challenge
facing catalogers and their allies in the vendor and publisher
communities.  On Friday, all the participants reconvened in a final
plenary session to hear all the discussion groups' recommendations.
Highlights of  the recommendations included:
Create a national/international database of standard records for
Web resources; define core competencies for catalogers in the
digital age; involve the library community in the development of
the publisher metadata scheme ONIX to ensure that it meets the
needs of both communities; create a long-term research and
development program, including partnerships with publishers and
registration (standard numbering, etc.) agencies; develop a
strategic plan for the continuing development of AACR; promote
semantic and systems interoperability; develop a metadata creation
tool that authors can use to help with bibliographic control of
their works; create a definable access framework for integration of
traditional catalogs, abstracting and indexing services, and other
databases; improve and promote standard metadata schemes; and hold
open and ongoing meetings at American Library Association
conferences with catalogers, reference librarians, vendors, systems
people, publishers, and administrators to ensure that reference
librarians' needs for resource description are heard.  One TDG
presented a general approach to solving that thorny, enduring
problem, "multiple versions."  The recommendations have been edited
and circulated for comment from all conference participants via
email.

     The conference Web site at URL
<http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/> contains the conference
program, background discussion papers, conference presentation
papers, and biographies of the speakers. In early January the
Topical Discussion Groups' recommendations will be mounted on the
site.  The Web site also includes access to a Webcast of the actual
conference.  The full conference proceedings will be edited for
publication in late spring 2001.  Meanwhile, Library staff will
prioritize the dozens of TDG recommendations in order to develop a
plan of attack for implementing them.
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                 THE LIBRARY CATALOG AND THE WEB:
 TOPIC 1 OF THE BICENTENNIAL CONFERENCE ON BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL
                      FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

     This session was grounded in the discussion paper "Metadata
for Web Resources: How Metadata Works on the Web," (URL:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/dillon.html) by Martin
Dillon, former executive director of the OCLC Institute.

     Sarah E. Thomas, University Librarian, Cornell University,
spoke on "The Catalog as Portal to the Internet" (URL
<http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/thomas.html>.   She
contrasted the traditional library catalog, with its strengths of
reliability, consistency, authoritativeness, and assurance of ready
and ongoing availability of the materials represented in it, and
Web portals such as Yahoo! which have the strengths of currency,
scope, customizability, relevance ranking, and hotlinks to the
actual resources.  She proposed that the library catalog be adapted
to serve as a scholarly and authoritative portal to research-
quality Internet resources.   She said that in order to gain
resources for controlling content on the Internet, libraries ought
to reduce the amount of time spent in cataloging books, and she
challenged libraries to begin by redirecting ten percent of their
cataloging resources to the control of digital content.  Finally,
she called for cataloging agencies to collaborate more and to
become assertive advocates, through advertising and published
research, of the value added by the catalog.

     Tom Delsey, director general, Corporate Policy and
Communications, National Library of Canada, discussed "The Library
Catalogue in a Networked Environment" (URL
<http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/delsey.html>)  an overview
of how technology has changed the relationships between the library
catalog, the catalog user, alternative  sources of bibliographic
data, and the resources described in the catalog.   Delsey said
that changes in approach will be needed in order to maintain and
enhance the effectiveness of those interfaces in an evolving
networked environment.

     Priscilla Caplan, assistant director for digital library
services, Florida Center for Library Automation, spoke next on
"International Metadata Initiatives: Lessons in Bibliographic
Control" (URL
<http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/caplan.html>).  She
described the Text Encoding Initiative Header, Encoded Archival
Description, Dublin Core, and VRA (Visual Resources Association)
Core, all specialized metadata schemes, but predicted that the
INDECS (Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce Systems) project and
other "schemes coming out of the publishing community ... may
ultimately have the greatest impact on traditional bibliographic
description ... The INDECS model is essentially a semantic model
for describing intellectual property, the parties that create and
trade it, and the agreements that they make about it."  Caplan's
Three Laws of Metadata are: metadata schemes differ because needs
for description differ; metadata has a life of its own; and
metadata schemes without content rules are not very useful.  She
urged the library community to work with publishers to develop
shared standards for metadata and warned that libraries have to
"bend so we don't break!"  She stressed that the key issue is
control of all resources, analog and digital, in a Web-aware
environment.

     Brian Schottlaender, University Librarian, University of
California, San Diego, was the panel reactor for  Thomas's paper.
He analyzed her paper as a set of eight yes-or-no propositions. He
agreed with her that libraries should create and manage a mechanism
to support access to Internet resources, but did not agree that the
catalog should serve as a portal to the Web or that libraries
should reduce the amount of time they devote to cataloging books in
order to free up time to control Web resources.   He also perceived
the question "Are cataloging tools appropriate for description of
Web resources?" and gave a nuanced yes-and-no answer.  He agreed
with  Thomas's calls for increased collaboration by libraries, use
of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging core standard, Dublin
Core Metadata Element Set, and greater use of cataloging copy
without modification.

     The panel reactor for Tom Delsey's paper was Jennifer Trant,
executive director, Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO).  She said
that many museums are facing challenges similar to those of
libraries, as the museums try to transform collection management
systems into information retrieval systems.  Noting that on the
Web, the boundary between a resource and its description is
blurred, she pointed out that the Web also enables digital objects
to be presented in a context that creates meaning.  She found it
frustrating that so much discussion of research use of the Web
focuses only on discovery, when discovery of a resource is only the
beginning of its use.   She suggested there would be value in
coordinating the catalog with the five phases of the user's
research process, discovery, retrieval, document analysis,
collation, and re-presentation.

     Robin Wendler, a metadata analyst in the Office for
Information Systems, Harvard University Library, commented on
Caplan's paper.  She noted that libraries use metadata formulated
according to rules for content, e.g., MARC-structured records with
content that adheres to AACR2, to support high-volume interchanges,
automate catalog maintenance, facilitate retrieval, and allow
creation of well-ordered result lists.  Other metadata systems that
are not tied clearly to content rules do not support these
functions on the scale to which libraries are accustomed.  She
predicted that libraries'  relationships with publishers will
become more important and this will result in a need to "re-
purpose" publishers' metadata.
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      ASSESSING CURRENT LIBRARY STANDARDS FOR BIBLIOGRAPHIC
                     CONTROL AND WEB ACCESS:
 TOPIC 2 OF THE BICENTENNIAL CONFERENCE ON BIBLIOGRAPHIC CONTROL
                      FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

      Bruce C. Johnson, Cataloging Distribution Service, Library of
Congress, introduced  Topic 2 by challenging participants to
consider the important relationship between bibliographic control
standards and access to information on the Web.  The stage was set
as  IFLA's Working Group on Functional Requirements for
Bibliographic Records defined four user needs: "to find," " to
identify," "to select," and "to obtain," augmented with a fifth
need for networked resources: "to use."  The discussion paper "Is
Precoordination Unnecessary in LCSH? Are Web Sites More Important
to Catalog than Books? : A Reference Librarian's Thoughts on the
Future of Bibliographic Control" by Thomas Mann, reference
librarian, LC,  reminded all of the importance of access and
traditional tools which serve to locate from books to Web sites.

     Matthew Beacom, catalog librarian for network information
resources, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, presented
"Crossing a Digital Divide: AACR2 and Unaddressed Problems of
Networked Resources."  Beacom characterized the current situation
as "crossing the digital divide," whereby we will either move into
a promised land or a wasteland.  The library community must respond
to four significant changes: in physical forms, from tangible to
intangible; in publication and distribution, from books and
journals to services and databases; in control of use, from buying
to leasing; and in the role of the catalog, from ascertaining to
using.  Beacom called for adding a fifth user need, "using," and
recommended twelve specific changes to AACR2 to adapt it to a
digital networked communications environment.

     Lois Mai Chan, professor in the School of Library and
Information Science, University of Kentucky, spoke about
"Exploiting LCSH, LCC, and DDC to Retrieve Networked Resources."
Chan pointed out the challenge of attaining quality and consistency
in indexing and retrieval tools while confronting the reality of
the ever-expanding Web.  She outlined tasks to meet the challenge
of expanding roles of controlled vocabulary and classification to
enhance searches, and enumerated five areas of enhancements to
these traditional tools for the networked environment.

     William Moen, assistant professor in the School of Library and
Information Sciences,  University of North Texas, spoke about
"Resource Discovery Using Z39.50: Promise and Reality."  He
acknowledged that the traditional library catalog is one among many
repositories of metadata today from which Web users seek
information and direct access.  Although Z39.50 may be currently
underutilized, both research and retrieval enhancements will
strategically elevate its usefulness in the Web searching toolkit.

     Barbara Tillett, director, Integrated Library System Program
Office, and interim director for electronic resources, Library of
Congress, addressed the participants about "Authority Control on
the Web."  Tillett stated that authority control can calm the chaos
of data on the Web by enabling "precision and recall," which are
lacking from today's Web searches.  Broader authority control
objectives are: to facilitate data sharing and to reduce cataloging
costs; to simplify authority record creation and maintenance; and,
to enable users to access information in the language, script, and
form that they prefer.  Tillett presented a model for linking
existing authority files from major national bibliographic
agencies, using the existing authority record control numbers,  to
switch the form of headings in shared bibliographic records to the
language or form preferred, either when cataloging or when
displaying the records to users.

     Glenn Patton, manager of the Cataloging Products Department in
the Product Management and Implementation Division,  OCLC, and
Diane Vizine-Goetz, Office of Research, OCLC, served as
commentators for the Beacom and Chan papers respectively.  Patton
noted that three words stood out in Beacom's paper: publication,
hierarchy, and granularity, which demand reconsideration of meaning
and application in the Web environment.  Vizine-Goetz recognized
the significant role played by the authorized subject schemes for
resource description and discovery while emphasizing the continuing
research needed to move these schemes beyond the library catalog
and into the realm of the Web.
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                AFRICAN AMERICAN SUBJECT HEADINGS

     On Subject Heading Weekly List 00-47 for November 29, 2000,
the subject heading Afro-Americans and subject headings that
included the adjectival qualifier Afro-American... were changed to
African Americans and African American....  Subject authority
records in the LCSH Master Database and the LC Database have now
been updated to the revised forms.

     Effective Dec 1, 2000, LC catalogers began assigning only the
new forms African Americans and African American... as subject
headings in current bibliographic records.

     Projects will be undertaken to update bibliographic records
with the old forms of headings during 2001.  Subject headings in
individual bibliographic records may be changed on a case-by-case
basis as the records are updated for other reasons.

Questions or concerns may be directed to

     Tom Yee
     Acting Chief
     Cataloging Policy and Support Office
     Library of Congress
     Washington, D.C. 20540-4305
     email: tyee@loc.gov
     Voice: (202) 707-4377
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the Cataloging Directorate, Library Services, Library of Congress,
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