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The Library of Congress > Cataloging, Acquisitions > PCC > SACO > PCC FY07 Annual Report

PCC Highlights

Under PCC chair Mechael Charbonneau (Indiana University) and chair elect Rebecca Mugridge (Pennsylvania State University) the PCC completed work on tactical objectives and action items deriving from the visioning exercise PCC2010. This work also produced a complete revision of the PCC Governance document.

The PCC's direct involvement in bibliographic standards, both formulating and implementing, has led to official representation on the ALA committee concerned with descriptive access. In addition, members of the PCC sit as personal members on this committee as well as those dedicated to subject access. Related activities, such as documentation and training, have given the PCC sufficient visibility that chair Charbonneau made a solicited presentation to the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control.

Three individuals completed their terms on the Policy Committee: CONSER Representative and past PCC chair Mark Watson (University of Oregon); BIBCO representative Joan Swanekamp (Yale University); and NACO representative Deborah Kempe (Frick Art Reference Library)

To succeed them, PCC members elected as a BIBCO representative Robert O. Ellett, Jr., (Joint Forces Staff College); for CONSER David Banush (Cornell University); NACO representative James Mouw (University of Chicago); and, as the first SACO representative, David Miller (Curry College)

At the end of the fiscal year, chair elect Rebecca Mugridge assumed direction of the PCC as Mechael Charbonneau took up emeritus status. She continues, however, to play an active role in bibliographic cooperation as the chair of "Big Heads" in ALA.

The PCC continued its program of guest speakers on topics of interest at its ALA participants' meetings. At ALA Annual in June of 2007, Jay Girotto, Microsoft vice president and a member of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. Mr. Girotto spoke on searching and the value that authority work brings to it. The PCC Participants' Meeting Summary provides a narrative of the meeting and the highlights of the presentation.

The guest speaker for ALA Midwinter in January of 2007, was Lorcan Dempsey, Vice President and Chief Strategist, OCLC. His remarks centered on Discovery, Disclosure, and Inventory Management. The PCC Participants' Meeting Summary, provides a fuller description of the meeting as well as access to the slides which accompanied Mr. Dempsey's presentation.

As a dynamic organization, the PCC membership develops initiatives to resolve new challenges to information access. This can result in controversies. The late Library of Congress decision to cease most series authority control in its cataloging operations generated a considerable reaction from the library community at large. While endorsing the continuation of optional series authority control by PCC members, both libraries and vendors, the Policy Committee appointed a Task Group to consider long-term benefits, costs, and simplifications of series authority control. A CONSER task group proposed a CONSER Standard Record. After considerable discussion in several fora, members implemented the new standard record in a carefully monitored process.

Over the past few years, the PCC has discussed "personal membership" in its programs, in order to retain the contributions of trained catalogers who move to a non-member institution. At this time, the CONSER Coordinator is overseeing a pilot project in which a CONSER-trained cataloger is continuing to work in CONSER although not at a CONSER member institution.

Statistics this year reached a milestone. The LC/NACO Authority File now contains seven million records. NACO members have contributed 39% of that total. LCSH, the largest subject authority file in the world, now has 308,000 subject authority records, of which 14% are from PCC members.

In the fiscal year 2007, PCC membership reached 624. PCC institutions increased NACO production to 188,183 new name authority records and to 10,464 new series authority records. SACO-participant institutions contributed 3,047 new subject headings to LCSH as well as 2,214 new class numbers. CONSER-member institutions contributed 22,317 new records, while BIBCO members contributed 65,939 new bibliographic records.

CONSER

In 2007, CONSER gained two new associate level members, the University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania State University.

CONSER operations representatives agreed to implement the CONSER Standard Record (CSR) on June 1, 2007 with the understanding that member institutions will probably need to consult with staff before setting an implementation date locally. Representatives agreed to monitor the implementation of the standard throughout the year and make changes or adjustments as needed. Many of the comments that CONSER representatives offered on the CSR included suggestions for improvements in MARC21. A CONSER group has been established to draft CONSER standard related MARBI proposals.

In June of 2007, CONSER and BIBCO members began to authenticate records for integrating resources on OCLC. These records will be distributed in a single "continuing resources" file to CDS MARC Distribution Service (MDS) subscribers.

CONSER representatives have been discussing potential contribution of CONSER serial records to the Registry of Digital Masters (RDM) for the past two years. Concerns over the single record approach used in the RDM have kept CONSER member contributions to the RDM relatively low. CONSER members agreed at its operations meeting in May not to contribute single record approach records to the RDM for a year. CONSER will monitor developments in how holdings records might be used in the RDM and how institutional needs for contributing to the RDM evolve over the coming year.

BIBCO and NACO

Of particular note this year is the completion of a range of training workshops developed by the Program for Cooperative Cataloging, ALA-ALCTS, and the Library of Congress. These courses are available through the Cataloger's Learning Workshop Website:

  • Basic Creation of Name and Title Authorities
  • Basic Subject Cataloging Using LCSH
  • Fundamentals of Series Authorities
  • Fundamentals of Library of Congress Classification

This Website contains courses developed by CONSER for the Serials Cataloging Cooperative Training Program and courses in the Cataloging in the 21st Century program developed by LC in conjunction with ALCTS pursuant to the Library of Congress Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control for the New Millennium.

Several existing courses were updated: Basic Subject Cataloging Using LCSH; NACO Training for OCLC Libraries; and SACO Training for PCC Libraries.

Each new or revised course required preparation of its own training the trainer documentation and workshop.

As a proof of concept to test ideas for converting current PCC training into online courses, an older workshop on Basic SACO was redesigned as an online course. A non-LC cataloger successfully completed the online version. Unfortunately, the software used was purchased and retired by a rival company. Difficulties over a permanent server to house such courses compounded the practical difficulties.

The focus of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) Outreach continued to be training, recruitment of HBCU libraries, and funding issues. Beginning in FY07 the recruitment of HBCUs extended to include other minority institutions such as American Indian and Hispanic institutions. As a result of HBCU Outreach, one new NACO funnel project formed in Texas. The NACO Canada Funnel and the Tennessee NACO Funnel expanded membership.

The recently formed CJK NACO Funnel has also seen growth. Membership now stands at 26 institutions. Training sessions at the University of California-Berkeley and at the Library of Congress included 30 catalogers. A special team of eight NACO reviewers oversees their initial contributions.

SACO

The SACO program expanded both membership (eight new SACO-only participants and one new funnel) as well as services to members.

The SACO Participants' Manual, 2nd edition, is now available through the PCC Website in .pdf format.

Workflow for proposals to Library of Congress classification was considerably automated. Members now contribute new LC Classification proposals directly into the classification proposal database using Class Web. The Weekly Tentative Classification Lists are now posted on the PCC Website.

International Participation

Membership and active participation in PCC programs remained steady through the year. These institutions, on all continents and working in a variety of languages, bring to the PCC and to the authority files a highly valued expansion of coverage. A new task group is forming at the direction of the PCC Policy Committee to study furthering international participation and delivery of training.

Members outside the United States contributed 28% of all new name authority records; 11% of all new series authority records; 18% of all new subject headings; and 12% of new CONSER records.

PCC Standing Committees

Standing Committee on Automation

The work of this committee was, for the most part, performed through two task groups.

Task Group on Normalization: The task group's report, Authority File Comparison Rules, was submitted and posted on the PCC web site. A great deal of the work that this topic requires was folded into Unicode implementation and is ongoing.

Task Group on Monographic Aggregators: A number of steps were taken to publicize this task group's MARC Record Guide for Monograph Aggregator Vendors:

  • A notice about the availability of the guide appeared in the Apr. 2007 issue of ALCTS Newsletter Online. The notice included a link to the guide on the PCC Website.
  • A message announcing the guide was sent out to the NISO AVIAC (Automation Vendor Information Advisory Committee) list.
  • A message announcing the availability of the guide on the PCC web site was sent to the ALCTS Publisher-Vendor-Library Relations list.

Committee membership: The terms of committee members Gary Charbonneau (chair) and Liz Brown expired at the end of September. Adolfo Tarango (University of California, San Diego) was appointed chair for 2007-2010. The Steering Committee requested that the committee add two new members in each of the years 2007/08 and 2008/09 to bring its size up to the level of the other standing committees. Gary Charbonneau agreed to serve as a regular member for the single year 2007/08 and to represent the committee at the November 2007 PCC Policy Committee meeting.

Standing Committee on Standards

The situation of the Standing Committee on Standards at the end of the last year gave the PCC the opportunity to discuss thoroughly its role within the PCC as the committee was rebuilt.

Joan Schuitema is the new chair. Members include Peter Fletcher (University of California at Los Angeles) who is also the PCC representative on CC:DA; Diane Boehr (National Library of Medicine); Joseph Kiegel (University of Washington); and Ann Sitkin (Harvard Law School). Jay Weitz and David Reser serve as the OCLC and LC representatives respectively.

Standing Committee on Training

During the past year, several task groups worked under the Standing Committee on Training.

With the Standing Committee on Standards, the committee formed a joint task group on online training. This was in response to a call in the report of the Joint SCT/SCS Task Group on International Participation in the PCC for the PCC to initiate a full review of the delivery of training to international members that would explore the possibility of delivering training using a variety of online resources as training tools.

As a result of a PCC/LC/ALCTS agreement to develop cataloger training, a joint task force on Library of Congress Classification Training produced a workshop previewed at ALA in June 2007. A second joint task force produced a workshop on series authorities, also previewed at ALA in June 2007.

The committee also formed two task groups on medical cataloging and on map cataloging.

The membership and chair of this committee remain stable through 2008.
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