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SCATNews
Newsletter of the Standing Committee of the IFLA Cataloguing Section
Number 23 ISSN 1022-9841 June 2005
Gunilla JonssonLetter from the Chair
Dear colleagues,
It’s soon time for a new IFLA conference. All theofficers of the Division of Bibliographic Control andof the different sections are busy preparing agendasand papers, finalising the arrangement of pro-grammes and presentations. You will find the dif-ferent meetings and programmes of the CataloguingSection in this issue of SCATNews. The programmeformat of IFLA has changed, instead of open ses-sions and workshops we now just have an openprogramme, and we are free to design it as we findbest. This year the Cataloguing Section and theClassification & Indexing Sections will have a com-bined programme. We will discuss authority workfrom different aspects, principles as well as prac-tices, and cover subject indexing, personal namesand geographical names. Several of the presenta-tions have a multilingual angle. Our committeemember Natalia Kulygina will speak about Russianname authorities. The programme will end with apanel discussion between Marcia Zeng, Mirna Wil-ler and a colleague from the archivist world, Per-Gunnar Ottosson. Per-Gunnar Ottosson is an ex-pert on authority principles and authority workwithin the archival sector, and he is also active inthe international archival association ICA. Hope-fully, even the audience will take part in the dis-cussion.
We are very happy that this co-operation withanother section has been possible, and we hopethat it will form the start of an extended co-operation within the division. It is no coincidencethat this closer collaboration springs from the
common concern with authority work and authorityprinciples. The digital environment makes it possibleto search on virtually anything that is contained in arecord, but the preparations for systematic searcheshave not yet matched this wide range of searchterms. The FRBR model has clarified these circum-stances and translated Cutter’s requirements for acatalogue to the current environment. As you know,this modelling work has been extended to nameauthorities of different kinds in the FRANAR workinggroup, and it is just about to continue into the realmof subject indexing and classification. Just beforeIFLA, our Finnish colleagues are organising a twodays satellite meeting on FRBR, Bibliotheca Univer-salis – how to organise chaos? That meeting will dealin depth with these issues.
At a general level, the statements of principleselaborated by the Frankfurt meeting of cataloguingexperts in 2003 and slightly amended by the BuenosAires IME ICC serves as a guideline to which system-atically accessible information an online catalogueshould provide. This extended authority work musteventually also have consequences for the descriptiveinformation in our records, and we will begin thatdiscussion during our meetings this year.
As usual, we will report on all the work that hasgone on in different working groups and reviewgroups during the last year. Important developmentshave taken place within the FRBR review group, andseveral ISBD groups have been very active, most im-portantly the study group on a consolidated ISBD.
Finally, I hope that you all will come to the Divi-sion’s social hour on Monday, August 15, between16:00-17:00. Our liaison person in Oslo, Unni Knut-sen, will lead us to some nice place where we pay ourown way for a little bit of something and meet underrelaxed circumstances. I have come to appreciatethese informal meetings with colleagues very much,and urge you all to take part, if you can. The locationwill be announced at the Standing Committee meet-ing on August 13. As you have been informed bymail, I will leave the standing committee after thisIFLA, but there is still a great deal for me to accom-plish before leaving over to someone else. It has beenvery interesting and rewarding to work with you all,and I don’t bid you farewell just yet. See you in Oslo!
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Dorothy McGarry is awarded the MargaretMann Citation
Our colleague Dorothy McGarry, retired Headof the Cataloging Division of the UCLA PhysicalSciences and Technology Libraries, is the recipientof the 2005 Margaret Mann Citation presented bythe Association for Library Collections & TechnicalServices (ALCTS), Cataloging and ClassificationSection (CCS) of the American Library Association(ALA).
The award “recognizes outstanding professionalachievement in cataloging or classification eitherthrough publication of significant professionalliterature, participation in professional catalogingassociations, demonstrated excellence in teachingcataloging, or valuable contributions to the tech-nical improvement of cataloging and classificationand/or the introduction of a new technique ofrecognized importance.”
Dorothy’s intense involvement at the interna-tional level over the past fifteen years has includedchairing the IFLA Section on Classification & In-dexing. Her contributions to the technical im-provement of cataloging include participation inthe development and ongoing revision of several ofthe International Standard Bibliographic Descrip-tions (ISBDs) and the promotion of these stan-dards to the international cataloging community.She has participated in IFLA working groups on“Guidelines for Subject Authority Files,” and“Principles Underlying Subject Heading Lan-guages.” She has sought to enable an under-standing of these and other IFLA efforts throughpresentations at international meetings and pub-lication of articles in international publications.
Recently, she co-edited Seymour Lubetzky:Writings on the Classical Art of Cataloging. In herrole as a consultant, Dorothy has assisted librari-ans from many different countries in implement-ing internationally recognized cataloging stan-dards and practices. She has helped both individ-ual librarians and the profession as a whole byrecruiting and encouraging librarians to serve oncommittees, task forces, and working groups ofmany professional organizations.
The Margaret Mann Citation was presented onJune 26, 2005, at the ALCTS Awards Ceremonyduring the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.
Report on the meeting of the Study Groupon Future Directions of the ISBDs, 28-30April, 2005, at Die Deutsche Bibliothek inFrankfurt by Dorothy McGarry
The members of the Study Group (FrançoiseBourdon, Elena Escolano Rodríguez, Renate Göm-pel, Lynne Howarth, Dorothy McGarry (Chair),Eeva Murtomaa, and Mirna Willer), and John By-rum, Chair of the ISBD Review Group, discussedconsolidation of the specialized ISBDs into a sin-gle ISBD.
The group agreed to a set of main principles, aswell as to a tentative approach. The recommenda-tions must be approved by the ISBD ReviewGroup before the SG can proceed.
A revised structure was discussed and agreedto. There will be a statement of the purpose, defi-nitions, and general rules followed by exceptionsfor particular types of resources. Sources of in-formation for the various resources for variousareas will be revised. Existing definitions will bereviewed for need and for wording of the remain-ing and additional terms, and some re-wording ofstipulations will be made. A set of examples of fullrecords will be prepared as a supplementary pub-lication, rather than as an appendix.
Discussions were held on a possible relocationof the GMD. Further work on this is being done bythe Study Group on Material Designations.
Area 3 might be renamed to account for thespecific information to be included in that area,and area 8 to include standard identifiers that arenot numbers per se. Discussion of a number ofother topics will also be report on to the ISBD RG.
Assignments were made by the SG for mem-bers to work on specific areas, to prepare the re-structuring, rearrangement of stipulations, andother potential changes.
Concerns related to area 5, the Physical De-scription Area, will be presented for discussion bythe Review Group in Oslo. Discussion of area 5seemed more appropriate to the revision of theISBD(ER) that is being finalized than to the con-solidated ISBD.
A report will be sent to the Review Group inmid-July to alert it to proposed changes, with dis-cussion at the RG meeting in Oslo in August. TheSG itself will have two meetings in Oslo.
We thank our colleagues at DDB who lent sup-port throughout the meeting, and in particular toRenate Gömpel. DDB also supported the effort bymaking available housing gratis to the attendeesand contributed lunches as well as refreshmentsthrough out the sessions.
Gratitude is also conveyed to the CataloguingSection for contributing toward the meeting ex-penses of the participants.
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IME ICC News by Barbara Tillett, Chair, IMEICC Planning Committee
Plans are underway for the third in the seriesof worldwide regional meetings towards a new“Statement of International Cataloguing Princi-ples” and suggestions for an international cata-loguing code. The third IFLA Meeting of Expertson an International Cataloguing Code (IME ICC)will be held in Cairo, Egypt, December 12-14,2005 for the Arabic-speaking Middle East coun-tries.
The report from the IME ICC2 (Buenos Aires forthe Latin American and Caribbean region) is beingpublished in English and Spanish by Saur.
Meeting on Cataloguing Principles: Influ-ences and European Scene, in Madrid,April 14th, 2005 by Elena Escolano Ro-dríguez
The “Meeting on Cataloguing Principles: Influ-ences and the European scene” was held in Ma-drid, on April 14th 2005 as part of the FESABID(Federación Española de Sociedades de Ar-chivística, Biblioteconomía y Documentación)General Conference.
The organizing committee was formed by Na-tividad Correas González, Technical Director, In-maculada Torrecillas González, Chair of the Bib-liographic Control Department, Araceli Sánchez-Piñol de Anta, Chair of the Cooperation, CulturalDevelopment and Institutional Relationship Area,and myself, Elena Escolano, Chair of the Cata-loguing Service, all from the Spanish NationalLibrary.
The speakers who attended the Meeting werecataloguing experts who had also attended theIME ICC meeting in Frankfurt in 2003; they are
Claudia Fabian from Germany, Mauro Guerrinifrom Italy, Irena Kavcic from Slovenia, FrançoiseLeresche from France, and Elena Escolano fromSpain.
The purpose of the meeting was to keep Span-ish librarians informed about the new principles,the work carried out in order to develop them, theorganizational framework of the conferences, theongoing work and future plans. We think that it isnecessary for Spanish librarians to get preparedfor future and foreseeable changes in our rulecodes and cataloguing practices. It was an inter-esting experience to show them the situation inother countries which are similar to our situation.
The content of the meeting was focused on:- the adaptation of cataloguing practices to the
international principles,- the implications of this approach for the dif-
ferent cataloguing codes and to give a currentEuropean and international panorama oncataloguing.
The papers presented can be downloaded intheir Spanish version from the following address:http://www.bne.es/esp/labiesdocumentos1.htm.
The attendance to the meeting was surprisinglyhigh, which shows how sensitive Spanish librari-ans are to the issue.
After the conference all speakers met for a dis-cussion about the overall cataloguing scenario asperceived after the Frankfurt IME ICC conference.Some of the ideas voiced in this conversationcould be of interest for the IFLA Cataloguing Sec-tion and the ongoing work of the ICC WorkingGroups, therefore we want to share them throughthe SCATnews.
Currently there is no European platform tomeet and discuss and to come to a common viewon cataloguing issues, as Pat Oddy once had sug-gested. This would give us a voice, as is the caseof AACR JSC. Our little group does not give a fullEuropean representation, but still we want toshare our conclusions.
We recognized that our European codes are sodifferent that it seems extremely difficult to reachan agreement; we are aware of these differencesand we think it is useful to overcome them as weall use each other’s OPACs and record exchangecould be improved among the European countries.
At the same time, we want to protect our tradi-tions, which could be an obstacle for an interna-tional understanding. So we have to search forpossibilities to achieve a set of common ruleswhile at the same time keeping our cultural tradi-tions.
We already have the ISBD standards whichnormalize description and are commonly ac
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cepted, so they represent an international mile-stone we should support and keep in mind. Themain differences are in the choice of the accesspoints where we should at least reach a definitionof mandatory access points and in the languageand form of the headings or access points forauthors and corporate bodies. There is no com-mon European understanding on these points.
The only way to come closer together in Europeis to support the International Cataloguing Code,as a framework for the choice of access points aswell as the form of these. We think that this Inter-national Cataloguing Code should allow for fur-ther national developments.
We recognized how useful it was to compareour codes, although the comparison that wasmade for the Frankfurt IME ICC only focused onsome specific topics, and it was not as detailed asit would have been desirable for lack of time. Webecame aware that the only way to share andcompare in detail our differences in cataloguing isto compare our codes with the most widely spreadone, the AACR2, concentrating on those chapterswe think are most important for our purposes,that is those dealing with the choice of accesspoints and their form. In this comparison it wouldbe worthwhile to categorize these differences as:“change is possible”, “this makes a difference” or“this makes a real big difference for us”.
As far as the form of the headings is concernedwe felt that the new ICC may give room to createeven more heterogeneity by recommending the useof the commonly accepted form. We thought thatit would be advisable to recommend instead theuse of parallel headings (as this is a current prac-tice in BnF and in the German name authorityfile): an internationally agreed heading could beprescribed as a parallel heading to the commonlyaccepted form. Among other roles, parallel head-ings are a crucial device in multilingual countriesand in the context of information exchange be-tween different cultures; the choice of an interna-tionally agreed heading as a mandatory parallelheading would greatly enhance the feasibility ofthe VIAF project and make cross border recordexchange easier.
We came to the conclusion that the ICC can beconsidered as a skeleton or model, but in order tobuild a full-fledged model, all of us should knowour differences in detail; this comparison would beparticularly useful to reflect on what is importantor not at a national level of our particular tradi-tions.
This is why we decided to launch this initiativeto other European countries, and we hope we willreceive some comments through the FrankfurtIME ICC listserv. We offer our results to the IFLACataloguing Section for its consideration, as well
as to the future International Cataloguing CodeGroup, and we offer our help in their task ofelaborating the International Cataloguing Code.
For any contact:Elena Escolano RodríguezServicio de CatalogaciónBiblioteca Nacional de EspañaPaseo de Recoletos, 20Madrid 28071 (España)Tfno.: 915807735Correo electrónico: [email protected]
World Library and Information Congress:71st IFLA General Conference and Council
August 14th - 18th 2005, Oslo, Norway
Cataloguing Section’s Standing Committee’sMeetings: August 13th, 11.30-14.20 & August19th, 11.00-13.50.
Division of Bibliographic Control’s Open Pro-gram: August 17th, 8.30-10.30.
Cataloguing Section’s Open Program (togetherwith Classification & Indexing Section): August17th, 13.45-18.00.
Bibliography Section’s Open Program: August17th, 10.45-12.45.
Knowledge Management Section’s Open Pro-gram: August 15th, 8.30-10.30.
ICABS’ Open Program: August 18th, 8.30-10.30.
Open Program about UNIMARC and XML:August 16th, 13.45-15.45.
FRBR Review Group’s Meeting: August 18th,10.45-12.45 in Room Gamlebyen (Radisson Hotel).
Expression entity Working Group’s Meeting:August 15th, 10.45-12.45 in Room Gamlebyen(Radisson Hotel).
Division’s social hour: August 15th, 16.00-17.00.
© Jorge Tutor,<http://www.jorgetutor.com/spain/madrid/bne/bne.htm>
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Germany on its way to international stan-dards by Renate Gömpel
BackgroundDiscussions about the internationalisation of
the German cataloguing code are not a new phe-nomenon but have been continued more or lessvehemently since more than thirty years before,however mostly without any result. In 1975 thedifferences between AACR records of the Library ofCongress and RAK records were examined. Al-though there was congruency to a very high de-gree and although it would have been compara-tively few effort to achieve absolute congruencythen, no conclusions were drawn from the resultsof the study. In the following decades the codesincreasingly drifted apart. Since the mid 1990slibraries have been more and more interconnectedand when the transition from the exchange formatMAB to the newer version MAB2 was to be intro-duced in 1995, it was discussed controversiallywhether it would be more wise to change for UNI-MARC or USMARC. The question of AACR or RAKplayed only a tangential role then. As a resultGermany launched MAB2 and did not turn to-wards international standards.
On November 17, 2000 the Committee for Li-brary Standards was founded to ensure the use ofuniform standards for cataloguing, formats andinterfaces of regional networks. The Committee forLibrary Standards is a nationwide co-ordinatingbody in the above mentioned areas and gives aprofessional opinion in deciding on questions ofprinciple. At the time of its founding the commit-tee had agreed not to introduce MARC and AACRin Germany, but concluded in favour of a stepwisemigration towards international standards.
While the objective of conforming RAK to AACRrespectively to international standards had beenagreed by the library community before, thissituation changed all of a sudden when a funda-mental decision for the use of AACR and MARC inGermany was postulated during a panel discus-sion in September 2001. As a consequence theCommittee for Library Standards decided on De-cember 6, 2001 to principally strive for a migra-tion to international standards (MARC21, AACR2)and therefore to scrutinise its general conditionsand requirements. For this purpose a project fi-nanced by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft(German Research Foundation) was conductedfrom November 2002 to May 2004. To go into de-tails would go beyond the scope of this article, butto sum up it is to say that in view of the cata-loguing code and the format there are no aspectscontradicting a migration in principle. Moreover amigration would provide considerable advantagesfor the users. Unfortunately, even these resultscould not break the resistance of the library com-
munity against the use of AACR and MARC. Par-allel to the decision of December 2001 and en-during the project phase the library communityhas begun a public discussion like never before.Always having been an insider topic the interest incataloguing increased tremendously. The topiccataloguing came in the whole community’s eyeand has been discussed controversially in publi-cations, conferences and meetings, and via mail-ing lists.
Step-by-step internationalisationBeing obvious there would be no way to prevail
the migration a third way of a “soft” migration hasbeen contemplated. Interestingly enough it has tobe stated that there are a lot of steps and actionsthat could be done with the agreement of a major-ity. Die Deutsche Bibliothek therefore recom-mended these measures for action independent ofa migration nevertheless knowing that this couldbe an intermediary step only on our way to theobjective of a migration.
According to an agreement of the Committeefor Library Standards the Consortium of LibraryNetworks and the head of the Office for LibraryStandards compiled proposals and made theirrecommendations for action. The members of theConsortium of Library Networks agreed uponunifying their data structures to improve the pos-sibilities of data exchange and the use of externaldata. They realised that the most economical wayto implement their common objectives would bethe use of MARC 21 as exchange format. The al-ternative would have been to develop MAB2 to-wards MAB3 – in the end this new format wouldnot have differed from MARC21 so much.
To realise their objectives the Consortium forLibrary Standards agreed upon several actions:development of uniform guidelines for the severallibrary networks and definition of a commonquality standard as well as reduction of the datamodel to 2 hierarchy levels. Moreover the mem-bers agreed to mutually use their data for thepurposes of data transfer, interlibrary loan andintegration into their portals via Z39.50. In futurenew acquisitions shall be catalogued on a coop-erative basis, for the same record should not becatalogued several times. A working group shallhave developed a prototypical method by the endof 2005. The development of a matchkey algorithmis an important precondition for data enrichment.For this purpose another project has been set upunder the leadership of Die Deutsche Bibliothek.Moreover the Office for Library Standards and theConsortium of Library Networks proposed im-provements for the cataloguing code and theauthority data files.
On December 15, 2004 the Committee for Li-brary Standards followed these recommendations
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and agreed upon the following: MARC21 shall beused uniformly as the exchange format and theOffice for Library Standards shall develop thecataloguing code according the objectives andactions originating from the recommendations.These comprise:– The use of the German language as the working
language and for headings.– The congruency of entities for titles, personal
and corporate names.– No agreement upon rules objecting AACR.– Harmonisation and integration of special mate-
rial rules into one code.– Differentiation of personal names if using an
authority data file.– Adaptation of splitting rules to ISBD(CR)– Exploration of the importance and heading form
of uniform titles in the FRBR context for “work”and “expression”.
– Adaptation of the code to flatter hierarchies.Another important agreement of the Committee
of Library Standards is to actively take part in thedevelopment process of RDA (AACR3). And lastbut not least the importance of an uniformauthority data format has been confirmed. Allpartners involved in this project with DDB aschair have been asked to deliver a draft, soon.
OutlookIt is important and good that there is move-
ment in the German library community now.However, the chosen way of a step-to-step inter-nationalisation also contains risks and dangers,because it is a complicated and difficult proce-dure. There is the danger that the initial impetuswill peter out and everything remains unchanged.But users all over the world want to search insimilar structured catalogues, and in Germanylike in other parts of the world the costs for cata-loguing are high and we need to cooperate inter-nationally to reduce them. We hope that com-monly developed and worldwide accepted cata-loguing principles as currently being discussedduring the IFLA Meetings of Experts on an Inter-national Cataloguing Code, and the current devel-opments of AACR/RDA contribute to a final Ger-man decision for international cataloguing stan-dards.
Meanwhile a time schedule has been set up forthe migration to MARC21. We intend to finish allpreparation work for the transition by the begin-ning of 2007. A series of workshops is planned –starting with an initial workshop in July 2005 – toprepare the transition for those areas where themain differences between MAB2 and MARC21 arelocated (e.g. multilevel cataloguing and analyticalentries, linking techniques, etc.).
News from the Library of Congress by JohnByrum
** Results from LC test of “access level”records available
In November of 2004, the Library of CongressBibliographic Access Divisions posted informationrelated to efforts to define a new level of catalogingwithin the MARC/AACR context, called “accesslevel”—more information related to the back-ground and development of the core data set andcataloging guidelines may be found athttp://www.loc.gov/catdir/access/accessrecord.html.
From December 2004 to January 2005, the Li-brary of Congress conducted a test of the pro-posed access level core data set and catalogingguidelines to determine whether the resulting rec-ords would meet the objectives formulated for theproject (functionality, cost-efficiency, and confor-mity with current standards). The link above in-cludes a presentation summarizing the results ofthe test.
Future plans for implementing “Access Level”After evaluating the results of the test, LC has
determined that there are substantial cost savingsto be derived from access level cataloging, with noappreciable loss of access for searchers. The Bib-liographic Access Divisions is proposing to pursuethe implementation of access level cataloging, us-ing the following framework to define a“preliminary phase” to be carried out in the nextyear:
1. Continue to apply access level cataloging fornon-serial remote access electronic resources(with guideline modifications based on catalogerand reference feedback).
2. Expand the group of trained catalogers fromthe five initial testers to include all catalogerstrained to work on this category of material.
3. Solicit feedback on the access level core dataset, cataloging guidelines, and future plans, frominternal and external constituencies.
4. Collaborate with the Program for CooperativeCataloging (see Objective 2.1.2 in the PCC TacticalObjectives, http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/pcctactobj-2004-06.html).
5. Distribute the records created as part of thetest, as well as for the preliminary phase, vianormal record distribution products (CatalogingDistribution Service).
6. Consider additional tests of the functionalityof the access level records in the catalog.
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7. Given the considerable savings derived fromdoing original cataloging at access level as op-posed to adapting copy cataloging records at fulllevel, perform only original cataloging at accesslevel for the preliminary phase; re-assess this de-cision after one year.
8. Work with other institutions testing theguidelines and core data set to decide on the op-timal record identification indicia (e.g., encodinglevel, possible use of authentication code).
9. Consider whether the “access level” modelmight also apply to other types of resources (Bib-liographic Access Divisions Strategic Plan for2005-2006, Goal IV, Objective 7).
More informationThe results of the access level test at the Li-
brary of Congress, the original project report, andthe core data set are available athttp://www.loc.gov/catdir/access/accessrecord.html.
Comments may be sent to David Reser([email protected]).
** BEAT Report for ALA June 2005
Several new and expanded initiatives highlight2005 news from the Bibliographic EnrichmentAdvisory Team (BEAT), an LC Bibliographic AccessDirectorate initiative aimed at developing tools toaid catalogers, reference specialists, and searchersin creating and locating information. Among thesedevelopments are the significant expansion ofBEAT’s various Reviews projects and the intro-duction of the Machine Generated 505 project thatadds table of contents data to the catalog record.In addition, three web-based TOC projects con-tinue to expand (with 6 million hits on the LCpages for TOC now recorded), the Web CatalogingAssistant program (providing machine assistedcataloging of electronic text resources from theWeb) has grown, and in turn continues to facili-tate increased access to current literature found
in web resources through BEAT’s Web Access toPublications in Series project, and with supportfrom LC partners, new resources have been linkedfrom LC catalog records for items in the collec-tions to full electronic texts for those monographsin the Web Access to Works in the Public Domainproject.
In addition to the items included in this report,information on other major components of theBEAT’s work: enriching the content of Library ofCongress bibliographic records, improving accessto the data the records contain, and conductingresearch and development in areas that can con-tribute to furthering these efforts may be foundstarting at the main BEAT Web page athttp://www.loc.gov/catdir/beat.
Automated Web Cataloging with the Webcataloging Assistant
An outgrowth of BEAT’s Web Access to Publi-cations in Series project (see below), Web Cata-loging Assistant has now been in operation forexactly one year. It is currently being used tocatalog monographs from 32 different series. Fromthe 112 items cataloged in its first productionmonth (June 2004), it has now accounted for (asof May 31, 2005) more than 2,800 electronicmonographs cataloged. This project evolved fromthe experiences that the Business and EconomicsCataloging Team gained in providing access at theindividual monograph level for selected series.However, it has now proved possible to automatemost of the process. As a result, the operationnow allows a cataloger to examine the abstractpage for a particular monograph on the Web; byusing computer and programmed functions, staffcan then create a MARC record that is automati-cally added to the LC database. This record in-cludes an abstract of the title represented. Acataloger subsequently enhances that catalogingdata to ensure that name headings are estab-lished and may add subject headings if key wordsin the summary do not adequately convey thetopic.
Web Access To Publications in SeriesThis project has several facets, the first of
which is to link many “working paper/discussionpaper” type series publications to their Web-basedelectronic versions. To date, this initiative hasprovided access to the full electronic texts of morethan 30,000 individual monographs compre-hended by the 300 series processed in the project.A web-accessible database of Technical Reportsand Working Papers in Business and Economics forseries covered by the project can be accessed athttp://www.loc.gov/rr/business/techreps/techrepshome.php.
Credits: Library of Congress, <http://www.loc.gov/jefftour/exterior.html>
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Machine Generated 505 Table of Contents(MG 505)
This BEAT project adds full text table of con-tents (TOC) data to catalog records – informationthat was previously available only through linksfrom within catalog records to LC’s web-basedTOCs for those items. In addition to English lan-guage materials, the project has recently ex-panded to include items in German.
The original TOC data was generated from in-formation captured from the scanned table ofcontents images from books and is now beingadded to field 505 by computer programs. Fieldswith such information are preceded by the legend:“Machine generated contents note:”. Because thescanned table of contents reflect a wide variety offormats and structures, a small percentage of rec-ords may contain errors in the placement andconfiguration of the 505 texts. The 505 data arenot reviewed for punctuation. Begun in February2005, this project has produced 10,000 machinegenerated TOC. A few sample LCCNs include00010582, 00013089, 00048663, 00108641, and00108641.
Web Access to Works in the Public DomainThis project makes links from the LC Catalog to
full electronic texts of items for which LC has anexact match in print represented in the LC collec-tions. This project is able to do so with the coop-eration of «trusted» partner institutions such asresearch libraries and other organizations that aredigitizing electronic versions of works freely avail-able and for which LC LC provides links to theelectronic versions from its catalog records for theprint versions.
Two new collaborators and their recent addi-tions are especially noteworthy. These are theRAND Corporation and the Thurgood MarshallLaw Library, University of Maryland. In the case ofthe former, over 680 links have been made toRAND publications via the RAND Web site<http://www.rand.org/publications>. In the sec-ond, over 140 links have been made to publica-tions of the United States Commission on CivilRights digitized by the Thurgood Marshall LawLibrary, University of Maryland at<http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/index.asp>.
BEAT Book Reviews projectsBEAT continues to expand provision of access
or links for works in the Library’s collections tostable, scholarly, and attributable sources forbook reviews and several recent initiatives haveresulted in new collaborative agreements for suchmaterial.
One new partnership is with the College ofEducation at Arizona State University and theMichigan State Libraries for the online publicationEducation Review (ER) which «publishes reviews ofrecent books in education, covering the entirerange of scholarship and practice.» The projecthas linked to over 350 catalog records to corre-sponding ER reviews <http://edrev.asu.edu> andsome are published in Spanish or Portuguese.
A second new source for reviews is the Asso-ciation for Library Collections & Technical Serv-ices (ALCTS) which has granted LC permission touse and archive book reviews contained in retro-spective issues of its flagship publication, LibraryResources and Technical Services Ultimately thesereviews will cover issues as far back as 1999.
Ongoing reviews projects also include links toH-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sci-ences, the online journal of H-NET : Humanitiesand Social Sciences Online; to sections of annualcompilations on reference books that appear inAmerican Libraries with permission granted by theReference and User Services Association divisionof the American Library Association); to reviewsfor monographs from a separately maintaineddatabase at LC for the Handbook of Latin Ameri-can Studies (HLAS) and to the MARS Best FreeReference Web Sites selected by the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of ALA’s Refer-ence and User Services Association.
Collaborative project to study iVia softwareThe Library is in discussion with the INFO-
MINE Project (http://infomine.ucr.edu) at theUniversity of California, Riverside about estab-lishing a cooperative agreement to test the iViasoftware (http://infomine.ucr.edu/iVia/) devel-oped for the INFOMINE project. iVia harvests,analyzes, and processes metadata from Web sitesand other digital objects for use in the INFOMINEdatabase. The parties believe that it would benefitthe library community worldwide to incorporatethe Library’s subject authority and classificationdata into the iVia automatic classifier capability. Itis thought that the incorporation of this data willimprove the ability of the iVia software to generatemetadata useful to the Library and other libraries,with minimal intervention by cataloging staff. Thegoal of the cooperative agreement would be to testthis hypothesis.
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Implementing OAI-PMH at Bibliothèquenationale de France by Emmanuelle Bermès
The Open Archive Initiative1 was founded in1999, after the Santa Fe convention which aimedto make online resources more accessible andinteroperable on the Internet. The Protocol forMetadata Harvesting, developed within the initia-tive, gives rules and tools to create such interop-erable repositories of metadata. The protocol pro-vides a framework for metadata harvesting.
It is based on a simple data model where a re-source (digital or not) is described by one or sev-eral metadata records. A simple Dublin coremetadata record is mandatory, but any other XMLmetadata may be added. The harvesting process isautomated through the OAI “verbs”, a set of HTTPrequests that make it possible to identify, describeand harvest a repository.
Much of the efficiency of the OAI-PMH, andwhat makes it so popular, results from the use ofcommon Web standards and languages such asHTTP and XML. Moreover, creating an OAI re-pository does not imply to modify the existing ar-chitecture of the resources, and they can bestored in a database, an institutional repository, aweb site, a digital library or in any other form. TheOAI repository is only a layer added upon the ex-isting architecture, allowing existing resources tobe more accessible and to have more visibility onthe Web.
The Bibliothèque nationale de France started toexperiment the use of OAI-PMH for exchangingmetadata for digital documents in 2003 with alocal project, the BNSA (Banque nationale desSavoirs en Aquitaine). In september 2004, the firstglobal OAI repository for the BnF was set up andit included around 8,000 records for digitizedbooks (monographs only).
Today, the BnF OAI repository includes around30,000 records, mostly for digitized books, manu-scripts and maps. The records are organized forselective harvesting in 64 sets. The sets includedigital collections and media types. Thematicalsets based on Dewey classification were also de-veloped, in order to allow specific partners, likeCellule Mathdoc2 specializing in mathematics, orthe University Library of Medicine (BIUM)3, to har-vest only such material that is useful to them.
The challenge with the creation of the metadatarepository proved to be, not the technical part, butthe bibliographic conversion of MARC records tosimple Dublin Core. DC is far less structured thanMARC and this creates problems with granularity 1 http://www.openarchives.org2 http://math-doc.ujf-grenoble.fr/3 See their digital Library at http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica.htm
levels. We therefore decided to be restrictive con-cerning the amount of information that is in-cluded in the DC records, in order to avoid confu-sion, for instance between various titles or subjectheadings. We are currently in the process of con-verting records for more documents, such as seri-als, prints and drawings, and material from othersources such as virtual exhibits.
A first application of the exchange of metadatawas made within the France in America project4.The project is a bilingual digital library exploringthe history of the French presence in NorthAmerica from the first decades of the 16th Cen-tury to the end of the 19th Century. Two websites,one in Gallica, and the other one in Global Gate-way, have been designed to present the completecollection. Instead of duplicating the digital docu-ments, only the metadata were shared using theOAI-PMH, so that the digitized documents couldbe accessed from both websites on their uniquelocation in BnF or LC. The use of the OAI-PMH inthis project made it easier to collaborate on ashared digital collection.
Many projects have been built with the OAI-PMH in libraries in the past few years. For in-stance, the OAIster5 project, from the University ofMichigan digital Library, harvests several thou-sands of OAI repositories in the world. AmericanMemory6, the digital library of the Library of Con-gress already counts more than 190,000 items inits OAI repository.
But today, it seems that we are entering a newera in the use of the OAI-PMH. Projects of a newkind are seeking to apply the protocol in a broaderway: browsing repositories and combining themwith URIs and RSS feeds (The Errol project7), ex-changing not only metadata but complex digitalobject or full-text documents8, tools for publishingresources on the Web, like CMS or Web servers,that integrate the creation of OAI repositories (Themod_oai project9).
Search engines are also showing a greater in-terest in the OAI-PMH, since it can help them toindex the deep Web. Yahoo! has a partnershipwith OAIster in order to include systematicallyOAI repositories into its Content Acquisition Pro
4 France in America in Gallica:http://gallica.bnf.fr/FranceAmerique, and in Global Gate-way: http://international.loc.gov/intldl/fiahtml/fiahome.html5 http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/6 http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/7 http://errol.oclc.org8 See this article in DLib Magazine on the use of OAI-PMH with MPEG-21 to exchange full digital document:http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december04/vandesompel/12vandesompel.html9 http://www.modoai.org/
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gram10. Google has been working with OCLC onthe same topic.
As the OAI-PMH is being used on the Web byvarious actors to expose and discover many differ-ent types of online resources, it is a greater issuefor libraries to join this movement and implementthe OAI-PMH. Although libraries do have an expe-rience in sharing resources in their own commu-nity, the OAI-PMH could help them with this mis-sion, and also give them the opportunity to reachnew users and to work on a seamless integrationof library resources with other cultural and aca-demic material on the Web.
10 See press release from March 2004:http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2004/Mar04/r031004
Recent Developments in Cataloging Re-searches and Practices in the National Li-brary of China by Ben Gu, Director of theAcquisitions & Cataloging Department,NLC
The National Library of China was active incompiling and revising cataloging standards andrules in the past several years.
In cooperation with other major libraries inChina, NLC staff revised the Descriptive Cata-loguing Rules for Western Language Materials,which is a Chinese counterpart to AACR2 and wasoriginally published in 1985. The revised and ex-panded edition was published in 2003.
During 2001-2003, the National Library ofChina organized an editorial committee to revisethe UNIMARC-based CNMARC Manual (Biblio-graphical Format) to replace the original edition asa standard of the Ministry of Culture published in1996. In the revised edition, some fields not usedin China have been deleted and some locally de-fined fields for Chinese materials have beenadded. The revised edition was published in 2004,and will become a national standard in a couple ofyears.
In 1996, the first edition of Chinese CatalogingRules was published. It was the first of its kind inChina and has played an important role in thestandardization of library cataloging practices inChina. However, the old edition was not suffi-ciently discussed before its publication, and usedquite a lot of Chinese practices not compatiblewith internationally accepted standards and rules.In 2002, NLC began to organize a revision com-mittee composed of NLC staff and experts fromother institutions. The revised edition was pub-lished in 2005. During the revision, there werequite a lot of controversies mainly focused on theinternationalization and Chinese local character-istics. Anyway, the revised edition has made re-markable progress in the internationalization,although we still have much to do in the future.With the development of the compilation ofAACR3/RDA, I think, we will consider anotherrevision in the future.
NLC is also compiling a user’s manual ofMARC21, which is expected to be published inJuly 2005. Although there is a Chinese manualfor the USMARC bibliographical format, therehave been neither Chinese translations ofMARC21, nor a Chinese manual for MARC21 be-fore. This MARC21 format manual will includebibliographical format and authority format. To-gether with the manual for holding format pub-lished in 2003, there will be three Chinese manu-als for MARC21.
In China, libraries use two MARC formats, i.e.MARC21 and CNMARC. Most small-sized libraries
Credits: University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign,<http://www.library.uiuc.edu/ugl/BI/Research_Skills/2_Orient/cartoon.gif>
© Alain Goustard/Bibliothèque Nationale de France,<http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/label_france/FRANCE/DOSSIER/PARIS/tgb10.html>
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use UNIMARC-based CNMARC for all materials.For large-sized libraries that have sizable collec-tions in foreign languages, they prefer US-MARC/MARC21 to CNMARC with the considera-tion of international compatibility and easy recorddownloading. Therefore, both CNMARC andMARC21 user manuals will be important tools incataloging.
NLC librarians are also paying attention to therecent developments of FRBR researches, the revi-sion/compilation of AACR3/RDA and issues re-lated to metadata. I think there will be more re-sults to come in the near future and the practicesof cataloging and resource description in NLC willdevelop in a better way.
Bibliotheca Universalis – How to organize chaos?
Satellite meeting
devoted to the FRBR and FRAR models
organized by the IFLA Cataloguing Section
in co-operation with
the IFLA Information Technology Section
Järvenpää, Finland, 11-12 August 2005http://www.fla.fi/frbr05/index.htm
Credits: Library Juice, ISSN 1544-9378, <http://libr.org/Juice/pics/cartoon.gif>
Credits: Ben Gu, <http://bgu61.nease.net/images/pic2page/pa_320491.jpg>
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Contributions to SCATNews are welcome at any time. Please send news items, articles,comments to the Editor:
Patrick Le BœufBibliothèque nationale de France
DSR / ABN / SCO / Bureau de normalisation documentaireQuai François Mauriac75706 Paris cedex 13
Tel: +33-(0)1-53-79-49-75Fax: +33-(0)1-53-79-50-45
Email: [email protected]
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