The Continuing Resources Cataloging Committee (CRCC) held its forum at the 2020 ALA Midwinter Meeting & Exhibits on Monday, January 27. The forum opened with Peter Fletcher giving a brief CC:DA update. The Program for Cooperative Catalog (PCC) Standing Committee on Standards (SCS) and Standing Committee on Training (SCT) continue to work on revising NACO module 6a for qualifiers in Series Authority Records. CC:DA is also working on reviewing and revising some internal procedures and by-laws, including the potential merger of ALCTS/LITA/LLAMA into one division later this year. The group also discussed changing guidelines for updates and revisions to ALA-LC romanization tables and is waiting for further input from some other groups.
Regina Reynolds, director of the U.S. ISSN Center, gave updates from the ISSN Director’s Meeting in New Delhi, India, Paris, France, and Washington, D.C. She highlighted the work being done on ISO 3297 and ISO 8. ISO 3297 was recently updated to make provisions for clustering ISSNs and updates technical information on electronic resources and representing the ISSN in different systems. Key points in ISO 8, approved earlier in 2019, are being reviewed by the NISO PIE-J group. The resulting brochure will highlight these points to assist print journal publishers. The updated ISSN Portal, while still a subscription, now has many free elements. Subscribers will see a “hub” of information about the publications along with the bibliographic record. Another change is that the ISSN Manual will undergo an extensive revision focusing on expressing concepts, adding missing information, and clarifying rules of ISSN assignments such as podcasts. Predatory publishers, another topic, was mentioned along with information on India’s requirements for both Ph.D candidates and publishers. Finally, Regina Reynolds and Diane Boehr, Head of Cataloging at the National Library of Medicine, collaborated on an article about the history of CONSER to commemorate the 25th anniversary of PCC. This article will be published in the Cataloging & Classification Quarterly (CCQ).
Ed Jones, Associate Director of Assessment and Technical Services at National University, gave a presentation on the work of the recent LC-PCC task group on Diachronic Works. Ed noted that one of the positive changes that may be coming is that the new model for description more closely aligns with how ISSNs are assigned. Areas that may be of concern or in need of development include changes to the title proper for serials and the deprecation of the widely-used “has other distinguishing characteristics” element in the beta RDA Toolkit. In addition, “former title” and “later title” have been deprecated in favor of repeated titles proper with associated timespans. Multi-part monographs continue to pose problems in the new LRM model and no concrete decisions have been made about how to handle them.
Melani Polutta, Policy Specialist at the Library of Congress, presented a review of the BIBFRAME pilot on behalf of Les Hawkins. The Policy, Training and Cooperative Program (PTCP), headed by Les Hawkins and Paul Frank, was involved with both training and advising catalogers during the pilot. The tools developed for the pilot include both the BIBFRAME Editor (BFE) and the BIBFRAME database, which is a copy of the Library of Congress (LC) catalog. The number of participants grew with phase 2 and involved staff from the U.S. ISSN Center, LC oversees office, and eDeposit program. The entire LC database is converted to BIBFRAME every night, which allows staff to test workflows for copy cataloging. One issue the pilot brought to light was the occurrence of duplicates in the BIBFRAME database due to LC staff and CONSER members updating the same record. Melanie ended by commenting on how continuing resources are modeled in BIBFRAME and the questions and concerns that have arisen from this model, which includes the relatively new, Work Hub.
Tina Shrader provided an overview of the Linked Data for Production 2 (LD4P2) Cohort Serials Affinity Group (SAG). She provided some screenshots from the Sinopia editor that is being used to create native linked data descriptions and discussed the work of the SAG. The group has been working on developing a profile for describing serials in the Sinopia editor based on the BIBFRAME ontology. The group has run into challenges around how to reflect changes in frequency over time, replicating things like 550 notes for issuing bodies and in particular PCC authentication. The group has discussed whether authentication belongs to the entire description or to each triple since they are meant to be re-usable independent of one another. The group plans to continue refining the profile and experimenting with describing serials in linked data. They also hope to work with CONSER to develop a profile that can be used in other contexts.
Submitted by Charlene Morrison and Elizabeth Miraglia
