Meeting Minutes (February 12, 2001)
J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Richmond, Virginia
Present: Elaine Day (Averett), Billie Hackney (ODU), Trish Kearns (William & Mary), Gail McClenney (VSU), Daniel McShane (UVa)
Members Absent: Althea Aschmann (VPI), Karen Cary (VCU), Nadine P. Ellero (UVa), Polly Khater (GMU), Charles Lewis (JSRCC)
Guests: Barbara Anderson (VCU), Tonia Graves (ODU), Kate Cooke (JSRCC)
Barbara Anderson (recorder), Nadine P. Ellero (will post to web)
Cataloging Guidelines Revision
Daniel McShane will complete the technical guidelines (including correction of broken links) as planned, but, due to job-related pressures, Althea Aschmann asked to be relieved of Task Force responsibilities. She had previously volunteered to take responsibility for editing the first revision of the guidelines. Meanwhile, AACR rule changes that will have the greatest impact on the content of the guidelines (e.g. changes in the concept and treatment of seriality, adoption of the GMD "electronic resource," etc.) have still not been finalized. The group discussed the advisability of undertaking a major revision of the guidelines and/or a commitment to maintaining the current guidelines that will soon be out-of-date. While these cataloging guidelines and accompanying examples were felt to be very useful at the time when VIVA libraries were beginning to provide access to an increasing number of electronic databases, it may be that there is less need for them now that cataloging electronic resources has become more "mainstream," most VIVA libraries have developed their own approach and processes for handling these materials, and online and print documentation of cataloging practices and standards have become more widespread. Perhaps a small subgroup of the Task Force could review the proposed AACR changes and examiine the guidelines more closely to project the complexity of revising them. Perhaps, instead of guidelines, the VIVACat web page should point to relevant Internet resources. This topic will need to be discussed further and in a broader forum, perhaps on the VIVACat-L discussion list.
Serials Solutions and Access to E-journal and Fulltext Aggregators
Kathy Perry has indicated an interest in helping to coordinate the centralized maintenance of vendor information for VIVA-sponsored full-text aggregator databases. Serials Solutions appears to offer such a service (http://serialssolutions.com/Home.asp) through their fee-based HTML and MARC-related products, but it appears that Serials Solutions is primarily a web-display product. They do not offer actual MARC records corresponding to full-text aggregator titles, but rather, "MARC-ready" reports of fields (e.g. 856 fields) that can be copied and pasted into existing MARC records. Other locally-developed solutionsfor generating MARC records automatically seems, at this point, to be far less labor intensive than application of the Serials Solutions data. At the January 2000 VIVA workshop on providing access to full-text aggregator titles, there was a general discussion of possibilities for maintaining a centrally-located database that could be used to generate MARC records in a manner similar to the VCU publicaly-available process: http://www.library.vcu.edu/cfapps/jbc/instruct/vivamarc.cfm <link broken, 4/7/2008, TM>. Among the difficulties cited were inconsistency of data formats provided by vendors, and gaps in data such as ISSN information and title coverage. Barbara Anderson volunteered to review the recommendations from the workshop and look more closely at whether Serials Solutions could be a source for more consistent and complete aggregator title data.
Chadwyck-Healey Poetry Databases
Elaine reported that the files are being stored in a temporary VIVA directory. She hesitates to broadcast their web address until she is confident that the records are ready for general distribution. Work was done to incorporate the GMD "electronic resource" consistently, a PERL script to correct headings has been run against the records, and corresponding authority records have been downloaded into shared files, however, Dan McShane reported problems that he encountered when loading some of the authority records as well as persistent inconsistencies and errors in 100 and 700 bibliographic record headings. He and his staff plan to generate a file of all 100/700 headings, de-dup them, and do one more check of these headings against authority file forms of names. After his staff has made this last set of revisions, the corrected records will be re-saved on the VIVA server.
No one present expressed great enthusiasm for the OCLC CORC cataloging product, citing dissatisfaction with the interface and inconvenient export features. UVA and VCU are both involved in some efforts to map non-MARC (TEI, EAD, Dublin Core) to MARC records. It may be that results of those mapping efforts can be shared with VIVA libraries as demand for this increases.
Elaine Day anticipates stepping down as Chair of the Task Force later this year, and the group needs to identify a new Chair, as well as consider the directions for the future. Some thoughts about initiatives the Task Force could take included:
- encourage greater participation by staff with more technical (i.e. computer programming ) skills
- regularly share practical cataloging solutions for dealing with VIVA resources
- create tools and centralize solutions for handling data sets (e.g. tools for automating the creation of MARC records from various data formats)
Billie Hackney will take the lead in developing a survey to gauge the interest of VIVA libraries in past activities and future roles of the Task Force.
To be determined.
For previous minutes and information on VIVACat, please visit our web page:http://new.vivalib.org/tech/cat/.
Submitted by Barbara Anderson; marked up version by Nadine P. Ellero
March 1, 2001