Report from the Cataloguing Committee Open Session

Cataloguing Commission

Report from IAML 2014 in Antwerp

In Antwerp the Cataloguing Commission held a business meeting on Friday 18 July from 11.00 to 12.30. Joseph Hafner, the current Chair of the Cataloguing Commission, chaired the meeting. About 16 members from various countries were present at the session.

The meeting began with elections to lead the Commission. The outcome of the election was that Joseph Hafner was re-elected as Chair, Anders Cato was re-elected as Secretary and Daniel Paradis was elected as Vice Chair. They were elected to lead the group for the next three years.

IAML is going to have a committee to review the terms of references and/or created them for the various committees, so we will review our terms of reference over the next few months with this in mind.

The group reviewed the work of the two Sub-Commissions, ISBD and UNIMARC, to determine how they will work in the future. It was decided that these Sub-Commissions members and work should be folded into the work of the Commission instead of having them operate separately. This is for various reasons, including a feeling that it will be best to have discussions about these topics with the whole commission in upcoming years.

We discussed that next year we would have a working meeting and a business/programme meeting, resulting in 2 sessions. This would be a reduction from the various ISBD, UNIMARC and Cataloguing meetings that were held this year in Antwerp. One or both of the meetings will be sure to include ISBD and UNIMARC, as well as other relevant topics, like RDA, BIBFRAME, etc. We will not hold separate meetings in New York for these Sub-Commissions.

We supported the work of Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi as the IAML ISBD Liaison to the IFLA ISBD Review Group. We asked Anders Cato to follow-up with the IFLA Cataloguing Committee to ask if he can be our representative on that Committee. He did follow up on in this at the IFLA Congress in Lyon in August, and our request was accepted.  

Daniel Paradis, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), presented on the translation of RDA updates in the French version of the Toolkit. He reported that that when it was first published, the French version of RDA was up to date as of October 2012. Since then, the rewording of the instructions took place and numerous fast track changes and rule revisions were made. BAnQ, which is a member of the Francophone Editorial Committee and participated in the original translation work, is now working on translating the instructions that were changed or added in RDA since October 2012.

Because the rewording process changed a number of the recurring phrases that are used in RDA, the first task was to revise and update the French list of recurring phrases that was used during the original translation process and would also guide the translators working on the updates. This work has been completed and the actual revision work has started. This work is however not going as fast as they hoped it would because the team of translators available to do the work is smaller. Consequently, it is expected that only the updates up to December 2012 (i.e. reworded chapters 6, 9, 10 and 11) will be ready in time to be incorporated into the October 2014 update of the Toolkit. The schedule for the translation of the remaining updates has not been set yet.

(For more information on the French translation of RDA, see the article entitled Translating RDA into French by Arsenault, Paradis and Riva published in Cataloging & classification quarterly, available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2014.889059.)

Next Daniel, as a member of the JSC Music Working Group, reviewed the following draft proposals prepared by the JSC Music Working Group, including:

• 6JSC/Music/4 - Expression Access Point Elements for Musical Expressions
• 6JSC/Music/5 - Score and part bound together
• 6JSC/Music/6 - Reorganization of the 6.14 Instructions for Choosing and Recording a Preferred Title
• 6JSC/Music/7 - Designation of a Part Identified by Number
• 6JSC/Music/8 - Conventional Collective Titles for Musical Works
• 6JSC/Music/9 - Conventional Collective Titles for Literary and Musical Works
• 6JSC/Music/10 - Additional Terms for Base and Applied Materials

(More information on these is available on the JSC website or on the IAML Cataloguing Commission wiki.)

These had been posted on the wiki and made available for review by the members. After a brief discussion we agreed to give feedback to Damian Iseminger, Chair of the JSC Music Working Group, that we show support for the work done on these proposals.

Finally he reported on the implementation of RDA at BAnQ, which began using RDA for monographs in April 2013. Implementation for music started a year later in early May 2014, with audio recordings. Implementation for scores has not started yet. The delay in implementing RDA for music is explained by several factors. First, he was one of a team of three trainers at BAnQ who provided general training for RDA across the province. Each of the trainers spent about 30 days in total since April 2013 giving RDA workshops for over 600 people from school, public and academic libraries. Second, he thought it preferable to wait until MLA’s “Best Practices for Music Cataloging Using RDA and MARC21” were finalized before making final decisions on the details of implementation. And third, once these details were worked out, time was needed to work on how the new RDA elements and MARC fields would be displayed in the OPAC and in the National Bibliography of Quebec.

So far, implementation for music audio recordings is going generally well, thanks to the experience that was acquired with monographs and to the guidance provided by the “Best practices”. The issue that proves the most difficult is that of “creatorship” for popular music and jazz. Because performers can be considered creators only when they are also composers, it is felt that establishing the authorized access point for albums of popular music and jazz requires more efforts and research under RDA than under AACR2.

Anders Cato reported on EURIG (the European RDA Interest Group), which was formally founded during winter 2011/2012. EURIG is the European official counterpart to the Anglo-American cataloguing world and spokes partner to the Joint Steering Committee. EURIG aims at having one yearly official meeting, plus an extra meeting during the IFLA yearly congress if possible. A startup meeting was held at IFLA in 2012 in Helsinki. The first official meeting was held in Madrid later that year. The group reads and gives comments to most proposals being sent out from the JSC and also sends in proposals of its own.

About a year ago the need for a special spokesperson for music within the group became evident and from the JSC there was also expressed a wish to have someone from Europe in the newly established JSC Music Working Group. The issue was raised at a EURIG meeting in Stockholm about a year ago. Everyone thought it was a brilliant idea, but at the time no one had the possibility to take on the duty due to their various work loads. For the time being Anders Cato agreed to take on the task, even though he cannot do this at his present employer's expense. At the beginning of this year Anders was officially accepted as a member of the JSC music Working Group.

Jay Weitz from OCLC shared a “Report from OCLC” with our group in writing and it was added to the Commission’s wiki. Please refer there for the full report.

Mary Wedgewood from the Library of Congress reported on issues at her library, including their participation in BIBFRAME and their progress in RDA. She also reported on a World War I Sheet Music collection of 14,000 items that were digitized and also catalogued using RDA. http://www.loc.gov/collection/world-war-i-sheet-music/about-this-collection/ 

Wibke Weigand from the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek who reported on RDA in Germany. This included discussion of an exchange format of MARC and ways to create faster bibliographic records for all formats of RDA for German language libraries, not only in Germany, but also in Austria and Swizterland. By next year there will be 3 or 4 union catalogues who will all use RDA, and there is a special music group on music for RDA in Germany. 

Isabelle Gauchet Doris from the Centre de documentation de la musique contemporaine updated us on RDA in France, pointing that France's priority is FRBRisation and linked data and therefore is working in this direction on the evolution of its rules and standards, while aiming for maximum interoperability with RDA.

Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi reported on Italy and cataloguing issues. They have no plan to apply RDA at this time, because they have their own rules, which were recently completed. These new rules also have ways they handle music uniform titles. 

Mr. Hafner reported that he had been in contact throughout the year with the Chair of the MLA Bibliographic Control Committee, Beth Iseminger, Harvard University, U.S.A., to continue sharing information with our two committees.

For anyone interested in the work of the commission and/or who wishes to see documents or links mentioned in this report, please contact one of the officers and they will be happy to assist you and can ensure you are added to our wiki (or please go to http://iamlcataloguingcommission.pbworks.com and request access online).

The outgoing officers are Joseph Hafner, Chair (McGill University, Montréal), Geraldine Ostrove, Vice-Chair (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.) and Anders Cato, Secretary (BTJ, Lund, Sweden).  

Respectfully submitted by Joseph Hafner, Chair.

September 12, 2014