Report from the Cataloguing Committee Open Session

Cataloguing Commission

Report from IAML 2015 in New York

In New York at the Juilliard School the Cataloguing Commission held a business meeting on Monday June 22 from 16:00 to 17:30. Joseph Hafner, the current Chair of the Cataloguing Commission, chaired the meeting. Daniel Paradis, the Vice Chair, was present at the meeting. Anders Cato, the Secretary, sent his regrets, because he was not able to attend the meetings. The second business meeting on Friday June 26 from 11:00 to 12:30. About 15 members from various countries were present at each session. 

After introductions were made at the beginning of the first meeting, we started on a discussion of the name of the Commission. After everyone had a chance to review the issues related to the name and compare what other organizations are doing with naming similar groups, the consensus from the group was that we should change the name of the Commission to be the Cataloguing and Metadata Commission. The Chair will follow-up with the Secretary General for next steps for re-naming the group.

We then started a lengthy conversation about next steps for our two Sub-commissions. First of all we affirmed the important work that has been done by these Sub-commissions and our will to find new ways to continue this work into the future as appropriate. We reviewed that last year we decided to not have the two Sub-commissions meet separately during the New York Congress, but instead to include any business within our regular Commission Meetings. We also want to respect the time of everyone involved and there was much overlap of people involved with the three groups, as well as a desire to find ways to meet more regularly throughout the year virtually (wiki, email, Skype, etc.)  or on conference calls to keep the Commission's work moving ahead without having to wait a year in-between meetings. We also want to be responsive to requests from other groups who want our collaboration or input on various issues, while taking into account the various points of view from our members in any documents we take forward to other organizations like IFLA. Only meeting during the annual conference is not enough for us to be effective, and we would like to try new methods to keep up with the ever-changing issues related to cataloguing and the various communities of practice. Of course we also realize that we can have time set aside at the annual conferences for business meetings, and if one of the topics needs special attention, like ISBD, we can arrange for a special meeting or meetings to discuss issues in person, along with the work being done throughout the year. 

After much discussion of the pros and cons of separate versus together, by the second meeting we agreed that the chairs of the UNIMARC and ISBD Sub-commissions, Isabelle Gauchet Doris and Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi, should become members of the leadership team for the Cataloguing Commission, along with the Chair, Vice-Chair and Secretary, so that we would have five members leading our Commission. They would act as liaisons for the work on UNIMARC and ISBD and work with the other members of the Executive and any interested members from the Commission to carry out the work in these areas. In the future we could include other liaisons as appropriate. We will start working towards this, and a next step is to update the Terms of Reference and submit them to the appropriate body of IAML for approval. We would like to have the new Executive Team meeting quarterly to plan and review issues for the group. We cannot wait until the annual meeting to ensure things are moving ahead, so we will meet throughout the year. Any interested persons can contact the Chair or other members of the Commission to become involved in our work in these areas.

It was agreed that the members of the elected representatives of the Cataloguing Commission and the appointed heads of the two Sub-Commissions will plan to meet in the fall and winter virtually to keep the work of the Commission going, along with regularly reviewing issues on our wiki to keep discussions going and get feedback on topics from the members. At the next year's meeting the Commission will hold two business meetings again, like we did this year, and not necessarily have separate meetings planned for the Sub-commissions. 

The members felt this will help us continue the important work done in the areas of UNIMARC and ISBD, and be more responsive to questions and activities involved in this work. Massimo will continue liaising and working with the IFLA bodies responsible for maintaining ISBD and UNIMARC. As part of this work, the UNIMARC Sub-commission brought forward with the Ufficio Ricerca Fondi Musicali a proposal seeking to create new fields (223, 423 and 523) in the UNIMARC authority format for names of fictitious characters in performance-related resources.

Daniel Paradis reported on the progress made with the French translation of the updates of RDA. The August release of the RDA Toolkit will incorporate updates to chapters 10, 18, 24 and 29 as well as to appendices C and F, bringing these sections of RDA up to date with the English version of RDA as to October 2014. The list of corrections and revisions to the French version of RDA included in the August 2015 release of the RDA Toolkit is available at this address: http://www.rdatoolkit.org/sites/default/files/modifications_rda_201508_0.pdf.

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 various cataloguing projects and work done in her unit at the Library.

Susanne Frintrop, the Vice president of IAML Germany, presented a report from Germany. On 1 October 2015, the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, DNB) will begin producing cataloguing data entirely according to the rules Resource Description and Access (RDA). All Union Catalogues and libraries in Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland will follow within the following three months. From October to December 2015 will be held RDA-training in all Union Catalogues. The public libraries are not connected to the Union Catalogues, but training in the public libraries will take place from 2016.

Forty changes to the data format required for the transition from RAK (the former rules “Regeln für die alphabetische Katalogisierung”) to RDA must be implemented by the system providers in the library systems in October 2015 (Mappings: https://wiki.dnb.de/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=99090449 ). In Authority data (“Gemeinsame Normdatei” (GND)) is already an internal data format in use, which is very heavily based on MARC 21. In bibliographic data there are mainly two different data formats in use according to the 2 different library systems: PICA (OCLC) and Aleph (Exlibris). In the Aleph-Union-Catalogues the title data field is an extended MAB2 format (Germany: BVB, HBZ, KOBV, OBV;Switzerland : IDS; Austria: OBV). The PICA-Union-Catalogues uses a different internal format (Germany: SWB, DNB, GBV, HEBIS, ZDB), and because of that the centrally produced training material will be format neutral.

A “thematic group BFG” of the “UAG music” (Music working group as part of the RDA-project in German-speaking countries) is working on a list of controlled vocabulary for medium of performance and genre/form, but currently only for use in the AAP. The basis for this vocabulary to be developed are different previously used vocabulary lists in the German Union Catalog SWB, in the Swiss Union Catalog  IDS, in the RDA itself and in the formerly used standard “RAK-Musik." As far as possible the LCMPT terms have an ID-number assigned to the German terms and there are explanations and instructions for use.

Controlled vocabulary for aspects of medium of performance and the genre/from is currently only recognized for works in the authority files of GND, but not for expression in the title files. Also, this includes vocabulary from the old GND, which has not been used before for sheet music or sound recordings but only for books about music in German Union Catalogs.  A mandate for the development of vocabularies also for use in MARC21 field 382 and 380 in both authority files for works (GND) and title data for expressions is still pending. This is unfortunate, because the lack of controlled vocabulary for these important attributes could help to improve catalogues by faceting the medium of performance and genre/form.  A hindrance for the development of the vocabulary for works and expressions levels is the formulation in RDA 6.15 stating, "Medium of performance is a core element when needed to differentiate a musical work from another work with the same title." More details for the RDA Project in D-A-CH can be found at:  https://wiki.dnb.de/display/RDAINFO/Neues+aus+dem+RDA-Projekt

Isabelle Gauchet Doris from France reported on the French RDA working group, which is now part of the new program called "Bibliographic Transition”. She said that the priority today in France is to go to FRBR and linked data, and that RDA is a way, but not the only way in their minds. They are trying to make the national standards move to match the FRBR model, while approaching RDA as much as possible. In particular, they have made proposals on musical arrangements to RDA to make the access points more precise, but they haven't heard back from the JSC (Joint Steering Committee) on their proposal. 

There was a brief discussion about the RDA revision proposal prepared by the Finnish Music Group, which will go to the JSC for their review. The proposal seeks to add two alternatives to 6.14.2.5.2 (Preferred Title Consisting Solely of the Name of One Type of Composition). The first would allow an agency to always record the accepted form of the name of one type of composition in a language preferred by the agency. The second would have the effect of allowing an agency to always record the accepted form of the name of one type of composition in the plural, if desired. We will look forward to the response by the JSC to this proposal.

Damian Iseminger and Tracey Snyder presented information from the the February 2015 report of the Music Library Association's Bibliographic Control Committee. The full report is available on the Commission's wiki. Damian also reported proposals prepared by the JSC Music Working Group and which will be discussed by the JSC at their November meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi from Italy reported that they have worked on Italian rules on music uniform titles. For the Italians there is no plan to adopt RDA at this time, because they have their own rules, which were recently implemented.

Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi reported on the work of the IFLA ISBD Review Group. There is at present a discussion on the strategic plan for the standard, as a few members of the IFLA Standing Committee of the Cataloguing section think that the next revision, besides considering the new FRBR Consolidated model as its basis, should be simplified and become more generic, while other think that it should be further developed, and made compliant with the FRBR Consolidated model. The discussion will continue in an extra meeting of the Cataloguing section, during the next IFLA Congress to be held in Cape Town, August 15-20, 2015. The ISBD Review Group is waiting for the approval of the FRBR Consolidated model before starting the revision of the ISBD. In order to have more information on the ISBD, a survey on the use of the ISBD throughout the world was launched in 2014; the results will be presented at the IFLA conference.

In the meantime, the ISBD Linked Data Study Group has met in Paris in December and worked on developing the unconstrained ISBD namespace, to be published in the Open Metadata Registry in a short time, and on mappings and alignments of ISBD element sets and vocabularies with other namespaces. The RDA Toolkit already hosts the alignment of ISBD with RDA/ONIX, published in appendix D. A complete mapping between ISBD and RDA has been approved, and one between ISBD and the existing edition of FRBR is almost complete. The Guidelines for translations of the IFLA ISBD namespace in RDF is intended to encourage, support and give guidance to professionals on the process of translations of the ISBD namespace have been published in the IFLA website, and an ISBD Application profile is in preparation. Guidelines on the use of the ISBD namespaces are being prepared; the work on examples is ongoing and it is expected that the Guidelines will be published by the end of the year.

A Croatian translation of the ISBD Consolidated edition has been published, so 10 translations are now available, while 3 more are in preparation. Massimo also continues to liaise with IFLA's Permanent UNIMARC Committee (PUC), of which he is since March a full member, replacing Patricia Martini of ICCU as the Italian representative.

Massimo and Isabelle were contacted by Françoise Leresche and Rodolphe Bailly on behalf of the DOREMUS project (http://www.agence-nationale-recherche.fr/?Projet=ANR-14-CE24-0020). This project, which associates the BnF, the Philharmonie de Paris and Radio France, is funded by the National Research Agency in France. It has been designed to publish on the Linked Data Web (in RDF) a repository of musical works by converting their corpus of works and interpretations into a comprehensive model based on FRBRoo. Françoise Leresche (BnF) is steering the modeling work, Radio France is also data provider, and there are three research laboratories as technical partners.

DOREMUS is now trying to identify existing repositories to align them using semantic web technologies. In this context, our lists of musical forms and medium of performance, which are maintained by the Sub-commission on UNIMARC, have been identified. They asked us to discuss a collaboration between IAML and the DOREMUS consortium to convert our lists in RDF and make them available on the Linked Data Web. As this is already the intention of IFLA and of the Permanent UNIMARC Committee to complete the publication of UNIMARC vocabularies in RDF already present in the Open Metadata Registry (http://metadataregistry.org/user/show/id/63.html), we agreed that this proposal is a great opportunity for the work that has been done and that it is important to accept their offer, so we need to consider how this collaboration could be formalized, so to start the work as soon as possible. It is important to underline that some work will be necessary to allow the conversion of these lists in RDF. The issue of migration of the base of these codes for musical forms and medium of performance, currently hosted on the website of URFM in Italy, to the new website of IAML, was also discussed. The Commission agreed to support this work going forward. Massimo and Isabelle will work with the other members of the Executive Team to keep this work moving ahead. Anyone who is interested from the Commission will be able to volunteer to assist.

There was an open program sponsored by the Cataloguing Commission, which was on Tuesday, June 23 from 14.00 to 15.30 and called "Changes of music description in the digital age." The program was moderated by Joseph Hafner, and consisted of the following presenters and presentations: 

• Kimmy Szeto (Assistant Professor . Metadata Librarian, Baruch College, City University of New York) Music Library Associations involvement in the Bibliographic Framework Initiative: Examining medium of performance as BIBFRAME Data
•  Tracey Snyder (Music Catalog and Instruction Librarian, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY), Kevin Kishimoto (Music Cataloger, University of Chicago) Reconsidering popular music in FRBR: Toward Linked Data discovery
•  Sophie Rondeau (Technical Specialist, Cataloging and Acquisitions Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse, NY), Jennifer Vaughn (Technical Specialist, Cataloging and Acquisitions Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse, NY) Facilitating discovery of historic sound recordings: Rethinking subject access
• Jenny Doctor (Director of the Belfer Audio Archive and Associate Professor, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY), Rachel Fox Von Swearingen (Librarian for Dance, Music, Musical Theater Research and Scholarship, Syracuse University Libraries, Syracuse, NY) Facilitating discovery of historic sound recordings: Classroom and research strategies

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.comand request access online).

The officers are Joseph Hafner, Chair (McGill University, Montréal), Daniel Paradis, Vice-Chair (Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec) and Anders Cato, Secretary (Danish Agency for Culture).  

Thanks to Daniel Paradis, Anders Cato, Susanne Frintrop, Isabelle Gauchet Doris, and Massimo Gentili-Tedeschi for their assistance in reviewing and editing this report.

Respectfully submitted by Joseph Hafner, Chair.

September 4, 2015.