National Library of Australia

Meeting 10 January 2005, ALIA House

Present: Ebe Kartus (ALIA: Chair), Ann Huthwaite (ALIA), Philip Hider (ALIA), Deirdre Kiorgaard (NLA), Julie Whiting (NLA), Rob Walls (NLA), Anne Robertson (EPC representative)
Minutes: Catherine Argus (NLA) and Susan Newbery (NLA)

Welcome

Ebe Kartus, the Chair of ACOC opened the meeting.

Deirdre introduced Catherine Argus, explaining that Catherine will be the temporary Manager of Bibliographic Standards and Policy at the National Library when Deirdre departs for twelve months overseas in January. As Deirdre has recently been promoted, the position is likely to be advertised for permanent filling some time during 2005.

Minutes and Business Arising from Previous Meeting

The minutes of the teleconference meeting held on 13 October 2004 were confirmed without amendment. There was no business arising not already covered in the agenda.

Seminar: What's in a name?

The seminar arrangements were finalised with the assistance of Ms Emma Royan-Smith, the ALIA Events Manager. For the next seminar, it was decided to give consideration to the possibility of sponsorship; a student concession rate; and the timing in relation to other events. This year the seminar has had to compete with too many other satellite events associated with the Online Conference.

ACOC Communication Strategy (including communication on progress of AACR3)

The revised Strategy, incorporating the changes agreed to at the 7 September teleconference, was tabled. The three main issues discussed in relation to the Strategy were:

  • the ACOC procedure for reporting to ALIA. It was agreed to discuss with ALIA their expectations of ACOC reporting
  • the issue of the two Catlibs email lists. This will be followed up further with ALIA head office
  • the dissemination of information about AACR3.

ACOC Brochure

The final version of the brochure was tabled. ACOC agreed on methods of dissemination of the brochure.

ACOC Website

It was agreed that photographs and biographical information for the Committee members will be added to the website. A mock-up of the revised website will be prepared, with a similar style and colour scheme to the ACOC brochure, taking away the NLA presence, and adding more links. It will be circulated to Committee members for feedback.

DDC Report

Anne tabled her report on the DDC Editorial Policy Committee (EPC) meeting held at the Library of Congress in October 2004. Anne passed on thanks from EPC to all those who provided comments and feedback. EPC is now interested in possible sites for testing the new schedules. The main points of discussion were:

  • subject terminology mapping within WebDewey. The Canadian version of WebDewey now includes subject heading links
  • the usability of WebDewey, although there are no plans to phase out print in the foreseeable future. A survey of WebDewey usage by NLA staff will be conducted
  • licenses for WebDewey and Abridged WebDewey. ACOC decided to find out about licenses for educational purposes

IT19

Rob Walls will be nominated as the ACOC representative on IT19.

Other business

It was reported that the proposed incorporation of Australian extensions into MARC 21 countries and geographic area codes would be considered by the MARC Advisory Committee on 15-16 January. The proposed 042 anuc authentication code would also be considered at the same meeting. If the proposals are successful, they will be publicised on Catlibs and Kinetica-l.

It was reported that there is ongoing discussion on the issue of Kinetica contributing headings to LCNA. The technological difficulties of exchanging data between two different databases is one of the issues yet to be addressed.

JSC business - Outline of the schedule and process for AACR3

The AACR3 revision schedule, through to the anticipated June 2007 publication release, was tabled and discussed. The final deadline for comments on Part I to Deirdre is 28 March 2005. ACOC decided to circulate Part I to selected key people in the Australian cataloguing community for any further input they might offer before March 2005.

Two additional scheduled activities were highlighted: the Review of Examples and the Review of Rules for Digital Media. The Review of Examples is being chaired by Denise Lim (Standards Division, Libraries and Archives Canada), and Deirdre nominated Catherine Argus to be on this Committee. Part I was then discussed in detail. A summary of some of the main discussion points follows.

General rules

After looking closely at Part I, there appeared to be a few rules that could be covered in A, rather than separated into B or C. This caused ACOC to consider what determines whether or not a rule should be General and in Chapter A. The consensus was that if the rule is a general principle that can be applied to all resources with the relevant characteristic, then it should go in Chapter A. If the rule would have to specify for a particular type of resource (e.g. if it is projected media then …) then it should have its own chapter in B or C.

GMDs

It was suggested that if there must be two facets to GMDs that it would make more sense to reverse the order, as the medium qualifies the content, ie, the medium GMD followed by the content GMD. Philip also made the further suggestion that one of the lists should be made into adjectives, preferably the medium list if it is to come before content.

ACOC agreed to the suggestions that both the content and medium GMDs should be mandatory rather than optional. From the user perspective it would be very useful for everything to be qualified as there would be no uncertainty as to the type of format of resources. For the MARC coding of GMDs if they were both to be mandatory, it was agreed that two separate subfields would maximise the usability, rather than depending on coded data which is less reliably input.

ACOC agreed that the Medium GMD "digital" was not specific enough. It was agreed that there should be two new terms to replace "digital", one for remote access and one for physical format. Suggested terms were "digital remote access" and "direct access".

ACOC agreed that the Content GMD "music" should be changed to "musical notation" to make it unambiguous. ACOC also agreed that Chapter B2 should be called "Musical Notation" rather than "Music".

Chapter C7: Digital Media

Concern was expressed that remote access resources are still not dealt with adequately. It was suggested that there should be a rule somewhere directing cataloguers to describe remote access resources according to content. However the problem is that the technical description of such resources is currently covered only in Section C. ACOC considered, but decided against, proposing that all of C7 could be absorbed into Part A.

Next meeting

During the first two weeks of March. To be arranged by email.

The meeting closed at 5.15pm.