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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 53| October 2001
Australian Committee on Cataloguing Meets in Canberra
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The Australian Committee on Cataloguing (ACOC) held its annual meeting on 10 September 2001 at ALIA House in Canberra. ACOC conducts much of its business by teleconference, but holds a yearly face-to-face meeting. ACOC is a joint Australian Library and Information AssociationNational Library of Australia committee charged with monitoring and influencing developments in national and international cataloguing and classification. The September meeting of ACOC was devoted mainly to briefing the Australian delegate to the Joint Steering Committee (JSC) for the Revision of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), which is meeting in Ottawa in October. The ALIA representatives are Ann Huthwaite, Susanne Moir, and Helen Hoffmann. National Library representatives are Peter Haddad, Deirdre Kiorgaard and Julia Trainor. Among the topics discussed at the meeting was a paper on whether to continue to use the general material designation (GMD) in cataloguing. GMDs are currently used in cataloguing records to indicate the type of material being described e.g. microform, manuscript, map, etc. |
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Above left: The Australian Committee on Cataloguing |
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ACOC strongly supported the function of the GMD in the catalogue. It provides a prominent indication to the catalogue user of the type of material being displayed. However, ACOC was aware of the fact that GMDs lack specificity and do not convey more than one attribute of an item, for example a serial map in electronic form can be designated as a map or an electronic resource but not both. ACOC agreed that the resolution of the GMD problem should not be attempted at this stage. It should be scheduled for resolution after the following essential tasks have been completed:
Another interesting paper attempted to provide a statement of principles on which the cataloguing code should be based. ACOC agreed that the list of principles in the paper should be included in the Introduction to AACR, and suggested that two additional principles of disambiguation and uniqueness, should also be included. ACOC considered that a statement about the context of AACR could usefully be included in the Introduction. Such a statement of scope could refer to the place of AACR in the context of other standards used for bibliographic description and access, such as MARC, ISBN and ISSN agency standards. ACOC also discussed whether the scope of AACR could be extended to include descriptive data used for collection management, such as preservation and rights management. While such data is used directly by collection managers rather than by catalogue users, the data is used to underpin services to users via the catalogue. Other matters discussed by ACOC included revisions to the rules in Chapter 3 of AACR dealing with the cataloguing of cartographic materials, and Chapter 12 dealing with serials and integrating resources. These major rule revisions will be issued next year. Ann Huthwaite, who is the Chair of the JSC for the Revision of AACR reported that strategic planning would be the first item on the agenda for the next meeting in October. ACOC considered that the strategic issue of the highest priority for AACR should be the revision of rule 0.24 to deal with format variation, and that this needs to be addressed before the GMD issue or the reorganisation of Part 1 of AACR. ACOC will also be reviewing its terms of reference and membership and reporting to ALIA by 1 October for presentation to the ALIA Board on 9 October. Committee members expressed a desire to increase the involvement and input of cataloguers throughout Australia in the work of the Committee. More information about ACOC and its activities may be found on its
homepage at: www.nla.gov.au/lis/stndrds/grps/acoc/acoc.html |
Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: dthomas@nla.gov.au