ALA Midwinter 2016 in Boston
Highlights from OLAC-CAPC (Cataloging Policy Committee of the Online Audiovisual Catalogers)
Report by Beth Iseminger, CMC Chair
Presentation: Kathy Glennan, ALA Representative to the RSC
The JSC (Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of RDA) is now the RDA Steering Committee. The RSC is undergoing a long-term reorganization. Within the next three years or so, the Library of Congress, Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, and American Library Association representatives will be consolidated, and there will be one North American representative. It is possible CC:DA will continue to exist, and any RDA concerns CAPC might have could be funneled through CC:DA to the North American representative.
CAPC’s RDA proposal to create new elements for optical disc storage format and recording method was not approved by the RSC. Some concerns with the proposal included: different instructions that should have been revised; the granularity was too extensive (35 new definitions proposed for the glossary); and the elements should apply to more than just optical discs, so the proposal should be broader. “Stamped” and “burned” were the only terms added to the glossary. The RSC did note that the encoding format vocabulary is problematic, and there may be an RSC working group to rework it.
CC:DA Report (Kelley McGrath)
Kelley asked if the RSC is pulling back from vocabularies in RDA. Kathy Glennan responded that the RSC is interested in registering vocabularies needed to support RDA. The RSC is on the verge of publishing almost everything as RDA vocabulary. Existing instructions involving RDA-specific vocabulary will be retained but the vocabulary will be deprecated to allow substitute vocabularies instead. The RSC is moving toward applications profiles, so that RDA could refer to outside vocabularies like LCMPT or the IAML medium of performance list for instrumentation terms.
One RDA proposal that CAPC is contemplating involves region encoding. Region encoding is in a subfield where every other element has a vocabulary that is specified in $2, but there is no vocabulary for region encoding. Perhaps CAPC could create one.
Library of Congress Report (Janis Young)
New legislation limits the term of the LIbrarian of Congress to 10 years, with possible reappointment.
NACO AV funnel Coordinator Report (Peter Lisius)
The University of Alabama is independent for personal names, and the University of Akron is independent for personal and corporate names. Funnel Coordinator Peter Lisius is hoping to recruit more reviewers, but the funnel also needs more independent contributors first. One goal for the funnel is to create a best practices document for NACO AV records.
Video Game Genre Task Force (Cate Gerhart)
The task force’s white paper is mostly complete. They are asking LC to agree that video games have identifiable genres.
Joint MLA/OLAC Playaways RDA Best Practices (Robert Freeborn)
The group divided the AACR2 playaways guide into its component sections, then divided it up among themselves to rewrite it for RDA. They are hoping to have most of it finished by ALA Annual 2016 and complete and ready for comments by ALA Midwinter 2017.