MARC Formats/Metadata Subcommittee Joint Business Meeting Report
MLA Annual Meeting 2015, Denver, Colorado
Submitted by Sandy Rodriguez, MARC Formats Subcommittee Chair; Lisa McFall, Metadata Subcommittee Chair; and James Soe Nyun, Encoding Standards Subcommittee Incoming Chair
The MARC Formats and Metadata Subcommittees of BCC held their second joint meeting on Friday, February 27, 2015, with over 40 people in attendance. The minutes of the 2014 joint business meeting of the subcommittees were approved by the voting members.
MAC Report
Sandy Rodriguez, chair of the MARC Formats Subcommittee, summarized her report on the MARC Advisory Committee. The MARC Advisory Committee met during both ALA Annual and Midwinter conferences. At the Midwinter conference, MLA presented a paper on defining subfield $e to code number of ensembles in MARC 382 (Medium of Performance), for both
bibliographic and authority records. The paper passed. The subfield coding will be made available in the next MARC Update, and OCLC will work on programmatically fixing subfield $n (number of performers) in cases when it was used to code number of ensembles. Also during the Midwinter MAC meeting, the Canadian Committee on MARC (CCM) presented a discussion
paper exploring solutions for recording Format of Notated Music in MARC. MLA weighed in on the importance of establishing a field for Format of Notated Music, preferring field 348, and recommended that it be available in both bibliographic and authority formats. CCM will becoming back to MAC with a MARC proposal on Format of Notated Music during ALA Annual 2015.
ALA Midwinter Summary
Lisa McFall, chair of Metadata Subcommittee, provided her report remotely via Skype. At ALA Midwinter, the Metadata Interest Group (MIG) had two presentations, one on using VIAF for finding additional matches to personal and corporate name files that were missed by the library’s authority vendor and the other on Linked Data initiatives of the National Library of Medicine. A link to the slides from these presentations is available at: http://alamw15.ala.org/node/25875. At the MIG business meeting, it was announced that there would be a virtual pre-conference held June 2-4 with a focus on the future of metadata services. The ALCTS office will be handling the registration process for this, with additional information about how to register forthcoming. The Metadata Standards Committee (MSC) meeting included comments and discussion on the Checklist for Evaluating Metadata Standards that was developed by MSC and sent out for comments shortly before ALA Midwinter. The MLA BIBFRAME Task Force submitted feedback to MSC on their Checklist. Based on the limited window for submitting feedback, the decision was made to continue to solicit comments. MSC is currently seeking guest editors to contribute to its blog and anyone with interest in doing this should reach out to Jenn Riley, co-chair of MSC.
OCLC Report
In the interest of time, Jay Weitz declined to give a verbal report on OCLC and directed people to the written report available at:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yiGpqWrFl0httV63uT8jNKKNpWLfOn8LAm7MCwsAgoU/edit?usp=sharing.
Library of Congress Report
Karen Lund announced that MODS 3.6 standards are available on the Library of Congress’ website. Steve Yusko provided a written report and highlighted that MARC Update 19 was published online in October 2014. This included minor changes to subject idiosyncrasies, including in Cataloger’s Desktop. Vendor records and cataloging were covered at the MOUG meeting.
PBCore Report
Thom Pease from the Library of Congress provided a brief history of the development and purpose of PBCore. He summarized his involvement on behalf of MLA with a subgroup of others working to revise PBCore and map PBCore metadata. Additional volunteers from MLA will be recruited once the new membership of the Encoding Subcommittee is confirmed. Version 2.1 of PBCore is anticipated for release at the end of March 2015, while work continues on the development of PBCore 3.0 which will radically rethink some of the larger issues in the metadata schema. Thom has also been involved with a group mapping PBCore metadata to MARC. Further volunteers from Encoding will be sought to help.
Other Updates
Sandy Rodriguez noted that an error had been corrected in the MARC documentation regarding the repeatability of subfield $s (Total number of performers) in MARC Bibliographic and Authority 382 (Medium of Performance), changing it from repeatable to non-repeatable. Lisa McFall announced the official release of the Metadata for Music Resources site (formerly named the Music Metadata Clearinghouse). She thanked the current and past members of the Metadata Subcommittee that worked diligently on this resource and also thanked web editors, Katie Buehner and Jen Matthews for bringing the site live. She asked that feedback be sent to her or Jim Soe Nyun.
Lisa reported that ProMusicDB was approached by a major online streaming company to start a working group whose mission is to create a decentralized rights management system. ProMusicDB is also waiting to hear if they were selected for a grant through NEH.
Kimmy Szeto provided an update on the progress of the MLA BIBFRAME Task Force. The Task Force has been working since October/November 2014 with the goals of examining transformation related to music, creating application profiles for music materials, and recommending some strategies for MLA’s continuing development of BIBFRAME. Members of the Task Force are currently catching up on the development of BIBFRAME and looking into genre/form, medium, event, and sequence. They will also be looking into how each indicator will be translated from MARC to BIBFRAME to see if there’s a current system that works and what can be improved.
New Business
There was much discussion on three MARC Formats-related issues which may lead to MARC proposals in upcoming MAC meetings: (1) The group discussed the need to examine all of the score definitions in MARC Bibliographic 008/20 (Format of music) to better clarify which code values to select without referencing a content standard and to draft best practices for further
guidance, given the challenge of RDA’s broader definition of score. Daniel Paradis noted that Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is also interested in this issue and may be able to work with the new Encoding Standards Subcommittee to bring a joint MAC proposal forward. (2) Mark Scharff brought up the issue of using 028 to record distributor numbers for publishers acting as
distributors and also the issue of which indicator value to use. Kathy Glennan suggested that an update to the field definition and scope of 028 may be the best solution. (3) Further enhancement of 382 (Medium of Performance) is on the horizon with a need to define subfields $3 and $5, and a re-examination of the need to code for total number of ensembles.
It was announced that the reorganization of BCC was officially approved by the MLA board. As part of this, it was decided that the MARC Formats Subcommittee and the Metadata Subcommittee would be merged to become the Encoding Standards Subcommittee. Pending board approval, Jim Soe Nyun will be the chair of the merged Subcommittee.
Peter Hirsch, Deb Kuczak, Molly O’Brien, and Ann Shaffer of the Metadata Subcommittee and Mary Huismann and Robert Simon of the MARC Formats Subcommittee rotated off at the end of the 2015 MLA meeting. It was announced that applications for new positions on the new Encoding Standards Subcommittee would be accepted and announcements of the new subcommittee members would be made in April.