Conference Attendance February 2008

Let me start with I regret any and all librarian-ese written here. I am using this venue as a way of gathering my thoughts for a mini-report. I have endeavored to shed light for non-library and non-cataloger folk.


Thursday, February 21, 2008

11:00-12:30: Bibliographic Control Committee (BCC-business meeting)

12:30-2:00: Music Vocabularies and Subject Access (Subject Access Subcommittee)

• The Library of Congress is moving forward on the form-genre project with music headings being a pilot subject area.
  
• The development of an Ethnographic Thesaurus through a Mellon Foundation Grant. The beta version is available at http://www.etproject.org
• Presentation concerned primarily with social networking and social tagging
  

2:30-3:30: Teaching Music Bibliography

• Scholarly editions backbone of the collection
• RISM (International Inventory of Musical Sources)
  
• Garland Encyclopedia of World Music
  

3:30-4:30: Technical Services Round table

• Encoding level 3 records: Encouraged to enrich these records.
  

7:00-8:00: New England Chapter meeting

• Not much of a meeting, but a heck of a good time
  

8:00-9:00: Concert-Rum Soaked Crooks and Friends

• Unfortunately, I had to leave early for the drive home. At least I got to hear a bit, including the winning lyrics (here) of the Sea Shanty contest.
  

Saturday, February 23, 2008

9:00-10:00: BCC News Hour: Breaking news and reports in music cataloging

• Authorities: Can now use the musical sharp symbol rather than the pound sign in records
• Authorities & Descriptive are reviewing and commenting on RDA (Resource Description and Access-the new cataloging code)
• MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging): Currently a proposal to make the 44o field obsolete (this is a series tracing field)
  
• Subject: Discussion of form-genre headings with a potential discussion group being set up ; Under discussion is a SACO-music funnel (Subject Authority Control Program)
• Playaways report: Looking at a best practices document, which is still up for comments. Biggest challenge is determining if it is a recording or an electronic resource.
• Library of Congress Popular Sound Recordings in OCLC (Online Computer Library Center): Put in as encoding level 3 as keeping up with verification of headings was to difficult. Again any library can enrich these records and add headings.
• Early Printed Music Report should be published in 2009

10:15-11:45: RDA: Update, discussion, and implementation

• Online prototype should be available in spring 2008: will be the primary way to access the rules
• Impact on MARC21
  
• Publishers of RDA are in contact with ILS (Integrated Library System) vendors
• Does this include Open Source ILS vendors?
  
• Thematic index information will not be considered abbreviations. Opus number is still up for debate. Units of measurement will be abbreviated, but a lot of the current abbreviations are not coming over.
• Slides from this presentation are here.
  

12:00-2:00: Lunch and networking
2:00-4:00: Bibliographic Control Committee (BCC-business meeting)

• Further discussion of the form-genre project with Library of Congress among other things.
  

4:00-6:00: MLA business meeting
7:00-8:00: Cocktail hour with the MLA big band & live auction
8:00-11:00: Banquet

That is it. Doesn't seem like much does it? I will guarantee that my brain was extremely tired at the end of Saturday. Since the conference I have found out that I have been appointed to the Subject Access Subcommittee of the Bibliographic Control Committee. I am very excited about this opportunity to serve my primary professional organization. (Note: I was recently elected Secretary-Treasurer of the New England Chapter of MLA, which means I am serving both nationally and regionally).