Friday, February 29, 2008

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).

2 comments:

  1. This post just showed up on my Bloglines, so somehow I missed it the first time.

    Anyway, congrats on the committee appointments! And, I like the new blog look.

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  2. well, I did start it back in February but just came back to it last Friday. :) And thanks on both counts.

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