Bibliographic Control Committee/Cataloging and Metadata Committee
Annual Report, July 2014-June 30, 2015
Submitted by Beth Iseminger, Chair

MEMBERS

BCC Members (July 2014-February 2015):

Beth Iseminger (Chair, CMC, appointed 2012), Raymond Schmidt (Chair, Authorities Subcommittee, 2013), Tracey Snyder (Chair, Descriptive Cataloging Subcommittee, 2012), Sandy Rodriguez (Chair, Subcommittee on MARC Formats, 2013), Lisa McFall (Chair, Metadata Subcommittee, 2013), Casey Mullin (Chair, Subject Access Subcommittee, 2014), Jennifer Matthews (BCC Recording Secretary/Webmaster, 2011), Alan Ringwood (editor, Music Cataloging Bulletin, 2011), Mark Scharff (NACO Music Project Coordinator), Nancy Lorimer (SACO Music Funnel Coordinator, 2012), Sue Vita (Library of Congress Representative), Jay Weitz (OCLC Representative)

CMC Members (March 2015-June 2015):

Beth Iseminger (Chair, CMC, appointed 2012), Tracey Snyder (Chair, Content Standards Subcommittee, 2012), James Soe Nyun (Chair, Encoding Standards Subcommittee, 2015), Casey Mullin (Chair, Vocabularies Subcommittee, 2014), Elizabeth Hille Cribbs (CMC Recording Secretary/Webmaster, 2015), Christopher Holden (Editor, Music Cataloging Bulletin, 2015), Linda Blair (BIBCO Music Funnel Coordinator, 2015), Mark Scharff (NACO-Music Project Coordinator, 2015), Nancy Lorimer (SACO Music Funnel Coordinator, 2012), Sue Vita (Library of Congress Representative), Jay Weitz (OCLC Representative)

REPORT ON ACTIVITIES

Reorganization of the Committee

During FY2015, the Bibliographic Control Committee was re-envisioned and reorganized as the Cataloging and Metadata Committee (CMC). The overall goal of the reorganization was to ensure that the committee structure reflected current changes and trends in librarianship and music cataloging/metadata in particular. The idea for the reorganization came from the BCC Review Task Force of 2012-2013. The new organizational structure took effect March 1, 2015. The charges for the new committee and subcommittees are given in Appendix 1 at the end of this report.

The new Cataloging and Metadata Committee is composed of three subcommittees: Content Standards, Encoding Standards, and Vocabularies. The Content Standards Subcommittee includes the combined membership of the former Authorities and Descriptive Subcommittees. The Encoding Standards Subcommittee includes the combined membership of the former MARC Formats and Metadata Subcommittees. The Vocabularies Subcommittee was renamed to encompass the full spectrum of the subcommittee’s work, including music genre and medium of performance vocabularies, and other controlled vocabularies as well.

In addition to selecting new members as usual, this year the CMC chairs’ discussion about selecting new members included strategizing how to balance the larger size of the three new committees as well as the need for added expertise in certain areas. This was particularly true for the new Encoding Standards Subcommittee, which requires a combination of members with expertise in the more traditional area of MARC format knowledge and members with knowledge of newer metadata developments, such as linked data, BIBFRAME, and other evolving standards. The chairs decided to utilize small task groups within the subcommittees as a way to divide up tasks among subcommittee members. The task groups are envisioned as a way to foster responsibility and engagement among subcommittee members and to provide a way for members to have leadership within the group, since task groups may have designated leaders or coordinators. Most task group members come from a single subcommittee, though some task groups involve participants from across CMC and beyond, at the discretion of the subcommittee chair(s) and task group leader(s).

PCC Funnels

A major development this year related to the work of the Committee was the consolidation of the music-specific PCC funnels under the MLA Cataloging and Metadata Committee umbrella. The consolidation involved the administrative move of the NACO-Music Project from MOUG to MLA-CMC. This move was intended to better coordinate music cataloging activities between MLA-CMC and the music PCC funnels. Such activities include things like collaboration on PCC policy statements, which can affect both authority work and descriptive cataloging, involving expertise from the NACO-Music Project, the BIBCO Music Funnel, and members of CMC.

CMC also worked to establish a new BIBCO Music Funnel in spring 2015. CMC voting members selected Linda Blair as the inaugural BIBCO Music Funnel Coordinator. Blair and CMC Chair Beth Iseminger spoke with members of the PCC Directorate regarding the funnel establishment process and funnel application, which has been approved. Blair attended the PCC Operations Meeting in May and spoke on behalf of the new funnel. She is also working on announcements, recruiting, and other initial activities to build up funnel membership.

With the move of the NACO-Music Project to MLA and the creation of the BIBCO Music Funnel, all three subject-specific PCC funnels are now linked with MLA-CMC organizationally, and all three funnel coordinators are active participants in work of the CMC Committee. In order to ensure visibility of the funnels within MLA and to outside constituents, a new category for PCC Funnels has been added to the MLA website under Organization Structure, and the category has also been added to the front page of CMC website as well.

Conference Programs

In addition to a preconference and program session on genre and medium vocabularies discussed under Past Goals, the Committee sponsored a program entitled “MARC to BIBFRAME: An Exploration of the Future of Cataloging” as well as sponsoring the BCC Town Hall.

Cataloging Webinars

Committee members Damian Iseminger and Casey Mullin presented the third MLA/ALA Editions webinar of 2014 entitled “RDA for Music: Classical Music Audio Recordings” in October of last year. The earlier two webinars on popular music recordings and musical scores were included in the Committee’s annual report for FY2014. Committee members are presenting three new MLA/ALA Editions webinars in calendar year 2015.

Website

This year, the Committee’s website transitioned from an older file-based site to the YourMembership platform. CMC was the first MLA committee to move to the YM platform as the basis for the committee’s own website. Much thanks is due to the three people who worked together to make this possible: former BCC webmaster Jennifer Matthews, current CMC webmaster Elizabeth Hille Cribbs, and Katie Buehner from the MLA Web Committee. They put in countless hours to convert the old website, and Hille Cribbs and Buehner continue to work hard on updates to the new site.

One of the challenges regarding CMC’s web presence was identifying updates that needed to be made to the committee website versus the MLA administrative pages. Buehner determined how to link CMC’s MLA administrative pages directly to CMC’s new YM site, which has simplified things very nicely.

Other major updates for the website included migrating some important cataloging resources, such as Thematic Indexes for Use in Library of Congress NACO Authority Files and Types of Composition for Use in Music Preferred Titles.

MLA Liaisons Work with ALA

The Chair and subcommittee chairs attended ALA meetings as MLA liaisons, where they represented the perspective of the music cataloging community on ALA committees and interest groups related to cataloging (Authority Control Interest Group (ACIG), OLAC’s Cataloging Policy Committee (OLAC-CAPC), the Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA), the MARC Advisory Committee (MAC), the Metadata Interest Group (MIG), the Metadata Standards Committee (MSC), and the Subject Analysis Committee (SAC)). The Music Cataloging Bulletin contains reports from these meetings, which will also be available on CMC’s website along with annual reports provided by the Library of Congress and OCLC representatives.

COMMITTEE HANDBOOK STATUS

The Committee’s handbook is complete, and is updated as needed. The handbook covers CMC proper as well as all subcommittees and task forces.

PAST GOALS

Establish an MLA presence in testing BIBFRAME, with the end goal of creating a BIBFRAME music profile.

• The Committee met this goal through the establishment of the BIBFRAME Task Force. Please see the annual report of the Task Force for details. CMC as whole continues to monitor BIBFRAME developments and will continue to be involved with influencing the BIBFRAME standard with relation to music materials.

Present training on use of LCMPT and LCGFT-music vocabularies.

• Recognizing the need for training on the newly minted LCMPT and LCGFT-music vocabularies, the Committee proposed a preconference on the topic for the MLA Annual Meeting in Denver. Unfortunately the preconference was not approved by MLA, but the MOUG Continuing Education Coordinator and MOUG Program Committee offered to work with our Committee to present the training as part of the MOUG meeting preceding MLA, for which we are very grateful. Please see the report of the Genre/Form Task Force for details about this training.
• Members of CMC presented an informative session directed to the general MLA audience during the MLA Annual Meeting in 2015. The session was entitled “Exploring a Faceted World: Discovering Music Resources Using Medium of Performance and Genre Terms”.
• CMC agreed to co-sponsor a session for ALA Annual 2015 in San Francisco entitled “Coming to Terms with the New LC Vocabularies: Genre/Form (Literature, Music, General), Demographic Groups and Medium of Performance”. CMC member Hermine Vermeij spoke as part of the session.

Develop and begin acting on an implementation scenario for LCMPT and LCGFT, including recommendations for local use of the vocabularies and creation of resources to assist in the process.

• The Committee met this goal through the creation of best practices documentation for LCGFT, updating of best practices documentation for LCMPT, and establishing a task group through the Vocabularies Subcommittee which is working on algorithms for deriving 382 LCMPT terms from subject headings, in collaboration with systems expert Gary Strawn from Northwestern University. Please see the annual reports of the Vocabularies Subcommittee and Genre/Form Task Force for details.

Solicit applications and select a coordinator for the new PCC BIBCO Music Funnel, and establish the funnel as an active group.

• The Committee met this goal and selected Linda Blair as the first BIBCO Music Funnel Coordinator. Some details are mentioned above under the PCC Funnels section of the Report on Activities.

Implement a new organizational structure for BCC.

• The Committee met this goal, as elaborated above in the Report on Activities.

Prepare RDA revision proposals in collaboration with other constituencies represented on the JSC Music Working Group (JMWG).

• The Committee met this goal; for the coming year, CMC has revised the goal to be “Provide expert comment on RDA revision proposals created by the JSC Music Working Group, ALA, and other constituencies, as well as other documents issued for community review.” The reason for this is that the role of CMC has evolved due to the establishment of the JMWG. The JMWG is the international group which is responsible for generating RDA revision proposals related to music; CMC now has the role (shared by other international music constituents) of responding to such proposals. There are four CMC members currently representing MLA to the JMWG: Jean Harden, Kevin Kishimoto, Raymond Schmidt, and Tracey Snyder. Additionally, MLA and CMC member Damian Iseminger is chairing the JMWG.

Propose PCC Policy Statements relating to RDA music cataloging as needed.

• The Committee met this goal and proposed policy statements relating to the following sections of RDA: 6.28.1.9.1 Implied Numbering, 6.14.2.5.2 Pluralization of Tempo Markings, and 6.14.2.7.2 and 6.28.2.3 Selections.

Contribute to continuing MARC21 developments through the MARC Advisory Committee. Communicate with the LC MARC Office on MARC issues related to music and RDA.

• The Committee met this goal. Please see the annual report of the Encoding Standards Subcommittee for details.

Collaborate as appropriate with other MLA, ALA, and music-related groups.

The Committee met this goal for FY2015 through collaborations such as the following:

• Preconference on genre and medium vocabularies co-sponsored by MLA-CMC and MOUG, with support from the Library of Congress Policy and Standards Division;
• Collaboration with OLAC regarding RDA revisions and policy statements;
• Co-sponsored session with the ALA Subject Analysis Committee for the Annual meeting on genre and medium vocabularies;
• Collaboration with the MLA EOP Subcommittee on ALA Editions webinars.

Update the BCC Procedures Manual (i.e. Committee Handbook) as needed.

• The status of this goal is ongoing. Updates were deferred this year until the reorganization of the Committee was finalized.

GOALS FOR 2015-2016

Communicate with the Library of Congress and the library metadata community on issues related to BIBFRAME and music materials. Collaborate with LC and other stakeholders regarding music-related BIBFRAME and linked data initiatives as appropriate.

Continue work on development and problem-solving related to the conversion of music subject headings to medium of performance (LCMPT), music genre (LCGFT), demographic group, geography, and other controlled, faceted terms.

Provide expert comment on RDA revision proposals created by the JSC Music Working Group, ALA, and other constituencies, as well as other documents issued for community review.

Propose PCC Policy Statements relating to RDA music cataloging as needed.

Contribute to continuing MARC21 developments through the MARC Advisory Committee. Communicate with the LC MARC Office on MARC issues related to music and RDA.

Maintain cataloging best practices documents (including RDA, LCMPT, and LCGFT best practices).

Maintain the Metadata for Music Resources site. Consider new or alternate methods of staging the site as appropriate.

Leverage committee members’ expertise by providing educational and training presentations, such as those that have been part of the MLA-ALA Editions series of webinars.

Collaborate as appropriate with other MLA, ALA, and music-related groups.

Update the Procedures Manual (committee handbook) as needed.

• Specific goal: Complete updates related to the Committee’s reorganization by the MLA Annual Meeting in 2016.

Continue revising, updating, and expanding the new CMC website.

• Specific goal: ensure all links have been migrated from the old BCC website to the new CMC website.
• Specific goal: optimize pages for web setting versus former flat-file web structure.

These goals support the MLA Strategic Plan goal areas of Organizational Excellence, Value of the Profession, and Education, through CMC’s continuing commitment to excellence and its collaborations with other national and international library organizations; through the visibility which CMC brings to MLA through our liaison and other professional relationships; through the relevancy of CMC’s work to current issues in librarianship, especially CMC’s work with the developing RDA standard and the LC thesaurus vocabularies; and through CMC’s efforts to use technology to provide online training for music metadata practitioners.

Appendix 1: CMC Committee and Subcommittee Charges, Effective March 1, 2015

Cataloging and Metadata Committee (CMC) Charge:

The Cataloging and Metadata Committee ensures and enhances access to and organization of music and music-related resources based on established and evolving content standards, metadata encoding standards, and vocabularies. The Committee is made up of representatives of the music cataloging and metadata community and represents the interests of this community by sharing our subject expertise in the development and revision of national and international standards and vocabularies for the description of music resources and for the encoding of information about such resources. The Committee maintains active communication with the music cataloging and metadata community and between music catalogers and metadata librarians and the Library of Congress. In addition, the Committee disseminates relevant information on cataloging and metadata to the membership of MLA. The Committee collaborates with the Library of Congress, with committees that are part of the American Library Association, and with other groups in support of the Committee’s charge and the mission of the Music Library Association. The Committee and Subcommittee chairs serve as MLA liaisons to relevant groups, particularly those associated with ALA.

Content Standards Subcommittee Charge:

The Content Standards Subcommittee participates in the development and revision of content standards related to description and access for music resources. The Subcommittee recommends MLA policy on the content of descriptive data elements and the formulation and management of authority data. Working through the appropriate channels and groups, the Subcommittee proposes changes to content standards as deemed necessary for access to music resources. The Subcommittee works on other matters deemed pertinent by the Cataloging and Metadata Committee and works with other CMC subcommittees or task groups as appropriate. The Subcommittee maintains documentation and MLA best practices related to topics specific to the subcommittee’s work.

Encoding Standards Subcommittee Charge:

The Encoding Standards Subcommittee participates in the development and revision of metadata encoding standards and data models used to describe music resources. The Subcommittee reviews and evaluates changes and enhancements to encoding standards, giving particular attention to their impact on the music library community. Working through the appropriate channels and groups, the Subcommittee proposes changes to encoding standards and data models as deemed necessary for access to music resources. The Subcommittee recommends MLA practice for the application of metadata standards to music materials. The Subcommittee works on other matters deemed pertinent by the Cataloging and Metadata Committee and works with other CMC subcommittees or task groups as appropriate. The Subcommittee maintains documentation and MLA best practices related to topics specific to the subcommittee’s work.

Vocabularies Subcommittee Charge:

The Vocabularies Subcommittee participates in the development and revision of controlled vocabularies applicable to music resources. Such vocabularies include subject, genre, form, medium of performance, types of composition, and other controlled lists of terms. The Subcommittee recommends MLA practice for the assignment of controlled vocabulary terms and recommends changes and additions to vocabularies as deemed necessary. The Subcommittee also represents music librarians’ interests in the development of music-related portions of classification schemes. The Subcommittee works on other matters deemed pertinent by the Cataloging and Metadata Committee and works with other CMC subcommittees or task groups as appropriate. The Subcommittee maintains documentation and MLA best practices related to topics specific to the subcommittee’s work.