ALA Midwinter in Boston
CC:DA
Saturday, January 9, 2016 and Monday, January 11, 2016
Tracey Snyder, Music Library Association liaison to CC:DA through February 2016

Please see the CC:DA blog for the complete agenda and links to many reports and documents.

After introductions, adoption of the agenda, and approval of the minutes of the previous meeting, the chair, Dominique Bourassa, gave a report on CC:DA motions and other actions, July-December 2015 (mainly the approval of several RDA revision proposals, discussion papers, and responses to papers from other constituencies; also the appointment of a task force to review Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Manuscripts)).

Library of Congress Report (Dave Reser)

Reser reported on personnel changes (including the recent retirement of Librarian of Congress James Billington), a recent change in organizational structure, a plan to fill vacancies within ABA, an increase in the federal budget, recent improvements to the Cataloger’s Desktop interface, continued development of the ALA-LC romanization tables, maintenance of the LC- PCC PSs, a delay in the upcoming Phase 3B of the conversion of the LC/NACO Authority File to RDA (which will entail the addition of many ISNI identifiers but no changes to 1XX headings), the continued enhancement of LC’s online catalog, and news related to BIBFRAME (including development of tools, the pilot at LC, and the recently issued BIBFRAME AV Assessment, which is the successor to the 2014 BIBFRAME AV Modeling Study).

RDA Governance Changes: the North American Perspective (Kathy Glennan)

Glennan, the current ALA representative to the RDA Steering Committee (RSC), confirmed that in late 2015 the Committee of Principals changed its name to the RDA Board and the Joint Steering Committee changed its name to the RDA Steering Committee, and that the representation on both of those groups will be changing.

There will be a transition to a new structure from now to 2019. The RSC will have 6 permanent members, based on UN regions, plus the chair, secretary, examples editor, chair of the RDA Board (ex officio), ALA Publishing representative (ex officio), technical team liaison, translations team liaison, and wider community engagement representative. There will be two standing working groups (technical and translations); other working groups are reviewed yearly until tasks are finished (e.g., aggregates, archives, music, places, relationship designators, fictitious entities, RDA/ONIX framework, capitalization instructions). There will be a greater reliance on working groups, with the music group as a model of a successful and productive working group.

Each geographic region will develop its own structure, and Glennan is seeking input on what the North American representation structure should look like. Although there will be a single North American member of the RSC, that person will represent ALA, the Canadian Committee on

Cataloguing (CCC), and the Library of Congress (LC), and possibly also Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ). A small group could potentially be created encompassing representatives from these organizations in addition to the main RSC representative. Glennan acknowledged the challenges inherent in this proposed structure and shared a projected timeline for implementation. The impact on CC:DA should be minimal, and in fact, this may be an opportunity for CC:DA to rethink its processes.

Report on JSC/RSC Activities, July-December 2015 (Kathy Glennan)

Glennan reported that the final meeting of the JSC took place in November 2015 and that the first meeting of the RSC will take place in November 2016. Usual deadlines for the work of CC:DA will remain in place. The RSC will extend its Working Principle through the next year to avoid investing substantial resources in making changes to RDA that may be overturned due to the incorporation of FRBR-LRM.

Glennan’s report summarizes the revision proposals and discussion papers that were considered by the JSC, as well as outcomes and follow-up work needed. Revisions resulting from this year’s proposals will take effect in the RDA Toolkit in the April 2016 update.

MLA members may be interested to know that the proposal generated by OLAC to add new elements in Chapter 3 for optical discs was rejected, although the terms “stamped” and “burned” will be added to 3.9.1.3. MLA members will also want to pay attention to the conversation around conventional collective titles in RDA, which was the subject of a discussion paper by the British Library. The JSC/RSC did not reach consensus on this (although they did approve the elimination of “Laws, etc.” as a conventional collective title) and expects to receive a paper from the RSC Music Working Group in 2016 exploring issues related to conventional collective titles for music.

The numerous revision proposals and discussion papers submitted by the JSC/RSC Music Working Group generally fared well, affecting areas in 6.14, 6.15, 6.16, and 6.28. The JSC/RSC Aggregates Working Group submitted a discussion paper on RDA and FRBRoo and the treatment of aggregates and will continue its work in the coming year. The JSC/RSC Fictitious Entities Working Group submitted a discussion paper on the disposition of fictitious, pseudonymous, and nonhuman entities in RDA and the anticipated FRBR-LRM, which received full support from ALA in its advancement of the idea that RDA should continue to allow fictitious and nonhuman entities to be considered creators of works. However, this paper was rejected since it does not conform to the anticipated FRBR-LRM model, and the group was advised to begin modeling these types of entities using Nomen.

The JSC/RSC issued a moratorium on relationship designator proposals to allow the RSC Relationship Designators Working Group to complete its work before any more new terms are considered. Glennan will work with representatives from OLAC and MLA to finalize in-process audiovisual relationship designator proposals dating from earlier in 2015.

In ALA/CC:DA, the Task Force on Relationship Designators in RDA Appendix K is discharged, and its work will be referred to the RSC Relationship Designators Working Group; the Task Force on Machine-Actionable Data Elements in RDA Chapter 3 will not be discharged until the RSC creates a new working group to take on this work; the Task Force for Recording Relationships in RDA is discharged, and its work will be referred to the RSC Aggregates Working Group. A new CC:DA task force will need to be charged to continue the work that was begun as an auxiliary project of the Task Force for Recording Relationships in RDA, concerning resources consisting of more than one carrier type. A new CC:DA task force will need to be charged to review FRBR-LRM in 2016.

RDA data capture and storage (Gordon Dunsire)

Dunsire, chair of the RDA Steering Committee (RSC), gave a presentation on what the future may hold for RDA in terms of recording metadata and creating Linked Data. He began with a review of the available methods for recording relationships between various types of entities. He talked about the idea of OCR possibly serving the purpose of transcription, and imagined a future where catalogers scan title pages and rely on OCR transcriptions and crowdsourced corrections, reducing the burden on catalogers and users to be conversant with elaborate transcription rules.

Dunsire named the new entities that will be introduced in FRBR-LRM (FRBR Library Reference Model) when it is released in the spring of 2016 — Place, Time-span, Agent (which will include both Persons and Collective Agents (Families and Corporate Bodies)), and Nomen (which will include identifiers, access points, and more) — and mused on which of the techniques for recording relationships will apply to the new entities. He also talked about the changes that will be necessary in RDA to incorporate FRBR-LRM. The RDA Toolkit structure is being reviewed, and a reorganization is being planned.

Report from ALA Publishing Services (Jamie Hennelly)

Hennelly reported that the RDA Toolkit has a healthy renewal rate and that there has been an increase in consortial purchasing of subscriptions and in international usage. A revised print version of RDA will not be issued this year, but it is possible that print revisions will be issued every other year. The planned RDA Essentials is expected in April 2016 but will probably be revised soon after because the text is only current as of April 2015. Hennelly discussed various translations of RDA that are in the works, including Catalan and Norwegian. The Finnish translation was released in December, and the Italian translation will be released in March.

Report from the PCC Liaison (Lori Robare)

Robare summarized the activities of PCC’s Standing Committee on Standards and Standing Committee on Training, including the following highlights. The Standing Committee on Standards submitted proposals for relationship designators prior to the declared moratorium on relationship designator proposals and will be examining outstanding policy issues related to relationship designators in authority records. The Standing Committee on Training has compiled a list of available Linked Data training resources and will be evaluating and possibly adapting existing RDA refresher training resources.

Report of the MAC Liaison (John Myers)

Myers reported that MAC (MARC Advisory Committee) discussed two proposals, both of which passed, and 16 discussion papers, which will return as proposals or reworked discussion papers.

See the report of MLA’s liaison to MAC (Jim Soe Nyun) for details on the proposals and discussion papers that were discussed, especially those related to music (new and redefined subfields in field 382, code values in field 008/20 (Format of Music), recording distributor numbers, etc.): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxViFaIR72G1eUpOOGxxVVRfSzQ/view.