The CAC held their annual meeting on Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 3:30pm in the New York Hilton Midtown during the ARLIS/NA 2018 Conference. The meeting was attended by members of the Committee, as well as approximately twenty ARLIS/NA members.
CAC members for the 2018-2019 year are: Bronwen Bitetti (Chair, 2nd year), William Blueher, Sherman Clarke (representative to the ALA Subject Analysis Committee), Samantha Deutch (ARLIS/NA Executive Board liaison), Marie-Chantal L’Ecuyer-Coelho, John Maier (representative to the MARC Advisory Committee), Liz O’Keefe, Maria Oldal, Andrea Puccio and Karen Stafford (representative to the ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access).
New members joining the Committee are: William Blueher, Metadata and Collections Librarian at the Watson Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Andrea Puccio, Collections Management Librarian at the Clark Art Institute; and Elizabeth O’Keefe, formerly of the Morgan Library & Museum. The CAC thanked previous member, Tamara Fultz, for her service and work on the Committee.
During the last year the Committee petitioned the Executive Board to clarify language around membership of the CAC in the Policy Manual, which was accepted. It is now clear that the Committee consists of: 1 Chair, 6 members and 1 liaison to the Executive Board. The three representatives to outside bodies are appointed additionally, are considered full committee members rather than ex officio, and need not be counted in the main membership body.
The Committee heard reports from representatives to outside bodies, summarized below.
Karen Stafford (CC:DA; midwinter report)
- Governance structure has changed. A new group called NARDAC has been created and will sit between CC:DA and the RSC. The proposal process has not been ironed out yet.
- RSC website now has selected presentations posted along with several relevant IFLA documents. LRM officially endorsed in August and that will affect 3R (RDA Toolkit update and redesign).
- They are working on FRBRoo (FRBR-object oriented) to LRMoo document coming this fall. Related to that is PRESSoo which deals with continuing resources
- 3R pushed back to June 13th from mid-April. No immediate implementation to allow for changes to be analyzed and new policy statements and training documents to be added
- CAC submitted comments in response to the RDA pop-up meeting at ALA Annual 2017. Of interest to us is that color content is a new expression value; our other comments filed away for after 3R project.
- Most of day 2 of CC:DA was about new directions for CC:DA, one interesting idea that came up was to become lobbyists for metadata and generating tools for librarians to use to advocate for metadata in our own communities.
John Maier (MAC)
- One actual proposal for the cartographic community to make it possible to put more information on digital cartography into the MARC record – passed
- One discussion paper that became a proposal and was then passed was on adding more information to the record about language to aid accessibility – link to paper
- Another discussion paper that will probably come back as a proposal: use of local indicators for subjects, pushed by the Germans, this paper proposes a machine generated provenance field in the 883 rather than a $5 in the 6xx fields – link to paper
- One of the discussion papers was just an inventory of the available remaining subfields
Sherman Clarke (SAC; midwinter report)
- FAST folks at OCLC are doing research connecting terms to Wikipedia articles and Wikidata terms (just topicals). There have been a lot of discussions here on trying to get different languages to talk better to one another, perhaps keep this in mind.
We recapped our separate meeting (2/27/2018) with Janis Young and Libby Dechman of the Policy and Standards Division at the Library of Congress on the recently accepted art-related terms for LC’s Genre/Form Terms (GFT) and next steps. A small group of terms came up during the comment period as terms that should be added (including: Pottery, Installations (Art), Multiples (Art)) and we discussed submitting those records separately. We also revisited the benefits many in the art community would get from having Reproductions as a term, as well as the difficulties it presents, but could not come to consensus and agreed to continue talking about it. Janis Young will draft an instruction sheet for the art terms, which will explicitly address the high-level application of the terms in LCGFT, separating it from more specific subject vocabularies like AAT. We will work on finalizing this with her.
The CAC discussed their work on the ArtFRAME project, which Marie-Chantal presented on in a session at this year’s conference with our colleagues from Columbia and Cornell, organized by Maria. The session was well-attended by 75 people and was very timely, impacting projects currently underway. Marie-Chantal, with Elizabeth O’Keefe, plans to turn the presentation into an Art Documentation paper which will include final results of the project, and invited participation from any other interested members. The deadline for a draft is August 1.
There was discussion about an issue currently under debate–how to model Style/Culture. The issue is that it seems natural to attach the Culture attribute to the Creator, but in art cataloging, we often have unknown creators. This situation could necessitate creating an anonymous individual, which is a solution that presents difficulties when you have a certain amount of information (ie: Unknown Flemish follower of X) and want to use a URI. Further, in some content standards, Culture and Style are a property of the Work, not the Creator. Lively discussion ensued and will continue.
Liz reminded the Committee that we were invited to give feedback on the Rare Book and Manuscripts Section Policy Statements (RBMS-PS) on sources of information without a title page, as well as some other areas regarding graphic materials.
The Committee discussed new projects to embark on. Someone in the Cataloging Section meeting asked if there were any plans to update the Cataloging Exhibition Publications: Best Practices document that is published on the CAC page of the ARLIS/NA website, which has not been updated for RDA. There was a general consensus that we should do this work. The group discussed whether the document should be more philosophical or specific in terms of application and there was agreement that a philosophical document would be useful, accompanied by examples of implementations by institutions. We discussed how best we might achieve this and where/how it should be published– on the ARLIS/NA website? In the RDA Toolkit post 3R? It was agreed that asking the larger ARLIS cataloging community for problematic examples would be helpful, so that we are able to provide some guidance for the difficult material and not just find examples that are clear-cut. Karen suggested that when this publication was finished, we might consider doing a webinar that could live on the Learning Portal about it.
There was discussion about programming for next year’s conference on cataloging artists’ books and zines and a question about publishing best practices for cataloging this type of material. We gathered names of a group of Committee members and non-Committee members who might be interested in joining on a task force on this issue.
Catablog would like to thank Cataloging Advisory Committee Chair Bronwen Bitetti for sharing these notes with us.