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Cataloging Advisory Committee conference

2019 ARLIS/NA Cataloging Advisory Committee (CAC) Annual Meeting Report

The CAC held their annual meeting on Thursday, March 28, 2019 at 12:30pm in the Grand America Hotel, Salt Lake City during the ARLIS/NA 2019 Conference. The meeting was attended by members of the Committee, as well as approximately twenty ARLIS/NA members.
CAC members for the 2019-2020 year are: Andrea Puccio (Chair, 1st year), Bronwen Bitetti, William Blueher, Sherman Clarke (representative to the ALA Subject Analysis Committee), Marie-Chantal L’Ecuyer-Coelho (representative to Art and Rare Materials BIBFRAME Ontology Extension, not in attendance), John Maier (representative to the MARC Advisory Committee), Liz O’Keefe, Maria Oldal, Sarah Osborne Bender, Alexandra Provo, Rachel Resnik (ARLIS/NA Executive Board liaison), and Karen Stafford (representative to the ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access).

New members joining the Committee are: Sarah Osborne Bender, Head of Technical Services at the National Gallery of Art and Alexandra Provo, Metadata Librarian, New York University.

Bronwen Bitetti
Cataloging Exhibition Publications revision update
Revision is underway, the current plan is to combine all the sections into one document which will be updated to RDA. There have been a few calls out to the community over the last year for cases that people felt needed clarification, thank you to all who responded. Some of the points we will be focusing on that didn’t come up in those calls
● Questions on determining the primary access point
● Uniform titles and Conventional Collective Titles (CCTS)
● Added titles
● Application of relationship designators
● Curator
● Application of genre/form headings
We have made progress in revision but we need to see 3R and be able to add rule numbers and determine how this document will relate to the application profile for the toolkit. With luck and a lot of work we are hoping we will be able to deliver something next year. In addition we have also identified some issues that we initially swallowed as a community but that we have now had a chance to unravel them a bit and this is perhaps a chance to do some advocacy.

Genre/Form terms
6 new terms have been accepted

Photography, artistic
Official word from Libby Dechman, it is fine art so it may be subdivided chronologically without the intervening $x History. It has been added to the LC manual PDFs but will not appear on Cataloger’s Desktop until its next update.

Discussion points from ARLIS/NA liaisons:

John Maier
MARC Advisory Committee (MAC)
● Proposal 2 Defining source for names and titles
○ PCC task force looking at URIs and a way to define where the string is coming from, proposing a $2. The difficulty here is that it would be hard to ensure what is in the $2 applies to the entire string (particularly tricky with a name/title heading)
● Intertitles and transcripts discussion paper
○ was accepted and will most likely be coming back as a proposal at annual

Sherman Clarke
Subject Analysis Committee (SAC)
● New genre/form list for video games, not officially accepted by LC as part of LCGFT but has been posted on the OLAC site
● Richard Sapon-White from Oregon State University gave a presentation on his work to analyse the tribes, subtribes and bands of Oregon and whether they were in the NAF or LCSH and how their hierarchy was established and played out in bib records etc.
● New SACO funnel for Latin America and indigenous peoples of the Americas
● LC is working on making any former headings with multiples explicit. E.g. religions using Buddhism, Christianity, et. Similar to the validation records for strings with free floating headings
● PCC task force on how to get rid of ISBD punctuation or rather how to have it machine supplied. Complicated
● NACO participants must now add your own statistics

Bronwen Bitetti for Marie-Chantal L’Ecuyer-Coelho
Art and Rare Materials BIBFRAME Ontology Extension (ARM) Task Force
● Newly established group, Marie-Chantal will be the ARLIS/NA liaison.
● Joint effort of ARLIS, RBMS, and SAA
● First meeting will be next month

Karen Stafford
Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access (CC:DA)
● RDA news, 3R project coming to a close, text will be frozen as of April. It will be going out to the translation teams for the rest of this year, projected completion in December with the new toolkit going live in January 2020. Old version will stay up for 1 year then we will be expected to be on new RDA
● The new toolkit will have a numbering system but the numbering is random
● The biggest impact on our community will most likely be the need for front end application profiles in order to use the new RDA, RSC will create a model profile (probably a book) but the cataloging community will be expected to fill in the gaps. There is now a new RDA YouTube channel
● IFLA work on LRMoo to replace FRBRoo is continues (oo = object oriented) should be in harmony with the CIDOC reference model that is maintained by the museum community, NARDAC does not currently expect it to have an impact on new RDA (seems unlikely)
● Still working to find a solution to the narrowed definition of “person”. Issue since we need to bring non-human personages (and fictitious characters) into bibliographic records. Still no word on how this affects anonymous artists or a workshop of type of situation
● No final word on how diachronic works will be treated
● We attempted to propose a change to the role designator “curator” before the text was frozen to change the relationship from agent to item to agent to a higher level (work perhaps?) but the answer we received was that the special collections community needed it at the item level but we will follow up after they open up for proposals

Projects continuing in 2019/2020

Artists’ book thesaurus
Several years ago the Book Arts SIG created a list of terms for cataloging artists’ books. There was interest in publishing the list as a thesaurus that could then allow the terms to be incorporated into bib records. It was forwarded to the CAC for review. We reviewed the list and put together our concerns, comments, and recommendations for next steps and sent that to Heather Slania and Suzanne Rackover.

Potential for collaboration with Andrea Joosten and the German language librarians who are working on an RDA compliant artists’ book cataloging manual. This has come up in past conference as a possible project for this group so we are very interested to see if we can work together on this.

Communication/Call for participation

CAC membership is restricted by the organization’s bylaws to a small group which means we can’t always complete the variety of projects we have in as timely fashion as we would like. We also recognize that we could often benefit from subject specialties and experience. We have been thinking about could we have a “friends of the CAC”? People who are interested in working with the committee on a specific project or consulting on a topic.
There was a general agreement with this idea from the attendees and several marked their interest on the attendance sheet.
Sherman – another area where we could perhaps use a slack channel.

Questions/Discussion

Liz- There will be an article in the fall issue of Art Documentation on ArtFrame by Liz, Marie-Chantal, and Melanie Wacker

Karen – Any ideas on RDA related content at next year’s conference? What will be useful?
Andrea – Too unknown right now, also there have been several delays. Where will they be by next April?

[Unknown attendee] – Perhaps it will be too soon to have a panel, maybe just scheduling a time to have an RDA discussion group (support group)

Lu Wainer – Maybe instead of focusing on RDA we could focus on LRM? So when we actually get new RDA we will understand the underlying structure

Bronwen – I would love to hear how the Bibframe test is going.

Lu Wainer – I am part of LD4P. They are developing Sinopia on top of LC’s bibframe editor. It is supposed to be done in April and they are starting to release training material. A few task forces and working groups are ready, there’s one for profiles, rare materials, authorities look ups. There has been some discussion about ISNI because it is not linked data yet, supposedly will be by June. Everything is just kind of frozen because the actual editor isn’t done yet.

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Call for proposals

Greetings, Catalogers (and Cataloging-Enthusiasts):

As you’ve likely already gathered, proposals are needed for the ARLIS/NA 2020 Annual Conference, “Preserve, Enhance, Reimagine” April 21-25 in St. Louis.  The deadline is Sunday June 16.

To ensure that relevant/enticing cataloging content is represented in the overall program, please consider submitting a proposal or contributing ideas of what you’d like to see so that we can develop these further as a group. To assist with brainstorming I’ve set up a Tricider forum here: http://www.tricider.com/brainstorming/2tXXqrafdJ3 ; there is also our Slack workspace.

Thanks!
-Adam

General submission info: https://www.arlisna.org/stlouis2020/submissions/openconf.php

Categories
conference section meeting

2019 ARLIS/NA Cataloging Section Meeting Recap

The Cataloging Section met for its annual meeting March 28, 2019, led by Emily Walz in the Envoy Room of the Grand America Hotel, Salt Lake City. At least 28 members attended.

 

The meeting began with the introduction of Emily Walz, Librarian in the Art & Architecture Collection at the New York Public Library, and Adam Robinson, Cataloging and Metadata Services Librarian at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Vice-Moderator/Moderator Elect).

 

Announcements highlighted cataloging-centric offerings at this year’s conference, including three workshops: (The Art of OpenRefine: Data Manipulation, Reconciliation & Grel; Leveraging MarcEdit to Bring (Better) Data to Light; and Clarifying the Quagmire of Cataloging Book Arts and Artists’ Publications), two sessions: (Catalogers’ Judgements: Ethical Cataloging and Artists from Underrepresented Groups; and Getting Started with Collections as Data), and several meetings: (Artists’ Books RDA Manual Project, Cataloging Advisory Committee, Cataloging Problems Discussion Group).

 

Emily presented a summary of Catablog stats (8 posts, 1718 views, and 991 visitors from 13 countries; featured as a resource for a Metadata Course) and emphasized the recent launch of the Cataloging Section Slack Workspace as a tool for increasing engagement.

 

Karen Stafford gave a report on the ALA Committee on Cataloging, John Maier reported on the Marc Advisory Committee, Sherman Clarke gave an update on the Subject Analysis Committee and Art Genre/Form Project, Bronwen Bitetti reported on the Cataloging Advisory Committee and on behalf of Marie-Chantal L’Ecuyer-Coelho regarding the Art and Rare Materials BIBFRAME Ontology Extension Task Force.

 

Open Discussion topics included formation of a Linked Data SIG (to begin informally as a Slack channel and/or discussion group), interest in the future of the Artists’ Book Thesaurus, filling out more Slack channels (ILS, etc.), and the potential for Section webinars/GoToMeetings throughout the year.

 

Suggestions for next year’s conference included offering a workshop or meeting on dealing with RDA 2.0, repeating a Catalogers’ Judgement panel, and offering workshops similar to the MarcEdit and OpenRefine workshops this year, perhaps split into beginner and intermediate/advanced sessions.

 

Zimra Panitz, Head of Technical Services at the School of Visual Arts, was elected as the next Vice-Moderator.

 

For more a more in-depth meeting summary, see 2019 Section Meeting notes (courtesy of William Blueher)

 

To share thoughts or ideas on the Section or Conference, join us on Slack or use the “Contact” link to send us a message.

 

Thanks to all who attended!

 

Categories
Best Practices Cataloging Advisory Committee

New Best Practice Recommendation from CAC

The ARLIS/NA Cataloging Advisory Committee has produced the below best practice recommendation for exhibition notes:

Best Practice for Recording Exhibition Notes in MARC

The ARLIS/NA Cataloging Advisory Committee recommends using the 500 field, rather than the 518 or 585, to record exhibition information such as dates and venues.

We reserve the use of the 585 for recording information about exhibitions in which the material being described has been shown, as in the following example:

https://bit.ly/2HwHIDQ

We do not use the 518 for exhibition information, as we understand it to be intended for creation or capture information.

We’re grateful to the CAC for sharing this new guideline!

Categories
conference

Cat Section Annual Meeting Agenda (2019)

Get ready to meet and mingle with your cataloging colleagues!

The Cataloging Section will meet this year at the ARLIS/NA annual conference in Salt Lake City at the Grand America Hotel, on Thursday, March 28 at 8 AM. For the most up-to-date information on time and location, refer to the conference Sched.

A limited number of print copies of the 2019 Cat Section Agenda will be made available at the meeting.

See you there!

 

(Image: Sam B. Dill’s Circus in Mineola, New York. Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library via NYPL Digital Collections)

Categories
conference

Section Meeting at 2019 ARLIS/NA Conference

The Cataloging Section meeting at the 2019 ARLIS/NA conference in Salt Lake City will be held on Thursday, March 28 from 8:00am – 8:50am, in Envoy (Level 1) at the Great America Hotel.

There are just two things we need to help make the meeting, and the year, a success:

  • A new Vice-moderator/Moderator elect: If you are interested in getting involved and contributing to the Cataloging Section, please contact us! This is a great chance to get involved with ARLIS/NA and contribute to the cataloging community. All are welcome! The only requirement is an enthusiasm for art metadata and serving the society.
  • Content: Do you have news to share at our meeting? Is there a fellowship at your institution, a new initiative that your metadata peers might be excited about, or a cataloging panel you’re involved in at the conference? Let us know!
    OR, can you make a mini-presentation? Mini-presentations are brief (5 minutes or so) and informal and can be about any topic related to cataloging and metadata. Describe something unusual you’ve cataloged, or provide an update about how a project is going. Share your cataloging stories, successes, and challenges! Send a brief description and please include any media/A/V needs.
We’re looking forward to hearing from you, and seeing you in Salt Lake City!
Categories
backlogs cataloging watson library

Turning a Gifted Backlog into a Multifaceted Valuable Resource

By: Patrick J Raftery Jr

Patrick J Raftery Jr is Senior Library Associate: Technical Services, at The Thomas J Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Backlogs are quite the norm within cataloging and technical services departments. Workflows attempt to manage the processing of materials in a timely fashion. Efforts are put forth to avoid having the backlog multiple in size. However, what does one do when you are gifted another institution’s backlog?

In 2015, The Thomas J Watson Library, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was gifted a large backlog from The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA.  The backlog consisted of seventeen skids, each skid consisting of thirty-two bankers boxes, filled with art related materials. Due to the sheer size of the gift, the backlog found its resting space at an offsite facility.  Under the guidance of former Associate Chief Librarian Daniel Starr, former Technical Services Librarian Andrea Puccio and a volunteer began to make a dent in this enormous project. However, the project was suspended in the fall of 2016 to complete the renovation of the Technical Services department, and other high priority projects.

As the renovations of the Technical Services room drew near, Daniel had retired and Andrea relocated to The Clark Art Institute. The MoMA backlog project was brought back to the discussion table for best practices on how to proceed. Under the guidance of John Lindaman, Associate Museum Librarian, Technical Services, the project took an unexpected turn. Instead of overloading the cataloging librarians with this immense project in addition to daily tasks, John approached me, a full-time para-professional member of Technical Services, and MLIS/MA History student at Queens College to become the project manager.

The MoMA backlog project became an educational project for both para-professional staff members and all Watson Librarians who wanted to volunteer their time and/or expand their skill sets in cataloging. To ensure a smooth workflow, that would not create another backlog of work or take away from other responsibilities, interested volunteers were asked to take ten volumes a week. Items are reviewed within the collection development policy. Additional copies of highly circulating volumes are added. For volumes that meet criteria and are not in our collection, OCLC Connexion is used to search for copy cataloging and original records are created if needed. Copy cataloging training/refreshers were provided by John. Para-professional staff who were interested in creating original records, like myself, began a Mentor-Mentee relationship with either Associate Museum Librarian, Principle Cataloger, Tamara Fultz or Assistant Museum Librarian William Blueher. All Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK) materials were directed to CJK Museum Librarian Min Xu and Assistant Museum Librarian Luxuan Liu. Volumes with non-roman characters are directed to Tamara and Associate Museum Librarian Jared Ash. Upon creation/completion of full bibliographic records, all new volumes are sent back to the offsite facility for storage and retrieval for patrons.

What at first seemed to be a daunting project has become a successful professional development tool. None of the Watson Library staff members who volunteered to take part in this project has become overwhelmed, overworked, or frustrated with the MoMA backlog. The MoMA backlog has refreshed cataloging rules and best practices for some, and has taught others the fundamentals of cataloging, seeking good copy records and creating good original records. Moreover, we decided against using Backstage Library Marcadia for two important reasons. First, it would take away from the educational value of the volunteers who were interested in becoming skilled catalogers. Second, some of these materials had been sitting in the backlog for an unknown amount of time. We felt it would be best practice to make sure the record is as full as it could be if there was not a record already created.

The progress of the project has been fantastic. During the first stage of the project, the Watson Library acquired 2,280 volumes. 2,109 were cataloged, 111 original cataloging and 1,998 copy cataloged, and 171 added copies. Stage two, the educational volunteer phase, began in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2017. At the end of fiscal year 2018, the Watson Library has acquired 3,390 volumes, 3,172 volumes were cataloged, 676 original cataloging and 2,496 copy cataloged, and 218 added copies. This brings a combined total of 5,670 volumes added to the Watson Library collection.

We have now completed 43% of the MoMA backlog project. The current workflow consists of receiving, searching, cataloging, and processing, four boxes every two weeks. Since the backlog is housed at an offsite facility, we can pause at any time for higher priority needs or unforeseen circumstances.

The MoMA Backlog Project has become a valuable resource for the Watson Library’s holdings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art curators, the independent researchers, and all of the college and university patrons we serve. It has also sharpened and widened the skill sets of the Watson Library staff. Furthermore, I have truly benefited from the MoMA Backlog Project from the guidance and support of my supervisor, John Lindaman, and my cataloging mentor, Tamara Fultz.

Who would have thought a backlog could provide so much opportunity!

The Cataloging Section welcomes contributions on the topic of cataloging within the art library community. Please share relevant resources, issues, conundrums, projects, cataloging hacks, tips and tricks or news from your library! We would love to hear from catalogers like you.

Categories
digital archives NYARC web archiving

Version 2 Released: Metadata Application Profile for Description of Websites with Archived Versions (via NYARC)

Many thanks to Sumitra Duncan for sharing this news, originally posted on the NYARC blog and ARLIS-L:

Version 2 Released: Metadata Application Profile for Description of Websites with Archived Versions

The second version of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) Metadata Application Profile for Description of Websites with Archived Versions has recently been released and is available via the NYARC Wiki and via the DLF AIG Metadata Application Profile Clearinghouse Project. The new version of the profile reflects the current practice of describing websites, which has evolved over the past three years since the release of version 1, and specifies the core elements that are recommended for describing websites that are both live and archived, especially in the context of bibliographic description. While based on NYARC’s cataloging practices using MARC, Version 2.0 is intended to be a reference for the library and archives community at large.

Originally authored in June 2015 and revised in August 2018 by consultant Rebecca Guenther, the metadata application profile includes a summary and data dictionary of data elements for description of websites with archived versions in a MARC/RDA environment, notes on MARC record coding, and sample records created by NYARC catalogers. In addition, the data dictionary entries include mappings between the elements and those in other metadata standards, including BIBFRAME, EAD, schema.org, and OCLC guidelines, among others. NYARC has implemented these updated guidelines into our workflow for describing the archived websites included in NYARC’s 10 Archive-It collections. We welcome feedback from the community on our application profile for describing websites with archived versions.

Many thanks to Rebecca Guenther for her excellent work on the profile and to NYARC’s technical services staff for their input and testing along the way!

Congratulations on this milestone, NYARC!

Categories
Best Practices cataloging conference presentations RDA section meeting

Summer Throwback: ARLIS 2018 Cat Section Meeting Handouts

Amid the stuffy, oppressive, stinky heat of New York City in late August, is it even possible to remember the cooler, albeit grayer, days of late February?

To aid in the quest for refreshing thoughts (or at least a happy distraction), linked here are the handouts from Kelly Swickard’s fantastic mini-presentations at the Cataloging Section’s Annual Meeting at this year’s conference:

Adding Binding Information to Artists’ Book Records, on using the 563 field to add binding characteristics

Cataloging Art Publications, which may be of particular interest; the handout was originally written as a manual for paraprofessional staff, and covers a lot of the particulars of art book cataloging in one brief yet information-packed document. It is RDA-compliant as of late February of this year.

Many thanks again to Kelly for sharing these, and my abundant apologies to everyone for taking so long to get these posted.

Stay cool!

 

(Image: Photographer unknown. Three women keep cool during a heat wave by moving a park bench into the water in Central Park, New York. September 1961.)

Categories
conference conference presentations

Developing session proposals for 2019

Team: Please join us in tossing around some ideas for cataloging sessions at the 2019 conference!  What would you like to learn from your many and multi-talented colleagues? What talents might you be willing to share with the group? To facilitate developing ideas for sessions, we’ve pre-populated a forum with some of the threads that came up at the NYC Section Meeting, along with others suggested by the Salt Lake City Conference Planning brainstorming group. Feel free to make comments on these, or to propose additional topics. You can also up-vote the topics that interest you the most.

  • Where: tricider forum.
  • When: Please contribute feedback by 5p Wednesday May 16.

Thanks!