Further Observations from the First WGFBC Meeting

This is the week! I'm waiting in anticipation for the second meeting of the LC WGFBC on May 9th. Being a true cataloging geek, If I could choose one of these meetings to attend, it would be this next one on "Structures and Standards for Bibliographic Data". Alas, I'll be nowhere near Chicago on Wednesday.

Janet Swan Hill, Professor and Associate Director for Technical Services, University of Colorado Libraries is a member of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. Here's are some of her insightful observations from the first meeting that she posted on the AUTOCAT listserv on March 15th:

"Some of the things that were especially striking to me about the first meeting include:

-- Throughout the day, there was a call for more bibliographic content, not less; that it needs to be authoritative; and that authority control is critical.   These comments came both from people talking about the needs of individual researchers, and from people talking about the "needs" of advanced and future discovery tools.

-- It was mentioned more than once that we need to be careful, when rhapsodizing over the capabilities of advance searching mechanisms to remember that they need to work over multiple languages, not just English.

-- After hearing many comments, I realized more than ever that in these discussions, it is critical to distinguish between the bibliographic data itself, the format in which it may be arranged, and the mechanisms by which the data is searched, assembled, and utilized.  For the most part, people tend to concatenate all three and confuse the roles and boundaries of each. A criticism of "cataloging" may actually be actually a criticism of the capabilities of the discovery tool; a comment about MARC may really be a comment about cataloging; a comment about "the catalog" may be actually a comment about MARC; etc.

-- There is a tendency to talk about obtaining bibliographic data from wherever without considering how and by whom it might be created in the first place."

Comments

[Jonathan Rochkind]

"it is critical to distinguish between the bibliographic data itself, the format in which it may be arranged, and the mechanisms by which the data is searched, assembled, and utilized."

I think this is one of the most important points. However, each of these can certainly effect the others. Eg., obviously, if the data isn't there... no matter what format you arrange it in, you aren't going to be able to search/assemble or utilize it the way you want to.

But yes, they are seperate. We have to start treating them as separate in our actual practice. We should, for instance, not tolerate receiving instruction on how to record the data itself from a format for encoding/arrangement (MARC). Encoding/arrangement needs to exist to serve our data needs, not vice versa!

[Christine Schwartz]

I agree with you about the importance of the instructions for recording data needing to be separate from the encoding/arrangement of that data. Currently, I think it would be possible to creatively use AACR2 with different metadata schemas. However, I don't think you can say the same about the MARC format. I have a hard time envisioning using MARC without the ISBD/AACR2 content standard.