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ALA Annual 2004, Orlando, Florida
Business meeting report, June 27, 4:30-5:30

Present: Qiang Jin (chair), Manon Theroux (vice chair/chair elect), Stephen Hearn (secretary), Anaclare Evans, Sandy Roe, Linda Ballinger, Mark Scharff, Mary Charles Lasater, Shannon Hoffman, Marlena Frackowski (Music Library Association liaison).

Chair Qiang Jin convened the meeting following the ACIG program, and after the cancellation of a fire alarm in the Orange County Convention Center. She thanked Sandy Roe for preparing a press release on the ACIG program which appeared in issue 2 (Sunday) of Cognotes.

Qiang announced openings for vice chair and ad hoc chair positions and called for nominations for the position of vice chair/chair elect. Linda Ballinger accepted the nomination and was elected unanimously. Shannon Hoffman agreed to serve as Ad Hoc Chair for Subjects for one year, filling out the remainder of Linda Ballinger’s term, and Mark Scharff agreed to serve as Ad Hoc Chair for Uniform Titles.

Mary Charles Lasater, liaison to the Policy and Planning Committee, led a discussion of the desirability, implications, and procedure for establishing ACIG as an ALCTS interest group. Currently ACIG is sponsored by ALCTS, but is not a formal part of the ALCTS structure. Being an ALCTS interest group would enable more support from ALCTS for planning and promoting programs and for doing publications. It would also require gathering signatures for a petition to be come an interest group, and more work to get a program proposal approved. It was not clear whether program proposals could reliably be presented after the ACIG business meeting at ALA annual, when they are usually planned. Manon Theroux agreed to summarize the issues for a decision at the ACIG meeting at Midwinter in Boston.

Anaclare Evans reported on her work preparing a retrospective annotated bibliography on authority control over the past twenty years based on bibliographies submitted by ACIG ad hoc chairs and on scans of Library Literature, LISA, and ERIC. She found that a number of foreign language articles are now difficult to access, and recommended excluding them. She and the students assisting her have roughly 120 pages of citations, and she expects to have a finished draft ready in six to eight months. She asked about publication at the LITA Publications Committee, and was advised to go to ALCTS. Margaret Rohdy offered to take the idea to the ALCTS Publications Committee, and Anaclare will prepare the required forms. Ad hoc chairs with additional bibliographical entries should send them to Anaclare.

Manon Theroux presented a number of ideas for the next ACIG Annual program in Chicago. These included:

1. Form/genre headings—LC’s plans, system vendors’ implementations, authority control service vendors perspective, user perspective
2. International authority control—VIAF, non-roman script data in authority records, reports from the conference in Italy, multilingual thesauri
3. Authority control of special collections and special formats
4. FRBR and authority control—FRANAR, AACR3 section 3, possible changes to chapter 25 rules, and the use of relator terms and codes
5. Metadata and authority control or the more specific topic of XML and authority control—uses for non-MARC versions of authority and bib data, development of MADS and other XML-coded controlled vocabularies

The last idea received the greatest support from the group. Suggested speakers included Judith Ahronheim and Kayla Willey. Manon agreed to present the idea to LITA’s program planning meeting.

Respectfully submitted,

Stephen Hearn