Home LITA Membership LITA Interest Groups Authority Control (LITA/ALCTS) 2006 Midwinter Presentations

GROUP: Authority Control in the Online Environment Interest Group

CHAIR: Linda Ballinger

REPORTER: Linda Ballinger

EMAIL: lballing@binghamton.edu

CONFERENCE: midwinter

MEETING: other

OTHER: Reporting session

ATTENDEES: 175

CURRENT ACTIVITIES:

At the Midwinter ACIG reporting session, our speakers described various developments in the field:

Taylor Surface, Manager, Digital Collections Services, OCLC, reported on the progress of the OCLC Terminologies Pilot Project, which "[explores] a service that provides access to multiple thesauri for libraries, museums, and archives to create consistent metadata for their collections providing mappings across thesauri to assist in relating terminology." (http://www.oclc.org/productworks/terminologiespilot.htm) They hope to offer the service by June 2006 through the Connexion Client, in combination with the Research Pane option in Internet Explorer (version 6 and above).

OCLC Terminologies Pilot Project (PowerPoint)

Ann Della Porta, Acting Coordinator, Integrated Systems Office, Library of Congress, provided an update on various issues relating to authority control at LC. She announced improved access to LC's online catalog and authorities database, the integration of six overseas offices into the online catalog, and the completion of their Unicode conversion. She provided additional information on the continuing issues with vernacular data, especially questions about how to handle non-Roman data in authority records. Finally, she elaborated on several recent changes in LC's cataloging policy for parks, tribes, and dates in personal names.

Library of Congress Update (PowerPoint)

Glenn Patton, Director, WorldCat Quality Management, OCLC, gave a report on authorities-related topics at OCLC, including upcoming changes in MARC authorities records, improvements to Connexion authority control functions, and a proposal to add 781 fields to authority records for geographic names. He also provided an update on database cleanup at OCLC, involving second indicator values in headings and changes in MeSH headings. OCLC is also looking into developing an RSS feed to alert libraries to changes in authority records, which will especially help those without vendor supplied updates.

OCLC Update (PowerPoint)

Jennifer Bowen, JSC, provided a brief report on the status of RDA, with some basic information on Part II (current Ch. 21, AACR2) and Part III (authority control). She noted that Chapter 3 of the Part I draft had just been released for comment, and that the deadline for comments on Part I would be February 7, 2006. A draft of Part II will be released for comment between May and September of 2006. The Part III draft is expected to come out between October 2006 and April 2007.

RDA Report (PowerPoint)

Ed Glazier, Principal Analyst, RLG, provided an update on authority issues in the RLIN21 environment. New features in RLIN21 include a browse option from the Heading Browse Display for cross references; explicit see, see also, and narrower term displays; new indexes such as Heading Word, Pending Heading Word, and Fuller Personal Name Word; as well as the ability for NACO users to generate authority records from bibliographic records. RLIN21 will soon provide conflict checking to identify records that would normalize to the same form, with daily notification of conflicts to the Library of Congress becoming available later this year.

RLG Update (PowerPoint)

FUTURE ACTIVITIES: ALA Annual Conference 2006: Program -- Questioning Authorities: Adapting Authority Control to the Changing Needs of Library Users

ALA Midwinter Meeting 2007: Reporting session