CEAL Committee on Technical Processing Annual Report 2008-09

Prepared by Sarah S. Elman (Chair)

Mar. 20, 2009

Introduction

            This report covers activities of the CEAL Committee on Technical Processing (CTP) from Mar. 2008 to Mar. 2009. It also includes report from the RDA Review Subcommittee which was formed to review the draft of the Resource Description and Access.

 

Committee Membership

 

A CEAL election took place in early spring 2008 and Sarah S. Elman became the Chair of the Committee on Technical Processing at the conclusion of the 2008 CEAL Annual Meeting. The formation of the committee membership immediately followed. Many librarians expressed interest to join the Committee. The Chair decided to select the committee members based on the principle to balance language expertise and types as well as geographic locations of libraries. The following members were selected and approved by the CEAL Executive Board:

 

Erica Soonyoung Chang (University of Hawaii)

Shi Deng (University of California, San Diego)

Shuyong Jiang (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Eunseung Oh (Stanford University)

Chiaki Sakai (University of Iowa)

Yue Shu (Smithsonian Institution Libraries)

Fabiano Takashi Rocha (University of Toronto Libraries)

Jia Xu (University of Iowa)

Hideyuki Morimoto (Columbia University ; Senior Consultant)

 

Committee activities

 

            After the committee was formally formed, the committee members carried out discussions on several issues in the summer of 2008. The following sections illustrate the topics discusses as well as their related activities:

 

A.    CTP Home page

 

  • The CTP homepage had been taken care of by Abraham Yu at UC Irvine since its establishment in 1999 and was stored on a server at UC Irvine. In 2008, the Council on East Asian Libraries purchased a commercial server space for the CEAL home page. After discussing with Abraham, the CTP home page was moved from http://cealctp.lib.uci.edu/ to the newly purchased CEAL server space at https://www.eastasianlib.org/ctp/index.htm. Yue Shu assumed the responsibility as the Web Master for the CTP home page. She has since updated essential information on the page.

 

B.     Establishing an open venue for communicating technical services related issues

 

  • A concern was raised by a few CTP members that some technical services librarians had been reluctant to post questions to Eastlib, and therefore the CTP should find a separate venue for such communications.

 

  • Pros and cons of various trendy tools, such as Wiki, Blogs, and Google Groups, etc., were discussed. No final decision has been made yet thus far, but one likely solution is to add a communication mechanism to the CTP Web site for catalogers to post questions. Senior catalogers can be invited to monitor the questions and provide answers. A FAQ section can be added to the CTP Website to document such exchanges as well as other cataloging Q&As. The committee will continue this discussion in the coming year.

 

C.     Non-Roman cross-references in authority records

 

  • Starting from July 13, 2008, non-Latin script data have been added to authority records as cross references.
  • OCLC developed a program to pre-populate the NACO authority files for personal names and corporate names tagged 110 with non-Latin references (authority 4XX fields) derived from non-Latin bibliographic heading in WorldCat. Due to inconsistent practice of adding non-Roman parallel headings in the bibliographic records, the result of the pre-population project shows problems and errors. The Library of Congress has been examining this situation and will issue a policy statement at the 2009 annual meeting.
  • Members of CTP had been collecting examples of records with errors in 2008. The records were forwarded to LC in early 2009.
  • If a full-scaled clean-up project is needed, CTP members will be called upon to participate in the effort.

 

D.    Review of RDA draft

 

  • A RDA review subcommittee was formed under the previous CTP membership. After the new CTP membership was formed, it was decided that the review work should continue until the final version of RDA is released. However, many members of the previous subcommittee were not able to devote their time to the project, it was decided that a new group be formed. The former Chair of the subcommittee Shi Deng agreed to continue to lead the group. The following is the report of the subcommittee.

 

CEAL CTP RDA Review Subcommittee Report, 2008-09 (by Shi Deng)

 

a)      The Committee membership:  In September 2008, the committee was regrouped. 

 

·         Membership after regrouping (New members are with asterisk):

 

Ai-lin Yang (Stanford)

Chwang Chia Yang (LC)

Chiaki Sakai (U. Iowa) *         

Daphne Wang (U. Oregon)

Dongyun Ni (U. Hawaii) *

Edwin Yu (CJKat)

Erica Chang (U. Hawaii) *

Fabiano Takashi Rocha (U. Toronto) *

Hee-Sook Shin (Columbia) *

Hisami Konishi Springer (U. Hawaii) *

Jai-hsya Tsao (U. Chicago)

Nanako Kodaira (Duke)

Sachie Kobayashi (U. Pittsburgh) *

Shi Deng (UCSD, Coordinator)

Wayne Richter (W. Washington)

Yunah Sung (U. Michigan) *

 

Advisors:

Sarah S. Elman (Columbia, CTP Chair)

Philip A Melzer (LC, CEAL president)

Hideyuki Morimoto (Columbia, Chair, ALA/CC:AAM RDA Task Force)

Beatrice Chang Ohta (LC)

Abraham J. Yu (UC Irvine, CEAL past president)

 

·         Outgoing members (2005-2008):

 

Dawn Lawson (NYU)

Evelyn Kuo (UC Berkeley)

Iping K. Wei (Princeton)

Joy Kim (USC)

Wen-Ling D. Liu (Indiana)

Thomas  Tsai (LC)

Young-ki Lee (LC)

 

b)      RDA Review  (CEAL comments on RDA can be found on CTP web site)

 

·         September 2008: Provided comments to JSC follow-up question regarding Traditional Asian publishing formats on RDA (i.e.  on Accordion Style)

 

·         October 2008: Reviewed but not submitted comments to JSC follow-up questions regarding RDA draft, 2.3.1.12 regarding serials major and minor changes including how to counting first five words in CJK cataloging

 

·         November-December 2008: Reviewed full draft of RDA, provided some comments and CJK examples to be incorporated into ALA response

 

For more information on RDA, check:

http://www.rda-jsc.org/rda.html

http://www.rda-jsc.org/workingnew.html

 

c)      RDA Comments that need to follow-up after RDA release: Several CEAL’s comments were not included in ALA response.  John Attig, ALA representative, suggested CEAL to make change proposals after RDA release, etc.  For details, check John Attig’s blog as ALA rep.: http://www.personal.psu.edu/jxa16/blogs/resource_description_and_access_ala_rep_notes/blog/

 

d)     RDA Timeline

 

·         March 12-20, 2009: JSC meeting on finalizing review of comments received

·         Third quarter calendar 2009: RDA is released

·         Last quarter calendar 2009–early 2010 – CoP national libraries evaluate RDA prior to implementation

E.     Annual meeting programs

 

§  The Committee will continue to organize programs at future annual meetings to highlight trends and developments in technical services areas and perhaps to showcase some interesting projects. When feasible, we will collaborate with other committees to cosponsor programs of common interest.

§  Committee members brainstormed on programs for 2009. It was decided that two timely subjects would have to be covered this year: RDA and non-Latin scripts in authority records.

§  A presentation proposal on a metadata application was later received and all members liked the content.

§  Traditionally, CTP had been focusing mainly on cataloging. The committee decided to include acquisitions in this year’s program. However, the OCLC CJK Users Group was also thinking to cover acquisitions. In order not to duplicate efforts, the Chairs of the two groups decided to collaborate-- OCLC CJK Users Group will focus on topics related to WorldCat Selections and CTP will focus on other acquisition methods.

§  A call for presentations was sent to the Eastlib as well as OCLC-CJK discussion lists in early January. Several proposals were received. CTP members review all of them and selected three potential proposals covering all CJK languages. However, one of the selected presenters withdrew due to her busy schedule. Due to time constraints, we could only accommodate two presentations at the end.

§  The annual program is available at https://www.eastasianlib.org/ctp/meeting09.htm

 

F.      Organize more workshops for CEAL members

 

§  The Committee discussed several potential workshop topics and settled on CONSER Standard Records as well as constructing and proposing CJK literary author classification numbers for this coming year.

§  Both workshops will be held on Tuesday, Mar. 24, 2009. Julie Su was invited to be the trainer for the CONSER Standard Records and Hideyuki Morimoto for the literary author classification numbers.

§  Two possible venues were explored initially: University of Chicago as well as Northwestern University (through Library of Congress’s librarian Jiping Wu’s help), and University of Chicago was chosen at the end.

 

G.    Other committee projects

 

§  The Committee planed to review projects undertaken by previous committee members and decide whether any of them should be continued or revised. However, due to competing priorities, this task will be carried out in the coming year.

 

Conclusion

 

            The Committee on Technical Processing was very active during this past year. We had several productive discussions, both via email as well as in the form of small-group meeting at the ALA midwinter. Several of us participated in the review of RDA as well as AACR2, and contributed many constructive comments. We have also organized two workshops as well as an informative program for the upcoming 2009 CEAL Annual Meeting. The Committee will continue to seek ways to bring timely information on technical services and offer workshops for learning new knowledge and skills to CEAL members in the next two years.