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Automated Bibliographic Control Committee Minutes
June 16, 2002

Present: Janice Pilch (Illinois), Mariya Barash (Wayne State),Diana Brooking (Washington), Mischa Buczkowski (Oregon), Jackie Byrd (Indiana), Joanna Dyla (Stanford), Inna Gudanets (Stanford), Carl Horne (Indiana), Jared Ingersoll (Columbia), Soobum Kim (Stanford), Sandra Levy (Chicago), Leena Siegelbaum (Harvard), Kay Sinnema (Duke), Marek Sroka (Illinois), Susan Summer (Columbia), Lydia Wasylenko (Syracuse), Cathy Zeljak (George Washington)

Minutes: The minutes of the January 2002 meeting were approved.

Status of Request to LC Cataloging Policy and Support Office for Clarification on Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Languages for Cataloging: Janice Pilch distributed copies of the reply from the Library of Congress to her letter requesting clarification and guidance for non-LC Slavic language catalogers who need to distinguish between the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian languages. The reply, dated May 29, 2002, offered guidance for decision making, but left much of the decision to cataloger judgment. The request for new codes to reflect ambiguity and Roman & Cyrillic alphabet variations for all 3 languages was denied. Only Serbian has the variation for both alphabets, and, therefore, only Serbian requires a 546 field.

Comments on the reply included:

• The new LC guidelines cite works written when Serbo-Croatian was considered a single language
• The lack of firm answers will result in inconsistencies
• Maybe native speakers can be used to distinguish between the 3 languages
• Should comments be sought from slavlibs?
• Should the letter be published in SEEIR and/or the SEES Newsletter?
• The guidelines offer practical advice for day-to-day use
• A cataloger could use the "und" code for the language in the fixed field, if the language can't be identified
• Bosnian poetry is classed with the Serbian poetry. Should it have its own class number, if it is now considered a different language?

Cyrillic Alphabet Abbreviations Enhancement: Janice Pilch led a discussion on progress on the list of Cyrillic alphabet language abbreviations. ABC had been working on devising a list that it would request to be added to the list in Appendix B of AACR2. Inna Gudanets had taken the list approved at the January 2002 ABC meeting and added corresponding terms in the other Cyrillic languages, and this revised list was distributed and discussed.

Janice reported that the trend is now to move away from abbreviations, since library catalogs offer keyword searching. The original intent for the abbreviations was to save space on a catalog card, and this is no longer an issue for most libraries. Janice also reported that it is very expensive for AACR2 to be revised and that our proposal would not likely succeed. ABC questioned whether it should continue with the project, and the committee decided to abandon the project.

Report from Diana Brooking on User Study on Slavic and East European Abbreviations: Diana reported on her findings from a survey given to faculty members and students at the University of Washington. Users were asked to supply the full form of an set of abbreviated terms and to supply an abbreviated form for words given in the full form. Although both faculty and students did fairly well in going from the abbreviation to the full word, both groups struggled in going from full word to the abbreviation. The survey findings were not finalized, but Diana felt that the results thus far called into question the wisdom of using abbreviations from a user's point of view.

The combination of Diana's findings and the reservations expressed in the discussion about the list of proposed abbreviations resulted in the decision that ABC will abandon the project of proposing additional AACR2 abbreviations.

Slavic Cataloging Workshop: Janice reported on the upcoming Slavic cataloging workshop to be held at the Slavic Librarians' Workshop at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, June 26-28, 2002. The topics and presenters are:

• LC Subject headings/geographic headings (Inna Gudanets)
• Authority records for Slavic (Carl Horne)
• Diacritics (Janice Pilch)
• MacroExpress (Victor Gorodinsky)
• CORC (Rebecca Routh)
• Metadata (Jackie Byrd)

It was decided that handouts would be made available to those who are unable to attend and that a summary would be sent to slavlibs with email links to presenters.

Resolution of Issue Concerning Liaison to CC:DA: Janice reported that SEES cannot have its own formal liaison to CC:DA, but it could appoint an informal liaison who would attend CC:DA meetings and report back to the ABC. Some issues identified were:

• This would be a big time commitment for the informal liaison
• The report would be made 6 months after the CC:DA meeting took place
• Informal liaisons would not get the official documents in advance of the CC:DA meetings
• Diana Brooking volunteered to be the informal liaison for the next year, since her library has a member of CC:DA who would share the documents and other information about CC:DA
• The International Relations Roundtable has a formal liaison to CC:DA. Could this person report back to the ABC?
• Could the ACRL report back to the ABC?

• Janice will find out who the ACRL representative is and evaluate this person as an option for reporting back to the ABC.
• Diana will investigate having an ABC member (herself, at first) serve as an informal liaison to CC:DA
• Joanna Dyla will look into having the formal liaison from the International Relations Roundtable report back to the ABC

Princeton's Slavic Cataloging Manual: Janice reported that copyright is not a problem for SEES taking over the Princeton Slavic Cataloging Manual. Donald Thornbury, Head of the Cataloging Division at Princeton, is willing to give up the manual to SEES. All SEES would need is for Jim Weinheimer to grant copyright permissions to SEES. Issues that remain are:

• Is there a server that could be used for this?
• We would need to distinguish between national and local practices
• We need to involve Jim in the discussion
• We need a Slavic cataloger with time, knowledge of HTML, and an available server

Submitted by Jackie Byrd

Last updated 12/05/02