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Automated Bibliographic Control Committee Minutes
January 19, 2002


Present: Janice Pilch (Illinois), Diana Brooking (Washington), Mischa Buczkowski (Oregon), Jackie Byrd (Indiana), Joanna Dyla (Stanford), Diana Greene (NYU), Inna Gudanets (Stanford), Jared Ingersoll (Columbia), Sandra Levy (Chicago), Robert Rohrbacher (Stanford), Marek Sroka (Illinois), Susan Summer (Columbia), Cathy Zeljak (George Washington)

Minutes: The minutes of the June 2001 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 reported that a letter was mailed to LC on Oct. 8, 2001 requesting clarification on the use of language headings and language codes for Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. A reply from LC was received on Dec. 21, 2001. LC reported that the issues are being worked on and that native speakers are being consulted. LC was unable to provide more information by the time of this meeting.

A discussion led to a March 1st deadline for more information from LC. If none is sent by that date, Janice will email LC and remind them of our request for information. It is hoped that the information will be available by the time of ALA annual in June 2002.

Cyrillic alphabet abbreviations enhancement: Janice Pilch led a discussion on the proposed update to AACR2 Appendix B10, the Cyrillic languages abbreviation list. The list of additions suggested by last year's ABC Committee included 70 words, and Janice suggested that the list be shortened to 20 or fewer, focusing especially on those terms that parallel currently approved abbreviations. Among the issues discussed:

  • Abbreviations save keystrokes for catalogers
  • Abbreviations can adversely affect keyword searching
  • Users may not recognize the abbreviations
  • Catalogers would need to memorize the new abbreviations or take time looking them up
  • There seems to be a choice of helping catalogers at the expense of patrons or vice versa
  • Would we submit all Slavic Cyrillic languages at once or just Russian?
  • Should we make the Cyrillic abbreviations consistent with those for the Latin languages? Is this for us to propose?
Janice had proposed the addition of 16 terms from the list proposed by last year's committee. After the discussion, the list of terms to be submitted totaled 14. Terms for all Cyrillic languages will be submitted together, and Janice will work with committee members to draft a list of terms in Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macdonian, Serbian, and Ukrainian.. Diana Brooking will design a user survey to determine the affects of the abbreviations on users.

Slavic Cataloging Workshop: The Slavic Cataloging Workshop, to be held in June 2002 at the U. of Illinois Slavic Librarians' Workshop, was discussed. It was decided that there would be 6 topics, and each would have about an hour at the workshop. The first 3 will focus on beginners, and the last 3 would be more general. 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)
Princeton's Slavic Cataloging Manual: ACRL suggested to SEES that the Princeton Slavic Cataloging Manual is the property of Princeton University and that we would need Princeton's permission before we moved it to another site and updated it. Janice will write a letter to Princeton asking their plans for the manual and asking whether we could maintain it, if Princeton has no plans to update it.

Liaison to CC:DA: Sandra Levy reported that SEES cannot have its own liaison to CC:DA. There is just one ACRL representative to that group. There are, however, "informal" liaisons, and SEES could request that one of its members attend the CC:DA meetings. It was decided that we would look into the process of having a SEES ABC member chosen as the formal ACRL representative to CC:DA.

Submitted by Jackie Byrd

Last updated 05/28/02