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Slavic Cataloging Manual

Automated Bibliographic Control Committee Minutes
January 15, 2005

Present: Inna Gudanets (Stanford), Matt Appleby (Wisconsin), Diana Brooking (Washington), Jackie Byrd (Indiana), Brenda Carter (Pittsburgh), Joanna Dyla (Stanford), John Eilts (Stanford), Kristin Johnson Kulash (Harvard), Soobum Kim (Stanford), Irina Lynden (Rhode Island), Sandra Levy (Chicago), Dan Pennell (Pittsburgh), Janice Pilch (Illinois), Leena Siegelbaum (Harvard Law), Jeff Strandborg (East View), Cathy Zeljak (George Washington)

Minutes: The minutes of the Orlando Annual Conference meeting in 2004 were approved as submitted.

Report on SEES/ABC Survey on Vendor-Supplied MARC Records: Print copies of Diana Brooking's report and the survey were distributed. Diana went over her report, and it was discussed in some detail.

It was decided to post the report on the SEES ABC website and to send a message to slavlibs notifying the list that this has been done. After a discussion, it was decided to leave the names of the vendors in the report but not to add links to their websites in the report. However, abbreviated vendor names in the report will be spelled out in full.

Follow-up on June 2004 Program on "Library Catalogs and Non-Roman Scripts": Janice Pilch reported on the interest in some follow-up work to the successful "Library Catalogs and Non-Roman Scripts: Development and Implementation of UNICODE for Cataloging and Public Access" program jointly sponsored by SEES, ALCTS CAAM, and LITA at the Orlando Annual Conference in 2004. Janice reported on the program at the B&D Committee meeting at AAASS in November, and the question arose whether SEES and/or B&D should send a letter providing feedback on the issues presented, including:

• Where should Cyrillic languages rank in prioritization of the next languages for UNICODE implementation?
• Do we want Cyrillic to display in our ILS or stick with transliteration?
• Do we want to catalog in our local ILS and then send our records to OCLC/RLIN or vice versa?
• Should LCC/LCSH have non-Roman script fields?
• Should we have Russian language cataloging documentation from LC?

• Is it worth our effort to pursue this, given LC's reaction to our input in the past?
• This is happening anyway. LC/RLIN/OCLC will be making decisions, no matter what we say.
• We need to clarify what we mean. Is there a consistent policy among LC, OCLC, & RLIN?
• B&D and East View would like to be involved in what SEES decides to do.
• Terri Miller is willing to work on this with a group of other volunteers from SEES and from among interested librarians in the field.

• If we just add parallel fields like Arabic and CJK, we won't be taking anything away. There will still be transliteration fields. We will be adding information, enhancing the record.
• We used to have Cyrillic on the old cards and had to give this up, due to the limits of technology when we went online.
• Do we gain anything with Cyrillic fields as opposed to transliteration?
• Can local systems handle Cyrillic yet?
• All libraries can choose whether to use the Cyrillic fields or not.
• It should be possible to automate the generation of parallel Cyrillic fields on older records.
• This could offer an incentive to enhance OCLC records to add these fields.

Normalizing/Improving Central Asian Language Transliteration: John Eilts from CAAM requested SEES participation in a project to normalize the transliteration of Central Asian languages which have been written in Cyrillic, Arabic, and/or Roman scripts over time. He also hopes to influence the development of AACR3 and have a section of that publication on special languages and scripts.

Submitted by Jackie Byrd

Last updated 5/09/05