Present: Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Marshall Breeding, Zora Breeding, Mary Charles Lasater, Jake Schaub, Pete Wilson, Roberta Winjum.
Marshall encouraged the group to attend the RDA Webinar on Wednesday, Oct. 14, at 12:00 in the GLB electronic classroom. The speakers are well known in the field of RDA and metadata. The Webinar materials will be available online after the event. The Metadata Committee will discuss the webinar at a future meeting.
Roberta reported that she is on an ALA task force to determine the cost and value of bibliographic control. A survey has been sent out and some of the Metadata Committee members have already filled it out. Members of the task force include individuals in the cataloging field and some vendors. Their task is to either decide the value of some elements of the MARC record, or perhaps to assign value to said elements. Marshall asked if there were any members of the task force from the field of ILS and other web services design/programming.
The group briefly discussed the Library’s ongoing review of committee planning issues. Although there has been no discussion of the topic at recent Library Council meetings, the Metadata Committee believes that we should be prepared to answer the question “what is the role of metadata in the library.” We are very much concerned with DiscoverLibrary, DiscoverARchive and other digital initiatives. In a related thread, Mary Charles brought up a disturbing event that happened at the last Digital Library Production meeting. Dale reported that a group was not happy that the serial set records were to be added to Discover Library. This sentiment caused members of the mapping team who have been working on the serial set records for the last year to wonder why there was still no unified vision of the DiscoverLibrary implementation. It is frustrating that relative to the effort that we have put into DL over these last 4 years, we have not yet gotten buy-in or full implementation of the product. This led to a discussion of customization of Acorn and Primo and the relative benefits of endless customizations.
The committee discussed the all-staff event with Brian Schottlaender. How can we collaborate in our environment. What sorts of groups do we have to collaborate with as a private institution. Much of the collaboration that Brian discussed had to do with collection decisions. He talked about a technical services unit that made purchases for the whole UC system. But in the afternoon meeting he clarified that each institution also maintained its own technical services unit as well. The collaborative TS unit was for system-wide purchases. It was observed that there is growing evidence that libraries are purchasing less (less copy available on OCLC with fewer holdings). We discussed the minimum number of copies held in a shared environment that would allow other members to discard their own copy.
Our next meeting was scheduled for Nov. 16th.
Minutes submitted by Zora Breeding