Present: Marshall Breeding, Roberta Winjum, Bill Walker, Mary Charles Lasater, Pete Wilson, Steven Nordstrom, Zora Breeding.
Absent: Teresa Gray, Annette Williams.
- Discussion of the Acorn Subcommittee report:
- We agreed that the Metadata Committee can serve as an adjudicating agent between the Acorn Subcommittee and LITS to investigate/resolve problems. We must also take into account how Primo handles some of the problems reported and whether or not staff time should be spent to resolve problems in Acorn that are not problems in Primo. The Acorn Subcommittee needs to list the problems in order of importance.
- There needs to be a way to keep track of problems that have been closed by LITS, but are still not resolved in Acorn. INFORM allows staff to view only their own problems that they submitted. Perhaps another way to handle this should be investigated.
Action item: Marshall will arrange for members of LITS to meet with the Metadata Committee to discuss the above issues. He will try to set this up for the meeting after next.
- Local vs. national cataloging:
- Policy is not consistent across libraries or even among Technical Services catalogers. Personal decisions are being made. Perhaps this committee should draft a policy that says that original cataloging will be done on the national level. It was pointed out that original cataloging is not really the problem, but enhancements is the issue. We need to define exactly what is meant by original cataloging as well.
Action item: Zora will draft a recommendation describing the philosophical approach and our responsibilities as far as national cataloging. This draft will be reviewed by the Metadata Committee in preparation for submission to Strategy and Planning Committee.
- Further discussion on the importance of having procedures in Technical Services that impact not only Acorn Marc cataloging, but all types of metadata projects. This committee needs to become more involved in all digital projects across libraries and spend more time on non-Acorn collections. However, there is the problem that we lack representation by all concerned. Special Collections, Biomedical and Divinity are often not represented at our meetings. Marshall will investigate why this is the case and see what can be done about it.
- It was decided that the committee needs to become more educated about other formats and standards for metadata. But there is always the problem of staffing and time. It may mean that we will need to allocate less time to the cataloging of some materials. But we also need to stay up-to-date on the cataloging rules where RDA is incorporating more XML and other metadata formats.
Action item: Steven Nordstrom will give a demonstration of XML at the next meeting and will send the group a list of links to view before the meeting.
- Next meeting will be Nov. 26.
Minutes submitted by Nancy Boggess-Korekach