Series in Acorn Project Team

Membership

Staff involved in public services and technical services will constitute this group.

• Mary Charles Lasater
• Ann Ercelawn
• Catherine Gick
• Carlin Sappenfield
• Janice Adlington

Project Summary

The Library of Congress has announced that it will be eliminating the practice of tracing series in bibliographic records it produces and will no longer perform series authority work effective May 31, 2006. Since technical services processes in our library are tied to those of LC, this change impacts our cataloging practices. Questions raised by this change include: • If we follow LC’s new practice of not tracing series, what would be the impact on searching in our catalog? • In the absence of series tracings being provided by LC, can we continue at least some of this work without an increase in time and effort? • Can some type of automated processing mitigate the impact of the reduction or elimination of series work? • What is the relative importance of series tracings relative to other priorities faced by technical services? • Can a reduction in effort in series processing be channeled into activities that have a higher impact on library users?

The project team will convene a joint meeting of the Research Services Committee and the Metadata Committee to gather information from these two groups on the value of series data in the catalog and the impact that this change might have on end-user searching.

Following this information gathering session, the team will assess the impact of this change, write a brief report on its findings, and make recommendations to the Strategy and Planning Council.

Time Line

The Group will make its initial recommendations to the Strategy and Planning Council by May 30, 2006. Final draft and implementation depend on other developments from LC, ALA, ARL, OCLC, etc.

Project Leader

Marshall Breeding will convene this group.