Wednesday, October 28, 2009
10:00 - 10:50 a.m. 

Minutes

The meeting was convened by Robin Horowitz and Bobby Bothmann, the Cataloging Steering Committee Co-Conveners, at 10:00 a.m.

The Fall 2008 Minutes were approved.

The different library types caucused in order to elect representatives to the Steering Committee for 2010. It was decided to combine the Community Colleges and Technical Colleges representatives into one position. The new members are:

State Universities: Bruce Willms. Community Colleges: Adam Marsnik. Special Libraries: Sarah Quimby. Private Colleges and Universities: Lori Pesik. Consolidated Colleges: Ginny Heinrich. State Government Libraries: Robin Horowitz

Ginny Heinrich and Adam Marsnik are the new co-conveners.

The next item of business was a discussion of legacy MARC data in the MnPALS database, such as fields coded 1XX X0, changing 440 fields to 490/830 fields, form subdivisions coded $x that should be coded $v, monographs with DtSt "c", 262 fields, 260 $d subfields, and so on. Should these legacy codings be addressed as a consortium? Tess Kasling said that only the coding that really makes a difference, such as coding that causes problems with MnPALS Plus, should be addressed. Ginny Heinrich added that "The metadata matters"--that new discovery tools are exposing years on neglect. She also stated that individual libraries won't be able to make all of the fixes themselves, that we as a consortium have to work together. Adam Marsnik asked if the focus of the Authorities Task Force should be expanded to discuss some of the legacy data, but Lori Pesik said that the problems were primarily in the bibliographic database, not the authorities. Mary Ann Greenwald said that PALS would make database-wide global changes to fix legacy data, although that doing global changes on fixed fields involves performing a fix routine, and then a re-load and re-indexing of the records. Carla Urban said that the situation was analogous to cleaning up the PALS database prior to migration, and that libraries should prioritize the changes they want to make. Bobby Bothmann said that libraries should think of database-wide global changes for PALS to make and to suggest them to the Cataloging Steering committee.

Adam Marsnik announced that the Indexing Task Force has asked for four new TYP field configurations: electronic journal, electronic newspaper, streaming video, and streaming audio, and that libraries may wish to reconfigure their format limits in the Advanced Search screen. He also asked that a link to the most current version of tab_type_config should be added to the Answer Book.

Carla Urban gave a Minitex update. There have been a few staff retirements, including Virginia Dudley and Edward Swanson. Edward will keep his position as the NACO funnel and is working on a succession plan for the Minitex ConCats program. The OCLC/Minitex relationship is changing. While the work won't change much (Minitex will still do the billing and the training), OCLC customers should call OCLC first. Minitex is planning to do a lot more training on digitization, MARCEdit and the like. A lot more of the training will be online, but Minitex is willing to do on-demand, in-person training. Carla also asked that people make sure to delete your holdings in OCLC if you weed items; so much depends on WorldCat these days. Minitex libraries contributed 15,000 original records to WorldCat in 2009.

RDA was discussed during the Cataloging Q & A meeting held the hour before the Cataloging Subsystems meeting, but Bobby Bothmann gave a brief recap, saying, "Don't panic."

Mary Ann Greenwald presented the PALS work plan, strategic plan, and cataloging report which is on the MnPALS Forum at: http://forums.mnpals.org/index.php?topic=1114.0

The last item of business was the workday planning. Tess Kasling said that the Acq/Ser Steering Committee loved having their workday in conjunction with the Cataloging group. Possible sessions for the next Cat/Acq/Ser workday were sessions on global updates, MARCEdit, or Macro Express (Bobby mentioned that you can write macros to count statistics.) It was mentioned that the CLIC libraries also have their own workdays, and one thing they do if there are not enough sessions to fill a workday is to get together and fix records on the live database.

The meeting was adjourned at 10:55 a.m.

Respectfully submitted by Sarah Quimby 

Agenda