ACRL New England Chapter News Online

ISSN 1527-0106

Spring 2003, Number 99

In This Issue (Home):

President's Letter

ACRL/NEC Spring Conference Report

Board Meeting Minutes, March 7, 2003

Serials Interest Group Spring 2003 Program Summary

Announcements:
Access Services Interest Group Spring Event

New England Library Instruction Group Annual Program

New England Library Association Annual Conference

The ACRL/NEC Serials Interest Group held its Spring 2003 Program, "Standards of Seriality" on May 16, 2003 at the Harvard Medical School, Tosteson Medical Education Center. The program featured a panel of four leaders in the area of serials standards who shared their knowledge and expertise with program attendees. The speakers were Gretchen Yealy, Serials Cataloger from Brown University; Regina Reynolds, Head of the National Serials Data Program at the Library of Congress; Diane Baden, Associate Director of NELINET; and Matthew Beacom, Catalog Librarian for Networked Information Resources at Yale University.

Gretchen's talk centered around the recent changes to Chapter 12 of AACR2, which expanded the definition of seriality, now referring to "serials" as "continuing resources." The new chapter also revamped many of the cataloging rules dealing with title changes, looseleafs and electronic resources. Gretchen provided us with many excellent examples that demonstrated how the new rules should be applied to continuing resources.

Regina Reynolds' discussion focused on the "ISSN in the Digital Wonderland," noting that the ISSN is being applied to many types of materials and is being used in a variety of creative ways. For example, ISSNs are widely recognized as a way of identifying continuing resources and their many manifestations. Electronic subscriptions of all types (not just serials) are utilizing the ISSN as a way of linking to resources. Products such as SFX and CrossRef rely on the ISSN to link a library's holdings to electronic journals. Materials being retrospectively digitized are also being given ISSNs. The ISSN standard is now undergoing its five-year review. It is anticipated that one of the major discussions for the standard renewal is the question of giving different ISSNs for different manifestations of the same journal title, i.e., one ISSN for the print version, another for the CD-ROM version, and another for the online version. Some thought is being given to creating an ISSN base number with a suffix to denote the type of format that the library owns.

Diane Baden gave an overview of how changes to MARC and other standards are incorporated into OCLC following their approval by national committees. The process can take anywhere from weeks to months, depending on the complexity of the change and the interrelationships to other bibliographic fields and values. OCLC will evaluate the changes, undertake the programming, test the programs to make sure that they work, publicize the changes to its members, install the new software, and provide training, if necessary. Diane provided the group with a case study of a recent change required by a MARC update and how many hours it would take to implement a small change: this turned out to be 618 hours (@26 days) and a cost of approximately $30,000. It is apparent that every time there is a change, it is no small task for a bibliographic utility to implement the change into its system.

Matthew Beacom, who currently serves as the American Library Association's representative to the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR, provided us with information on how the standards community works. The committees consists of members from the United States, Canada, Australia and Great Britain. The membership includes Library Associations and some national libraries. Matthew gave us an example of how the process worked using the new AACR2 Chapter 12. He remarked that before this process, the committees were basically reactive, concentrating on making small, incremental changes. When the Joint Committee commissioned papers on revising AACR2, a paper redefining seriality emerged and set the stage for a major revision. Individuals such as Jean Hirons and Regina Reynolds mobilized many people on the committees to work to change the definition of serials as continuing resources and create the new rules found in Chapter 12. Matthew concluded his talk with a comment on why we undertake the work of creating standards: first, because standards provide a benefit to the user for high quality information, second, because standards make library work shareable between institutions and finally, because standards make our work sustainable; by following a standard, migrating to new technologies becomes much easier.

The Serials Interest Group program was well-received by program attendees, and the planning committee is grateful to all of the speakers for their excellent presentations. The planning committee members for this event were: Patricia Hatch, Library Analyst/Training Specialist, Harvard University Library Office for Information Systems and Chair of the Serials Interest Group, Joseph Gabriel, Director of Technical Services, Gutman Library, Harvard University, Marie Lasher, Head of Collections, McQuade Library, Merrimack College, Noelle Ryan, Serials Librarian, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Roberta Schwartz, Head of Technical Services, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology.