ALA Annual 2012: MARBI (Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information) meetings

10:30am-12:00pm, Sat. June 23; 1:00pm-5:00pm, June, 24, 2012

Matthew Wise, the committee Chair, announced the statement from ALCTS. The ALCTS Board approved to dissolve MARBI as of the conclusion of Annual 2013 and create a joint ALCTS-LITA Metadata Standards Committee (MSC) with liaison from RUSA with the similar charge of MARBI: “The ALCTS/LITA Metadata Standards Committee will play a leadership role in the creation and development of metadata standards for bibliographic information.  The Committee will review and evaluate proposed standards; recommend approval of standards in conformity with ALA policy; establish a mechanism for the continuing review of standards (including the monitoring of further development); provide commentary on the content of various implementations of standards to concerned agencies; and maintain liaison with concerned units within ALA and relevant outside agencies.”

Sally McCallum from the Library of Congress stated that the Library of Congress would revisit the structure of MARC Advisory Committee to include the members of MARBI and national libraries representatives as voting members. The new MAC will be LC’s consultative national committee, just as the other national partners have their own committees. A separate group, the MARC Steering Group, will include the national library representatives from LC, BL, DNB and LAC, and will have the final approval on MAC decisions. The names of these two new committees are provisional until next year. LC is committed to maintaining the formats and the current system of proposals and discussion papers.

2012‐02 Identifying Titles Related to the Entity Represented by the Authority Record in the MARC 21 Authority Format

After discussion, the proposal was asked to be tabled since many important considerations have surfaced which cannot be dealt in a logical manner at the MARBI table. The group preferred simple coding (all title elements in one subfield) rather than complicated coding (mirroring the uniform title 130/240 or title statement 245 fields). It was suggested that the proposal only referred to entities in authority 100, 110 and 111 fields, not 148, 150, 151.

Proposal No. 2012-03: Data provenance in the MARC21 bibliographic format

Option two of this proposal was approved (defining field 883) with revisions to the definition of $u to use it for URIs only, using $c instead of $1 for the confidence level, and defining 883 in the authority and classification formats.

Proposal No. 2012-04: New data elements in the MARC 21 authority format for Other Designation Associated with the Person and Title of the Person

This proposal was approved with the addition of $s, $t, $u and $v. The existing field 368 will be renamed to simply “Other Attributes.”

2012‐05 Making 250 Field Repeatable in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

This proposal was not approved. It was suggested that Music Library Association took this paper and worked it into a discussion paper for
the midwinter meeting.

2012‐06 Defining Subfield $c (Qualifying Information) in Field 028 (Publisher Number) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

This proposal was approved with revision to define $q instead of $c.

2012‐07 Defining New Code for Vocal Score in Field 008/20 (format of music) in the MARC 21 Bibliographic Format

This proposal was approved.

2012‐DP02 Authority Records for Medium of Performance Vocabulary for Music

This paper will come back to the midwinter meeting as a proposal.

2012‐DP03 Chronological Aspects in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats

It was agreed that MARC need a place to encode date or period of creation in particular for the content of published collections/aggregated works. This paper will come back as a proposal at midwinter meeting. The task group will write a best practices document which will substitute for a content standard for now.

2012‐DP04 Recording Audience Characteristics of Works and Expressions in the MARC 21 Bibliographic
and Authority Formats

It was agreed that audience characteristics of a work is one of the work’s attributes and should be recorded. Most people preferred 3XX block rather than 6XX block since 6XX is named “subject”.  It also was suggested to not make 008/22 codes obsolete. The content standard will need to be developed to decide whether the terms should include the double dash syntax in their content standard, or possibly allow separate subfields.

2012‐DP05 Recording Creator/Contributor Group Categorizations of Works, Expressions, and Persons in the MARC 21 Bibliographic and Authority Formats

It was agreed that it would continue to be necessary to record in bibliographic records group categories for creators/contributors of compilations/aggregate works who share a particular characteristic. It was also agreed that individual persons have attributes for categories of groups to which they belong and should be recorded in personal name authority records. The 3XX block was preferable for this data than 6XX and the tags used in the Bibliographic and Authority formats should be the same if possible.  Separate 3XX fields for creator/contributor group categorizations and for audience characteristics were preferable to a single field for both. Nationality is not a clear‐cut question and there will be some redundancy. No clear answer was obtained.

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