Presentation to the OLAC Conference
Denton, Texas
October 3, 1996
Most people love books. Which one of us doesn't know the joy of curling up in a favorite easy chair with a book? It is one of those commonly felt and deeply meaningful experiences that we all share and that binds us together. Even those among us who have chosen to concentrate on other formats and other aspects in our work recognize this. The book is indeed central to our culture.
So, we should not be surprised to find that library methodologies have developed above all around the concept of the book. Ways of building and describing collections, organizing and arranging materials, and of providing intellectual access: all were organized on the basis of the book. Librarians who developed early cataloging rules and wrote codes did so with the book and printed documents in mind. And those of us who have come to love other materials have had to help develop rules and codes for these special materials.
Life for AV librarians at the Library of Congress has been no different. The development of the "AV commons," of specialized non-book, nonprint materials collections has been -- at LC as elsewhere -- relatively late in creation. From the beginning, LC's special collections have been a side issue, not allocated the central place accorded to books. However, special collections developed in a fortuitous manner, primarily because authors wanted copyright protection for their works. The Library of Congress, as the legal depository of copyrights, developed large collections of maps, photographs, prints, musical scores, and moving image materials. Maps, prints, and musical scores came first, with photographs following in the latter part of the 19th century and then motion picture films in the mid 1890s. Copyright deposits of sound recordings arrived much later, not until 1972. A change in the law then gave protection to performance as distinct from musical scores or the written word. The latest arrivals, computer files, came also in the 1970's with the proliferation of this new format.
A Case Study
Typical of the serendipity with which these collections often began
is the history of LC's moving image collections. LC's earliest motion
picture collections were retained by the Library of Congress largely by
chance -- a happy circumstance of the copyright law's delay in keeping up
with technology. Until the advent of cinema, with its succession of images
flickering across a silver screen, projected there through transparent
nitrate celluloid film by means of gears, lenses, and light, the law required
that photographic images be printed on opaque paper as evidence of
publication. The transparent images on film
were considered part of the production process, more akin to a woodblock or
a lithographic stone than to the final published product and were therefore
not copyrightable, since the copyright law protected only the rights of
published intellectual property. Unpublished intellectual property was
protected by common law.
Until the law was changed in 1912, producers of cinema films were obliged to submit opaque paper rolls of the images constituting their copyrightable works. These images were kept and now comprise approximately 3,000 titles, known as the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection. Figure 1 is an example.
[Fig. 1: A frame from the film Young Romance, 1915]
Not that they were then particularly valued. In fact, when the law changed in 1912 to permit registration through the deposit of regular transparent nitrate positive prints, the Library of Congress decided not to retain any more movies in its collections. Nitrate cellulose film is closely related as a chemical compound to dynamite. It is highly flammable and subject to deterioration. In warm temperatures and high humidity, deterioration quickens and its spontaneous combustion point lowers dangerously. This is of particular concern in Washington, D.C., as anyone who has ever been in our hot, humid summers can attest.
In their early years, "movies" were, in any case neither considered cultural nor educational; rather, they were looked down upon as mere entertainment for the masses. The danger such declass‚ flammable materials as these presented to the storage of book materials far outweighed any possible intrinsic value they might possess. Additional collecting of "moving pictures" would have to await the second World War and pressure from the War Department. (Our intelligence officers wanted to see pictures of streets and aerial views of cities and towns they planned to attack.)
Even during the war and shortly afterwards, collecting moving image materials was idiosyncratic. For a time, the selection of the film deposits for the collections of the Library was undertaken by two very proper librarians who reputedly refused to accept any title which sounded as if the film might contain violence or be about cowboys. On the other hand, they readily selected all Bible stories. Not until the mid-1960's did film collecting begin on a scientific and scholarly basis. At that time, the Library undertook the development of a systematic program for the selection of current copyright deposits. Moreover, with the help of the newly formed and then-Washington-based American Film Institute, the Library also began to fill in the missing gaps in our collections -- with films from the nitrate era, that is, between 1894 and the mid-1950's.
Today the moving image collections at the Library of Congress number some 200,000 titles, comprising films and video materials of all types. From the earliest Edison Sneeze to off-air video, the Library has garnered theatrical features, shorts, trailers, outtakes, screentests, educational and training films and videos, experimental films and video art, news footage -- including television newscasts and theatrical newsreels -- television entertainment series, documentaries, talk shows, quiz and game shows, commercials, political and public service spots, special events coverage -- for example, the Watergate hearings, Democratic and Republican Convention coverage -- performances of plays and musical works, home movies, amateur footage, anthropological and other scientific studies and experiments, and unedited footage of various types. The Library's primary mission is to collect American films and videos, but we have built up collections of representative samplings of the productions of other countries as well.
Film formats range from 9.5mm to IMAX and from 2 inch quad to digitized video. Master copies, preprint--both negative and positive -- separate track and picture elements, color separations, SENs for animation, as well as release prints and study prints -- all must be retained, accounted for, sorted, organized, stored according to varying optimum specifications, and made retrievable. To complicate matters even further, the materials upon which moving image materials were recorded -- the carriers of moving images -- were fragile, easily damaged through accident or deliberate change, and subject to deterioration. They still remain so. The result is that "copies" are seldom identical. As Ben Tucker, my predecessor as Chief of the Cataloging Policy and Support Office, explained in his introduction to AMIM, the Archival Moving Image Materials cataloging manual:
The need to do "something" with the special materials collections generated by Copyright deposits led to the first development of AV cataloging at the Library of Congress. It was in fact in the Copyright Office where a legal record of deposits was required for the protection and enforcement of claimants' (that is, copyright owners') rights. So, that is where the materials were first cataloged. Starting in 1906, the Office began publishing its Catalog of Copyright Entries. Initially, emphasis was upon the "legal record." Information recorded under each entry was quite brief, and no particular attempt was made to coordinate standards with those just developing in the American library community. Records for non- book materials were exceedingly brief and published together with the records for books in a single volume. Figure 2 is an example.
[Fig. 2: Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1906]
In 1946, immediately following the second World War, when money became more flush, the Library of Congress took the opportunity to implement some of its ideas and plans that had remained unattainable dreams throughout the long years of the great depression and the war. One of the Library's projects was to reorganize its Copyright Cataloging Division. This was done in order to place more emphasis upon copyright cataloging and to bring its procedures more in line with cataloging standards and practices employed throughout the Library in general.
This decision led to a flurry of developments for special materials cataloging. While book cataloging standards were already in place, very little had been worked out for the cataloging of audiovisuals. There were separate rule books for serials and government publications in the 1920's and 1930's, and the rules for maps and musical scores had been included in the 1941 edition of the American Library Association: Catalog Rules, but otherwise, no descriptive standards had been formalized for other special materials. A brief passage in the preface to the 1941 edition states:
But map cataloging rules were already in place. How did it come about that maps were the first AV materials to be incorporated into general texts of cataloging rules? The answer is actually quite simple. The first Chief of the Geography & Map Division, which was then known as the Hall of Maps & Charts, was Philip Lee Phillips. Phillips, who had started work at the Library of Congress as a book cataloger, inaugurated a series of catalogs for books and atlases, and the final volume was recently published in 1992. These book catalogs were arranged by geographic area, and were actually bibliographies rather than catalogs. Figure 3 is an example from an early book catalog for atlases.
[Fig. 3: An Early Book Catalog for Atlases]
An occasional volume would contain an index of the previous volumes arranged by author. As far as descriptive analysis was concerned, Phillips had learned his book cataloging quite well. In 1904, he was quoted as saying,
That was his view, but not all cartographic catalogers agreed with him.
The major controversy then raging in the world of map cataloging was the issue of whether main entry for maps should be by principal responsibility or by place. Most organizations, including the American Geographic Society, opted for place, but the Library of Congress, despite the fact that its book catalogs were actually arranged by place, held out for principal responsibility. Partly this was owing to Phillips' book cataloging bent, but, in part too, the issue was one of personalities.
The control of rules for content analysis was in the hands of the Cataloging Department. In 1928 the Chief Classifier in the Cataloging Department created and published an edition of the Library of Congress G Classification Schedule for atlases. Throughout the creative process, Phillips and his staff in the Geography and Map Division were never consulted, and Phillips didn't like the atlas classification nor the Chief Classifier. Phillips' successor, Colonel Lawrence Martin did not like the schedule either. As a result, despite the fact that it was published by the Library, the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division refused to use it.
In 1946, prompted by a deluge of new map acquisitions resulting from a new depository program put in place immediately following the second World War, the Geography and Map Division published, on their own, a continuation of the G classification, this one for maps. Some time later, in 1954, atlas classification was reworked to accord with G&M's maps classification scheme.
Personalities often turn the course of events. Building upon experience gained from cataloging the copyright collections, three intrepid ladies, Katharine Clugston, Virginia Cunningham, and Virginia Daiker (determined, dedicated, and devoted librarians all), set about designing methods of describing and cataloging three other categories of special materials: educational films, sound recordings, and graphics.
Katharine Clugston began her career as a film cataloger in the Copyright Office. While there, she gained experience with cataloging films of all types. Transferred to the Descriptive Cataloging Division in the late 1940's, she began work on developing a descriptive cataloging code for films. Since, at that time, the Library still had no separate film division and had not yet undertaken the systematic development of a film collection, Mrs. Clugston turned her attentions to the development of a program designed to supply catalog cards for educational films and filmstrips that could be used by the nation's schools, audiovisual centers, and public libraries. The catalog cards would be based upon data to be supplied by producers and distributors of audiovisual materials, thus eliminating the need for acquiring the expensive editing machines necessary, if one was to catalog from the films themselves. The information supplied by producers was to be preformatted onto especially designed forms called "datasheets." The cataloging rules were to be prepared to meet the needs of this program. A preliminary edition of the rules, entitled Rules for Descriptive Cataloging in the Library of Congress: Motion Pictures and Filmstrips, was published in 1952, and the film card program was inaugurated in the same year. An announcement in the October 1, 1951 issue of the Library Journal explained with enthusiasm:
A second librarian, Virginia Cunningham, began her library career as a music cataloger in the Music Division of the Library of Congress (see Figure 4). Seeing her best opportunities for advancement in the Cataloging Department rather than in the Music Division, she transferred to the Descriptive Cataloging Division in the early 1950's. There she built up an expert staff of music catalogers, and, in 1956, became Head of the Descriptive Cataloging Division's Music Section, retaining this position until she retired in 1972. Mrs. Cunningham's first efforts at preparing cataloging rules for sound recordings, were entitled Rules for Descriptive Cataloging in the Library of Congress: Phonorecords, published by the Library in 1952. They were well received. Indeed, they remain the basis for the descriptive cataloging of sound recordings today. Building her reputation at a period when music librarianship was dominated by men, Mrs. Cunningham was known for her expertise and her winning smile. Curiously, she never hired any women catalogers during her entire tenure as Head of the Music Section, and her staff came to be lovingly known in some quarters as "Virginia Cunningham's all-male orchestra."
[Fig. 5 and 6: Virginia Daiker]
Unlike the other two, Virginia Daiker, Curator in the Prints and Photographs Division (see Figures 5 and 6), was not responsible for the publication of descriptive cataloging standards. Instead she worked with her colleagues, mostly non-librarians, to devise and implement an innovative system for organizing and cataloging large numbers of visual images. The system, termed "lot cataloging," divided the images into groupings arranged by artist, by provenance, by topic, or by format (see Figure 7). The "lot cataloging" method was described in a 1949 article appearing in the Library of Congress Information Bulletin. Its emphasis upon efficiency and economy have a curiously contemporary ring.
[Fig. 8: Card with Microfilm Image]
From the issues developing in this first major thrust of activity, one can already see the basis of ongoing conflicts. One conflict concerned the issue of who controlled cataloging policies for special materials cataloging. In part, this was the result of the book-centrist attitudes of generalist librarians, and, in part it was a deeply human struggle -- one based on personal affinities, antipathies, and a struggle for influence and power.
Another conflict was closely allied with the first and was political more than theoretical as well. How much of the Library of Congress budget should be allotted to the collecting and cataloging of audiovisual materials? What should be the criteria for selection of special media, and how much money should be spent on organizing and cataloging them?
Still another conflict that, likewise, continues until this day, had to do with whether or not the principles and practices evolved to suit one type of material fit when applied to others. Do they fit well enough or even at all? Should description be based on a description of the physical and "biblio"-graphic characteristics of a particular format, or is adaptation adequate? By mid-century, these battles were in full swing. Writing in response to an article by Charles W. Buffum, Head of the Map Processing Section in the Library of Congress Map Division, Bill Woods, a map librarian at the University of Illinois, voiced the opinion of many specialists:
Reflecting trends elsewhere in the world, the decade of the 1950's was a period of consolidation and conservatism for the Library and audiovisual cataloging. Following the work earlier in the century on cataloging codes for special materials, staffs settled in to use the new tools for creating catalog cards. Although the Library had been creating cataloging cards for books since 1898 and distributing them since 1901, it was only in the early 1950's that the Library began programs to distribute cards for special materials. In the Map Division, cards served both the goals of cataloging the maps in the Library's collections and of providing cataloging copy for the nation's libraries. In part, the usefulness of the Library's cataloging cards was owed to the fact that maps, like books, were published and distributed in numerous identical copies. But in part, too, it was the result of the fact that the community of cartographic librarians was organized into professional associations that helped to promulgate the standards. Professional associations also served as a locus and outlet for criticism, as well as a useful mechanism for achieving consensus concerning changes and revisions.
The situation for sound recordings cataloging was only slightly different. The first sound recordings to be cataloged by Virginia Cunningham and her group were commercially issued performances of traditional classical music, and a consumer group quickly developed for Library of Congress printed cards. The profession of music librarianship was also already well-organized and well-defined. Here, too, professional associations of music librarians served as an outlet for criticism and a center for change and standardization.
On the opposite end of the spectrum was the Prints and Photographs Division, where, it will be remembered, no published rules had eventuated from the 1940's surge of creativity. This was not accidental. Like manuscripts, P&P's collections were primarily unique, and cataloging data based on them was not of service to the wider community of art and picture librarians in the way that map and sound recordings cataloging was. Managers did not see any benefits to be gained from standardization, and staff, organized separately as curators rather than catalogers, continued to design their own systems to meet the separate and specialized needs of individual collections. Much later the economic benefits of shared authority records for names, uniform titles, and series ad shared thesauri and subject headings was realized.
For film materials, the situation was different yet. By the 1950's, the Library of Congress was still not collecting film materials on any regular basis. Katharine Clugston involved herself in unsuccessful efforts to have this policy changed. Because responsible film collecting required heavy funding for the construction of special storage sites (nitrate vaults) and the purchase of projectors, splicers, rewinds, viewing tables and other expensive equipment necessary to catalog and service the collections, Congress refused to authorize the Library to build a film collection. The Library therefore continued its policies of shipping copyright deposits directly back to the claimants after registration was completed. Undaunted and convinced of the value of film materials, Katharine Clugston tried another tactic. As mentioned earlier, she managed to interest Library officials in her vision of a market for printed cards to provide cataloging copy for the nation's libraries, schools, and audiovisual centers. Her timing was right; schools and libraries were then in the process of developing audiovisual collections following a new emphasis upon the educational value and use of AV materials. Owing to her persistence, the Library, in Clugston's words,
The "Film Card Program," later to be known internally as the "AV datasheet program," commenced in late 1951. Figure 9 is an example "AV datasheet card."
An announcement appearing in the October Library Journal of that year described it.
In the 1950's the specialists had won the day. The next comprehensive cataloging rules to be published were the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR) in 1967. These rules contained major, "ground- breaking" revisions of the 1949 rules for choice of entry and form of headings based on the 1961 Paris Principles, but they left descriptive rules essentially the same as before, revising them to incorporate the special format chapters published at the beginning of the previous decade, but reorganized in a manner to fit the structure of the new rules. Part three of AACR consisted of a separate section for nonbook materials. This section had six chapters, one each for:
Each chapter contained two separate parts, one for bibliographic description and one for specialized rules of entry.
The period of the late sixties and early seventies was a time of ferment in the nation. At the Library of Congress, it was a time of planning for automation. By 1968, automation for book cataloging had reached the implementation stage, and the MARC format was a reality. The MARC II Format: A Communications Format for Bibliographic Data, co-authored by Henriette Avram, John Knapp, and Lucia Rather, was published by the Library in 1968. Soon other formats followed. MARC: Maps appeared in 1970; MARC: Films in 1971, a separate specialized format for books in 1972, and MARC: Music (including provisions for sound recordings) in 1976.
Once the formats were in place, the process of creating machine-readable records began. The process was, at first, quite cumbersome. Elizabeth Mangan of the Geography & Map (G&M) Division remembers that the first map records were input on paper tape in 1968 by staff from the Science & Technology Division. In 1970, Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriters were installed in G&M, and cataloging staff began keying records in batch mode. This meant keeping separate manual records for each bibliographic record. Groups of ten records each were organized into numbered"batches". Catalogers could not see the records they input; printouts of the records, organized into the same batches, were received no earlier than the following day and then had to be reviewed carefully. Any field containing any error had to be rekeyed in its entirety, thus generating the possibility for new error, and, of course, then reproofed until, finally, an error-free catalog record was achieved. The paperwork required to keep track of this work-flow was time-consuming and tedious.
Similar stories were told by Katharine Clugston's audiovisual cataloging staff, and by catalogers from the Prints & Photograph Division's Motion Picture Section. In cooperation with the American Film Institute, the Copyright Office, and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Library was beginning at last to develop its own film and television collections. With a grant of $110,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, catalogers in the Motion Picture Section viewed and prepared two carefully researched catalogs for important acquisitions of early films, the George Kleine and Theodore Roosevelt Collections. The advent of the automated catalog brought new possibilities to film cataloging, where the printed card system had placed severe limitations on the size of summaries and the number of access points permitted for each film. The published catalogs included access by alternate title, production and distribution companies, credits, cast members, release dates, genre, and subject. In a new departure for library catalogs, subject access included the themes and topics of fictional films as well as the more traditional access to the subjects and topics of documentary and educational films.
The MARC Music Format in 1976 added automation for sound recordings cataloging to the Library scene. Although they had to wait longer than map or film catalogers, the music and sound recordings catalogers could not only create but could also search for their records online. Map cataloging did not go online until 1984, and film and video cataloging not until 1986, when the films format was revised to include graphics and renamed the MARC Format for Visual Materials.
Advances in automation and telecommunication served as an incentive for the development of international principles of bibliographic description. The result of the 1969 International Meeting of Cataloging Experts sponsored by IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) in Copenhagen was the draft international standard for bibliographic description. The first definitive edition of the standard, ISBD(M) for monographs was published in 1974, and in 1976 an abbreviated outline of ISBD(M) was accepted by the International Standards Organization as an ISO standard. This first publication was followed quickly by a whole set of ISBDs as follows:
ISBD(G) - for a general framework, 1977.
ISBD(S) - for serials, 1977.
ISBD(CM) - for cartographic materials, 1977.
ISBD(NBM) - for nonbook materials, 1978.
ISBD(PM) - for printed music, 1980.
ISBD(A) - for antiquarian materials, 1980.
ISBD (CF) - for computer files, 1990.
The goals of the ISBDs were:
To achieve these goals, three major characteristics were incorporated into each of the ISBD standards:
In the Anglo-American cataloging community, where the history of cooperative cataloging was of longer standing, the ISBD efforts spurred the preparation of a new edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules. Undertaken for the purposes of reconciling the differences between the British and American texts of AACR, the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR decided very early on to incorporate ISBD principles and practices as well.
The ISBDs introduced the principle of item cataloging into the concept of the principal or chief source of information, defining an 'item' as:
The ISBDs provided separate guidelines for different types of materials, but the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR (JSCAACR) took issue with the separate guidelines approach. They firmly believed that automation requirements necessitated an even stricter standardization, and sought instead to build one standard description that could function for all formats of materials. In the preface to AACR2, the Chair of JSCAACR, Peter R. Lewis, stated:
Perhaps more than any other single decision, this across-the-board application of the principle of the physical item as the basis for cataloging, caused serious -- if not insurmountable -- problems for special materials catalogers. The frustrations audiovisual catalogers encountered in trying to apply AACR2 were of at least three different sorts.
First, the types of information and data elements available for them to use in describing their materials were often not found on the items being described. For example, unpublished maps and photographs commonly lack titles and/or dates and have no associated publisher or place of publication.
Second, types of information common to some special format materials have no true equivalent in the book world, and therefore the description of these characteristics were initially relegated to notes. Notes became longer, more cumbersome, more complex, and hence more confusing to both users and catalogers alike. Many of these latter problems, such as technique, physical description, and scale for maps, were resolved in the 1980's through the efforts of specialists in the areas of audiovisual cataloging combined with the sympathy, interest, and good will of book cataloging and MARC format specialists.
Third, and even more perplexing was the question of how we decide what it is that we catalog. When is an item an item? When is an item a copy, and when is it a new item? How alike is "alike," and how different is "different?" What is an "item," and what is a "work," anyhow? What are the differences, and which should we really be cataloging? How many and what kinds of changes are required to create a new item? a new work? These questions are still being debated.
The immediate result of the approach in the 1978 edition of AACR2 was reaction, refusal, and revolt. You will recall that was a time of "desuperimposition" and the implementation of the rules were postponed for two years until the library community could better prepare of moving to online catalogs and for implementation of the NACO program to build a shared resource authority file that followed the new rules. Special materials librarians rejected AACR2 and began working on descriptive standards of their own. The 1980's ushered in a renewed period of conflict with -- on one side -- special materials librarians of all stripes, banding together to press for increased flexibility and change, and -- on the other -- book librarians who saw clearly the needs for standardization, enforced by the constraints and limitations of automation. (It must be admitted, in addition, that many book librarians truly did not understand the impossibility of the conditions they were laying on their colleagues.)
The result of all this turmoil was compromise. The decade of the eighties saw the publication of a series of interpretive and AACR2-based manuals designed to fit into the framework of MARC but containing the flexibility required to allow special materials catalogers to create records which met the needs of both their clientele and their administrators. The manuals were:
The 1980's also saw the introduction of a new format into the collections of the Library. In the early eighties, LC began collecting computer disks and tapes on an official basis. Previously, since about the early 1970's, disks and tapes had begun appearing at the Copyright Office. At first they were often mistaken for video or sound recordings and found their way either to the Music Division or to the Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division. Books with disks in them were initially stored in the Music Division in a cabinet known as the "Phonocase."
The tasks of designing procedures and of cataloging computer files at the Library of Congress fell, initially, to one intrepid AV cataloger whom most of you know -- Ann Sandberg-Fox. Together with Ben Tucker, then Chief of the Descriptive Cataloging Policy Office, Dr. Fox revised and rewrote chapter 9 of AACR2. Finished in 1985, an off-print of the revised chapter was published in 1986. Together with the Cataloging in Publication (CIP) Office, Dr. Fox developed a data sheet and set of instructions for publishers to use in reporting software titles. Single-handedly, she began cataloging the materials. Since there was neither hardware nor staff to mount the files, the rules were designed so that all cataloging information could be taken from labels and accompanying information.
In 1988, to great fanfare, the Library opened its new Machine Readable Collections Reading Room. At the time, the Reading Room had only 250 titles. Selecting items from materials deposited for copyright, the professional staff slowly built the collections. Dr. Fox cataloged the materials for them, at first into a PC. Then, in late 1989, when the computer files format was brought up on MUMS, all the data from the PC file had to be rekeyed manually into the mainframe.
One of the biggest problems for computer file catalogers has always been the speed with which the technology changes. Rapid advances in miniaturization and telecommunications have already changed the characteristics of computer files dramatically. Writing in 1991 in the periodical Technicalities, Sheila Intner put the problem this way:
At the Library of Congress, the Machine Readable Collections Reading Room fell victim to these rapid changes. Lacking requisite funding, understaffed, and unable to acquire the varieties of new hardware capable of providing access to the ever-multiplying numbers of computer file resources, a reluctant decision was made this year, in 1996, to close the Reading Room, dispersing its holdings into other general collections.
A new trend in the early 1990's was the introduction of highly complex, interactive multimedia resources, integrating
Increasingly, as technology continues to advance, more and more computer files and interactive multimedia resources are becoming available over the Internet. A major challenge occupying cataloging specialists in the 1990's is the cataloging of items that you cannot hold in your hand, the cataloging of virtual reality and remotely accessed texts, images, and sounds.
To return to the Library of Congress scene at the opening of the decade of the nineties:
Under ever-increasing pressure from new governmental anti-spending policies, Library managers began to cast about for methods of spending less while at the same time bringing to fruition the aim of the new Librarian of Congress, James Billington, to eliminate the Library's processing and cataloging backlogs (called arrearages) by the turn of the century. The year 2000, now only ten years away, loomed large. Recently this target date was adjusted to extend to 2005, but even that is optimistic. Always under funded, the Library had, over the course of the century, built up enormous cataloging backlogs. Not surprisingly, most of these backlogs were in the Library's special materials collections, where decades of neglect had led to the warehousing of huge collections that no one had ever had the time or money to process. Now, despite overall losses in funding, LC catalogers were to catalog these materials and make them available to researchers within the span of ten years' time -- a single decade. The decision led to major shifts in planning, programming, and the allocation of staff.
One of the programs to fall victim to the changes was the audiovisual "datasheet" program developed by Katharine Clugston. In fact, cataloging staff from the Audiovisual Section was split in three directions in a major reorganization of technical services. Some went to the Special Materials Cataloging Division's Music Sections; some went to form the new Computer Files Cataloging Team, and some moved to the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division.
A second development, this one beneficial, was an increased reliance on the American library community to share in the responsibilities of producing catalog copy for the nation's libraries. Capitalizing on advances in networking and telecommunications technologies, libraries, by the nineties, had arrived at a place where they could share newly created or updated cataloging data almost instantaneously. Suddenly, complex agreements amongst libraries for dividing up cataloging work were no longer necessary. Catalogers need only check the networks to find out whether catalog copy already existed. This increased availability of cataloging records meant both efficiency and realistic savings to the nation's libraries.
At the Library of Congress, cooperative work on building a national name authorities database was already well underway with the NACO program, started in the late 1970's. SACO and BIBCO were added in the 1990's, but before BIBCO could actually be implemented, agreements were needed. Ann DellaPorta, Head of the Cooperative Cataloging Team in the Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division at LC, writes:
A part of the new cooperative spirit are the efforts now underway to devise mechanisms for implementing the use of subfield v for form subdivisions in subject heading (6XX) fields and differentiating its use from field 655, the field for genre and physical characteristics. In coordination with ALA's SAC Subcommittee on Form Headings/Subdivisions Implementation, a group of LC staff members under the able direction of Tom Yee, Assistant Chief of CPSO, is working to develop lists of form/genre terms for sound recordings, film and video, maps, rare books, computer files, legal documents, and manuscripts. In the process of this work, they are consulting scholars outside the fields of library and information science as well as colleagues within the profession. The Library very much now regards itself as a facilitator and coordinator of cataloging copy and policy.
And to the future? The next big issue for cataloging AV media that we are all beginning to tackle is electronic media. This includes information on the Internet and World Wide Web, or as some at this summer's IFLA meeting in Beijing were calling it, the World Wide Wait. And if we think multimedia is a problem, stay tuned. There is no telling what fascinating possibilities future technology will bring. The new technology is getting better and better. "Virtual libraries" already identify materials in the bibliographic universe anywhere in the world through the Internet. No need to house and archive such materials redundantly in individual libraries - access is everything.
There is no longer a physical item in hand to catalog, so AACR2's basic principle, rule 0.24, needs changing with the times. The future electronic material will supposedly be self-organizing and self-describing with its own metadata, searchable through powerful search engines, but the computer wizards developing these relevancy feedback weighted systems somehow skipped the course in precision and recall that we were taught in Library School - more than ever we need the power of authority control with controlled access and controlled vocabularies to enable more precise searches rather than the less than useful retrievals of thousands of hits on the Internet.
Audiovisual folks have a new opportunity for a stronger forum.
Next year in October in Toronto, The Joint Steering Committee is organizing a major cataloging conference, the 1977 International Conference on the Principles and Future Development of AACR. The conference will consist of three days of workshops, of invited papers, and discussions. The conference will be by invitation, with approximately fifty participants, and an as yet undetermined number of observers. The issues to be discussed are exactly those that have been plaguing audiovisual catalogers from the beginning, for example,
the issue of multiple versions -- What is a work; what is a publication, an edition, a copy?
the issue of main entry -- Is it still a valuable concept? Around what other elements might a bibliographic record be organized? title? a control number? What else?
the issue of corporate entry -- If we identify the specific relationship a corporate body has to the entity we are cataloging, perhaps we no longer need to worry about whether or not a corporate body can be an author.
Librarians across the country can have their voices heard and can assist in our national efforts through participation in the PCC. The PCC (Program for Cooperative Cataloging) describes itself as "an international cooperative effort aimed at expanding access to library collections by providing useful, timely, and cost-effective cataloging that meets mutually-accepted standards of libraries throughout the world." Direction of the PCC is by an Executive Council, whose membership is drawn from diverse library constituencies, including eight permanent representatives, one each for the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS), the British Library, CONSER, the Library of Congress, the National Library of Canada, the National Library of Medicine, OCLC, and RLG (the Research Libraries Group). Seven rotating PCC partners are elected by program members. In addition, two librarians from participating libraries are selected to advise the Executive Council on operational matters and technical issues in PCC cataloging. Three standing committees, Automation, Standards, and Training, operate to further the mission of the PCC. Task groups are created as needed. PCC is also now involved in the harmonization of the MARC formats of the US, Canada, and the UK. The goal is to establish a single "IMARC," as Sally McCallum is calling it.
The PCC is also the umbrella organization now for NACO, the name authority program, SACO, the subject authority program, and BIBCO, the bibliographic record program.
NACO: Through this program participants contribute authority records for names, uniform titles, and series to the national authority file. An individual institution may join this program, or a group of libraries with a common interest may form a funnel project to contribute records through a coordinator. OLAC has been instrumental in promoting the AV Funnel Program, whose coordinator is Ann Caldwell of Brown University.
SACO: Through this program participants propose subject headings for inclusion in the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and classification number proposals or changes for inclusion in the Library of Congress classification schedules.
BIBCO: Through this program participants that are already NACO participants contribute bibliographic records to the national databases. BIBCO members are responsible for contributing full or core level bibliographic records. These records are identified as PCC records and are notable for their complete authority work (both descriptive and subject), a national level call number (LC classification, Dewey, or NLM classification), and at least one subject access point drawn from a nationally recognized thesaurus or subject heading list such as LCSH, MeSH, AAT, etc., as appropriate. Core records are meant to be dynamic records that can be updated, but are intended to provide the basic information that should be acceptable records to most libraries, with all access points under full authority control.
More detail about the PCC program is available from the PCC World Wide Web Site, where you can find news bulletins, special reports, training information and other critical PCC information and documents. The address is:
Applications to join and additional information about the PCC program may be obtained from:
To make things easier, many of the standards used by PCC participants are now available on the Catalogers' Desktop. This is a CD- based set of cataloging tools available through LC's Cataloging Distribution Service. Catalogers' Desktop titles of particular interest to AV catalogers are:
Also available is Classification Plus which links LCSH terms with the available online LC classification schedules. We hope to have proofed and edited the online versions of all of the LC Classification schedules by early 1998.
We are still negotiating with ALA about getting the AACR2 online to link to the LC Rule Interpretations and the USMARC formats.
If you have questions and you are part of PCC in the NACO funnel project or one of the other programs, you are encouraged to first contact the funnel coordinator or another PCC library, and if you still need an answer go through the Cooperative Cataloging Team (Ann DellaPorta's folks). If you have any questions about rule interpretations, LCSH, or LC Classification, anyone at any time is welcome to contact the Cataloging Policy and Support Office directly at our email address:
or contact me directly:
Phone: (202) 707-4376 (direct, voice mail)
(202) 707-4380 (secretary)
Fax: (202) 707-6629
Email: btil@loc.gov
We can look forward to the next century with anticipation for its challenges and with the assurance that we, as librarians, will never run out of work to do in providing bibliographic control, access, and above all, service to users.
![[Fig. 1: A frame from the film Young Romance, 1915]](kn1p2.gif){kind=link}
![[Fig. 2: Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1906]](kn1p3.gif){kind=link}
![[Fig. 3: An Early Book Catalog for Atlases]](kn1p4.gif){kind=link}
![6: Virginia Daiker]](kn1p7.gif){kind=link}
![[Fig. 7: Lot Cataloging, P&P]](kn1p8.gif){kind=link}
![[Fig. 8: Card with Microfilm Image]](kn1p9.gif){kind=link}
![[Fig. 9: AV Datasheet Card]](kn1p10.gif){kind=link}