Submitted by Richard Sapon-White, February 10, 2020
At my first ALA meeting as Chair of the International Relations Round Table, I was mainly busy with round table-related meetings but managed to squeeze in several interest groups that related to cataloging/metadata. Highlights appear below.
Round Table Coordinating Assembly
Chairs and representatives of the various ALA round tables meet to discuss relevant issues. The focus of this meeting was on the report of the Steering Committee for Organizational Effectiveness, which is leading the way to reorganizing ALA. Of greatest concern to the round tables is a proposal that they each have a minimum number of dues-paying members equivalent to 1% of ALA membership. IRRT, one of the larger round tables, offers international members free membership, so despite our numbers, IRRT needs to do a major membership drive in the coming few years. Needless to say, with many round tables on the chopping block, this was an animated and rather contentious meeting.
We’ve Got to Stop Meeting Like This…Making Meetings Work
This workshop for ALA officers and committee chairs was conducted by the ALA Council’s parliamentarian, Eli Mina. He discussed how to create agendas and conduct meetings so that the focus is on getting work done. He had many useful tips, plus attendees were given two books on meetings that he has authored.
IRRT Welcome Session
This Friday afternoon meet-and-greet, sponsored by the IRRT executive board, attracted international visitors from Japan, Canada, and several other countries. Midwinter is not as heavily attended by international librarians as the Annual meeting, but it was nice to welcome those who could make it and answer questions about the conference.
IRRT All-Committees Meeting
As IRRT Chair, I was kept busy throughout the meeting answering questions about the round table and plans for the Annual Meeting in Chicago in June.
ALCTS Faceted Subject Access Interest Group
The FAST Policy and Outreach Committee promotes adoption of FAST and related tools. They posted an FAQ about FAST and have webinars planned for later this year. They are also developing training materials.
Future of Subject Access at the British Library: The British Library is conducting a project to add controlled vocabulary to records that lack any subject access. They especially were evaluating FAST and found the terminology compatible with LCSH and linked data. Assisted by OCLC, they decided to test the ease and efficacy of adding FAST terms in several workflows and are now considering replacing all current workflows with FAST. They will use FAST for British literature and media colletions. They didn’t want to stop using LCSH for mainstream materials. This approach will be used for grey literature, electronic media, Asian and African collections, archives and mss. They have a need for more training.
Discovery of datasets in catalog: Rowema Griem, Tachtorn Miller, Yukari Sugiyama (Yale) found that datasets are not cataloged in any consistent way. There is a limited number of dataset-related terms in controlled vocabularies. There is also a lack of guidelines to distinguish datasets from other computer files and/or recording dataset characteristics in MARC. The 336 field can be used to identify a computer dataset, but a 2nd 336 is needed to identify what type of data is included. A list of proposed terms had been proposed via SACO for LCSH and LCGFT, but some were not accepted. More information can be seen at http://Web.library.yale.edu/cataloging/datasets
IRRT Executive Board Meeting
Approved plans for Annual and awardee for the IRRT Mission Enhancement Grant (Ray Pun, who will be planning a conference on linked data in Croatia). Also approved a revision of the round table’s officers manual.
Steering Committee on Organizational Effectiveness (SCOE) meeting with round tables
SCOE is causing quite an upheaval in ALA, recommending a lot of changes for association governance. The impact of these changes on the round tables in particular has the potential to eliminate many of them. This session did not allay anyone’s fears. I believe that IRRT is probably safe for now, but we will need to up our membership in order to stay viable.
International Relations Committee
As IRRT Chair, I attended the IRC meeting to report on IRRT activities. IRC debated a resolution before council that would have ALA go on record as opposing recent legislation to prohibit the US government from conducting business with firms that support the boycott/divestment/sanctions movement against Israel. None of the 3 committees, including the IRC, that this resolution was referred to by Council voted in favor of it.
PCC Participants meeting
Several presenters discussed the evaluation of Romanization in catalog records. A recent survey indicates that librarians, especially tech services librarians, rely on Romanization greatly. It is also used for online searching as well as pronunciation and marking resources. A very interesting set of presentations that favor continuing the inclusion of Romanized data in records.
I also attended a presentation on a Wikidata project conducted by Lori Robare (UO) relating to the Oregon Book Awards and Oregon women mayors.
And last but not least (if you have read this far!) I took a tour of the Free Library of Philadelphia’s special collections and music score collection. One highlight was seeing the stuffed pet raven that belonged to Charles Dickens, named Grip. Dickens’ book narrated by Grip was the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.”
