Catalogers Discussion Group. December
19th, 2005, 3-5
pm
Frick Art Reference Library of The Frick
Collection
Minutes
Organizer: Mark Bresnan, Head of
Bibliographic Records, Frick Art Reference Library
Place: The Walnut Room of The Frick
Collection
Participants: a group of approximately 24
librarians from NYC, including two Library
School
students, Jacqueline Rogers and Andrea Young.
Agenda:
- Presentation
on local documentation by Mark Bresnan (Head of Bibliographic Records, Frick
Art Reference Library) and Daniel Starr (Manager
of Bibliographic Operations, Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, NYC)
- Casalini records, full and minimal, and
the utilities (Mark Bresnan)
- Draft of RDA pt. 1 (Daniel Starr)
- Viewing of The Frick Collection
exhibition “Memling Portraits”, 2-3
pm
LOCAL DOCUMENTATION AND MAINTENANCE
After the introductions, Mark Bresnan had
the floor and presented documentation on cataloging, posted online by a good
number of universities, both on national standard procedures, and local
practice and policies, stressing their forte(s) and / or weaknesses.
Columbia
University,
NYC, has a Bibliographic Control Division page at
https://www1.columbia.edu/sec/cu/libraries/staffweb/units/bibcontrol
(page already changed address!). He
found the site useful for having field-by-field documentation, instructions on
preliminary bibliographic records for monographs, and on variant editions.
Bresnan thought a limitation of the site is the OPAC’s (CLIO) Manual
password-protected. There was no colleague from Columbia to comment.
New York University’s Technical
Services Department page is at: http://www.nyu.edu/library/resources/tsd/cata.html
Original and
helpful on this site is the tag help in the upper right-hand corner. Areas
of interest: rare book cataloging, unanalyzed multi-volume sets, and a very practical
TSD New Staff Orientation. The limitation again is the password-protected
of certain areas and the extremely small font used for examples.
Sherman Clarke (Head
of Original Cataloging, NYU) commented that although some areas are
password-protected, most NYU documentation is free on the Internet.
Deborah Kempe asked if staff is allowed to make changes in the
documentation. Clarke indicated that updating is not done
directly by cataloging staff but must go through a tech services web liaison
and a central web update process. It takes an unpredictable amount of time. The
small type of examples results from the style sheet for all of the library webpages. Clarke
usually bysteps the process for art cataloging documentation by using his own
site at Geocities.com.
Yale University’s main
cataloging page is at http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging
Bresnan
recommends the site for cataloging online monographs (original and copy), standards
for creation of “permanent” preliminary bibliographic records for
selected art exhibition catalogs, auction catalogs, and the Beinecke Cataloging
Manual.
Princeton Cataloging
Page at:
http://library.princeton.edu/departments/tsd/katmandu/catman.html
provides good
support on collection-level, serial reprints, Slavic languages, and web page
printouts cataloging.
MIT’s
Cataloging Oasis at http://macfadden.mit.edu:9500/colserv/cat/
has one general and one specific area with monograph editing guidelines, and cataloging
preservation photocopies.
One thing of
particular interest at the University of Maryland, whose main
cataloging page is at: http://www.lib.umd.edu/TSD/tsd_policies2.html#systems
is the Glossary of terms used in the TS Division. Unfortunately, their
site too has some areas off-limits to surfers.
The University of Chicago, http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/staffweb/depts/cat/,
is most valued for serials documentation, as well as for the digital resources
cataloging policies, which could be of use for everyone.
Bresnan found the
cataloging manual of the University of Virginia, http://www.lib.virginia.edu/cataloging
“very well organized and thorough.”
At the end of
his presentation, Bresnan talked about documentation at The Frick Art Reference
Library (FARL). The institution’s Intranet houses a HTML version of
the local classification, and Word documents with policies and procedures for
cataloging exhibitions, web sites, for creation of item records and labels,
lists of form subdivisions, AAT terms, etc. Greta Earnest (Assistant
Director / Associate Professor, Fashion Institute of Technology) was interested
in knowing if there are links to images. Deborah Kempe (Chief of
Collection Management and Access, FARL) answered that at this point there
aren’t. Policies have to be established first. Eric Wolf (Director of the
Library, New School of Interior Design) pointed out that he redesigned his
library’s web site to include images. He made an appeal to all to
forward him local image sites.
Daniel Starr took the floor.
At Watson, documentation is also housed on the Intranet. A complete
list in alphabetical order, although not indexed, facilitates the retrieval of
the desired document. At the present time, the editing/updating of these
documents is pretty much available to all professional staff. Policies are
separated from Procedures. The editing/updating of the Manual is restricted,
but the revision is open to all.
Local
documentation has links to RLIN21, OCLC and NACO procedures.
Watson
Classification is still on the Intranet; next year it might be placed on the
Internet.
CASALINI RECORDS
Bresnan
presented an overview of last year’s “trials and tribulations”
of Casalini to market their catalog records. Both this firm and LC have
invested money, time and effort into training Casalini employees to catalog
according to AACR2 and LCSH. Nine large North American libraries have
agreed to buy catalog records from them. RLIN participating libraries
responded negatively to paying for these records. As a result, Casalini agreed
that they will not bar the nine subscribing libraries from putting their
records on the utilities, from where, all the other participating libraries can
derive from Casalini records for free.
RDA DRAFT. PT. 1
Daniel Starr indicated
that it is at http://www.collectionscanada.ca/jsc/docs/5rda-part1.pdf
through Jan. 28, 2006 to be considered in formulating the
official ARLIS/NA response. Comments should be sent to
him.
Discussion
Rodica Tanjala Krauss (Head of
Cataloging Projects, FARL) initiated a discussion on how other institutions,
aside from large universities and large museums, collected and maintained their
documentation.
At Morgan
Library (V. Heidi Hass, Head of the Reference
Collection) documentation and maintenance are done for internal use only.
At the School of Interior
Design (Eric Wolf), documentation is placed on the web;
maintenance is done directly on the Web. Wolf stated his belief that this
approach is much more efficient, as the editing and updating are available
immediately, and in only one version. So do John Meyer at NYU, Greta
Earnest at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Zimra Panitz at the School
of Visual Arts.
Cynthia Wolff (Librarian,
Collection Management, MoMA) added that they have the documentation in Word,
for internal use only, and not updated for a long time.
At the end of
the discussion, many participants expressed the desire to have Bresnan’s
presentation posted online, either on the ARLIS list or Sherman’s
Geocities. It can be found at
http://pages.nyu.edu/~sc3/bresnanlocaldoc.doc
The meeting was
adjourned at 5.
Next meeting was
scheduled for Feb. 6, 2006 at MoMA.
Minutes prepared
by Rodica Tanjala Krauss, Frick Art Reference Library,
NYC.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rodica Tanjala
Krauss, Head Cataloging Projects
Frick Art Reference
Library of The Frick Collection 10 East 70th Street, New York, NY
10024
212/547-0653
Fax: 212/547-0680 [log in to unmask]
www.frick.org
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