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Report from the ARLIS Representative to the MARC Advisory Committee: NOTE: A fuller version of this report appears on Sherman Clarke's Art Cataloging webpage, at http://artcataloging.net/ala/mw13/marbieok.html The MARC Advisory Committee (MAC) advises the Library of Congress concerning changes to the MARC 21 formats. The MARC Advisory Committee includes the American Library Association's (ALA) Machine-Readable Bibliographic Information (MARBI) committee, US national libraries, the Library and Archives Canada, the British Library, the National Library of Australia, and the German National Library, the large bibliographic networks such as OCLC, library associations such as the Music Library Association, Special Libraries Association, and ARLIS, and library system vendors. In the past, MAC has met two times a year at ALA under the umbrella of MARBI, but in June, 2012, it was announced that MARBI will be dissolved as of the conclusion of Annual 2013. MARBI will be replaced by a Metadata Standards Committee (MSC) that will play a leadership role in the creation and development of metadata standards for bibliographic information. MAC will continue as LCs consultative national committee on MARC, which LC is committed to maintaining. The penultimate MARBI sessions at ALA Midwinter were rather thin gruel in terms of issues specially pertinent to art documentation. The agenda for the two meetings is available here: http://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/mw2013_age.html The three proposals defining new fields for audience characteristics, creator/contributor group categorizations, and chronological categories were most interesting, since they reflect a continuing trend away from precoordinated indexing to a faceted approach. Each term in the new LC genre/form thesaurus, LCGFT, is a single word or phrase that contains only one concept; no qualifiers are allowed within a term, and there is no subdivision. Hence the need for new fields to encode the information that used to be included with LCSHs that functioned as de facto genre/form terms. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus, used by many art museums and art libraries, supports faceted indexing, but since our systems still generally do not, most users of AAT construct precoordinated headings. It will be interesting to see whether the LC approach leads to library systems becoming more faceting-friendly. And a warning: if you think you are seeing double when you start encountering multiple 250 (Edition Statement) fields in new records, don't call your eye doctor. The 250 field was made repeatable at the request of the Music Library Association, to better accommodate edition statements for music. The field can also be used for any resource containing multiple edition statements. I also attended an update on progress on the Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative (BIBFRAME for short). A major focus of the initiative is to determine a transition path for the MARC 21 exchange format in order to reap the benefits of newer technology while preserving a robust data exchange that has supported resource sharing and cataloging cost savings in recent decades. In 2012, early work by participants has produced a BIBFRAME Primer Document, and some testing by early experimenters. In 2013, discussions will be opened to a wider audience. New software will let the general community experiment with what their MARC records look like using the BIBFRAME models. They will also reach out to non-bibliographic communities, such as archivists and object catalogers. There is now a website devoted to BIBFRAME: http://bibframe.org/ It provides background information on the initiative, demos of what MARC21 bib records look like as BIBFRAME resources, and a tools page that offers: 1) Comparison service: Enter the bibliographic identifer (MARC BIB field 001) or a Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) and view a before and after presentation of a MARC record from the Library of Congress's database as BIBFRAME resources. 2) Transformation service: Submit your own MARC Bibliographic records (as MARC/XML) and view them as BIBFRAME resources in Exhibit. The resulting data are also available for download. I am particularly looking forward to viewing our own records as MARC/XML, and I encourage you all to run your records through the tool. Don't be surprised if some of your fields don't appear on the transformations, since I understand that Bibframe hasn't yet incorporated all MARC fields. Liz O'Keefe Morgan Library & Museum Elizabeth O'Keefe Director of Collection Information Systems The Morgan Library & Museum 225 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016-3405 TEL: 212 590-0380 FAX: 212-768-5680 NET: [log in to unmask] Visit CORSAIR, the Library’s comprehensive collections catalog, now on the web at http://corsair.themorgan.org ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Mail submissions to [log in to unmask] For information about joining ARLIS/NA see: http://www.arlisna.org/join.html Send administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc) to [log in to unmask] ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance: http://lsv.arlisna.org Questions may be addressed to list owner (Judy Dyki) at: [log in to unmask] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~