Technical Services Committee – December 15, 2022

Attendance: Tammie Busch (co-chair) (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Susan Howell (co-chair) (Southern Illinois University Carbondale), Jodi Craiglow (Trinity International University), Brent Eckert (Rock Valley College), Lauren Noel (Columbia College Chicago), Renata Schneider (DePaul University), Jackie Zook (Northeastern Illinois University) 

Members Absent: George Gottschalk (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Robin Mize (University of Illinois Springfield)

CARLI Staff Attending: Martin Kong, Jen Masciadrelli, Adrienne Radzvickas, Ted Schwitzner

Guest Attending: Andrew Belongea (Columbia College Chicago)

Minutes Taker: Lauren Noel

Announcements

1. CARLI Reports & Announcements:
   None reported
2. Committee Member Announcements:
   None reported

Discussion

New Business

Andrew Belongea from the Discovery Primo VE Committee joined the meeting to talk about centralizing custom local resource types.  Andrew is part of the subcommittee working on local resource types to be implemented network wide (in the NZ).  Currently the committee is focusing on AV resource types which include different music formats, audio, video, etc.  The subcommittee also plans to include equipment and thesis types.  Andrew displayed the current configuration where resource types are extremely broad, e.g., audio for everything (21K hits).  The committee has defined types by the MARC record for each format.  In the sample set, Andrew showcased the breakdown of audio into narrower subcategories including audio CDs, LPs, etc.  The same would work for video formats, where Blu-rays and DVDs would display as secondary resource types.  Andrew emphasized that the reason he was talking with TSC today was to explain how his committee defined these secondary resource types and to get feedback from us and to find out if we saw or could foresee any problems with this implementation.  Andrew went through a sample of the configuration files and included a link to the file.

Discussion ensued concerning several issues: the 007 field’s presence or lack thereof, with the overarching issue being the problem of how to define the predominant format.

Andrew went on to showcase equipment resource configuration. Further discussion ensued concerning best practices (eg. using a 694, versus a 590 field),   ie., which local fields should be used to ensure accuracy.  Ted provided a link to I-Share's local extension definitions’ page.

An additional topic concerned preferred terms within the thesis, dissertation category and the question of what terms go in the 502 field.

Andrew also mentioned government documents and how his committee has found this area problematic as it isn’t necessarily one format.  Several TSC members had suggestions and shared information concerning key MARC fields in government documents.

With such detailed discussion, it was clear that the TSC is quite interested in this project and Andrew agreed that he would keep the committee informed as to his subcommittee’s progress and would probably be joining another TSC meeting in the near future.

Continuing Business

1. Approval of November 28th minutes: The minutes were approved with one minor correction - Adrienne’s name had been left off the list of attendees & mention was made of date change for the deadline for the CARLI Counts Cohort 4.
2. Recap of yesterday’s Connexion Client Training Q&A: the group generally thought the session went well and agreed that sending out a reminder, as Ted has done, was helpful in getting more attendance.  Tammie asked if it would be possible to poll the attendees, after all the training sessions are over; specifically, would there be interest in further training sessions which might highlight topics that were touched on, but would be more focused or go into greater detail?  It was agreed that a survey would be helpful. Tammie and Susan volunteered to draft questions and bring them to the committee for approval.
3. An update on TSC’s Best Practices document:

   Review of the comments included:

   Section 2: discussion of how best to integrate Section 2 of the document.  Jodi suggested creating a reference page with strategic hyperlinks back out to the document.  

   Additional discussion of providing examples of local extensions was deemed helpful. 

   The Record Hierarchy session was discussed, and it was agreed that electronic resources information needs to be included (ie., portfolio information in addition to physical format holdings/item info).

   Tammie mentioned the importance of incorporating and reviewing CARLI’s NZ cataloging documentation. 

   Section 3: Questions came up about whether it would be helpful to include both reference and procedure pages.  In relationship to the Network Zone, Ted included a link to the existing Network Zone cataloging recommendations.

   It was also suggested that, because there is so much information already available, a recommendation be included to check the document depository.

   It was also noted that a policy on withdrawals would be a welcome addition. 

   Tammie asked Ted to elaborate on his comment that the document needs to address both NZ level cataloging policies and IZ level expectations; specifically, if it’s a rule in one place does it remain a rule in the other?

   Section 5: Comments included that this section was definitely a mix of both policy and procedure. 

   Overall, with the amount of work that has gone into creating this document, Tammie asked for feedback from Ted and Jen as to what the next steps should be Ted replied that it made sense to pull elements from the document that were policy related to a separate document to be reviewed by CARLI staff.  After such a review, the committee could then work on more subtle wordsmithing, with the goal to making the language of the document plainer and more accessible to different levels of catalogers as well as non-catalogers. 

   Brent raised the issue that several comments he had made on the document seemed to be missing and possibly lost.  Jen explained that there were different iterations of the document (one in Box, the other in Word) and that she would combine the comments into the final iteration of the document, so no comments were lost.  It was acknowledged that all the comments needed to be included before more work was done.

Other Business

Renata asked about the topic of ethical cataloging.  Tammie mentioned that she and Ted had both attended ILA and they agreed that DEI and cataloging needed to be its own committee.  Tammie stressed that it’s a larger issue than simply how to change a subject heading; there needs to be more input from others as to what subject headings we should be looking at.  Ted added that there needs to be a more holistic structure in place that considers different stakeholders, community members & policy makers so that it’s clear who is making such decisions and why they are being made and who is accountable for those decisions.  More discussion ensued with the idea that TSC could start by recommending possible future work         in this area, but that it was not TSC’s responsibility to do this work alone.

Upcoming Important Dates

Next Tech Services Q&A: Wednesday, January 25th, 2-3:30 PM.

Next TSC Meeting: Thursday, January 26th, 9:30-11:00 AM

Meeting was adjourned at 3:27

Submitted by Lauren Noel