NACO Coordinating Committee Minutes

Date: 21 November 2005

Present: Steven Arakawa, Maria Hunenko, Mickey Koth, Rick Sarcia, Manon Théroux (chair and recorder).

Absent: Sarah Elman, Cécile Mandour.

1. RLIN NACO Training Materials

In October, the Library of Congress revised the RLIN NACO training materials. The new materials include a PowerPoint presentation with RLIN21 screenshots. They have only been used once, so far, by an LC staff person doing training in Pennsylvania. That trainer made some corrections and further revisions and has just sent the files to Manon for proofreading. When she is done, LC will make further changes as needed, post the new materials for general use, and make an announcement to all NACO trainers. Manon will use the new materials in the next round of NACO training, which should start in December or January.

2. Revisions to: "Authority Control Workflow for Yale Catalog Librarians"

A draft revision of the document called "Authority Control Workflow for Yale Catalog Librarians" was discussed. The most significant changes were to the "NACO workflow" section which now recognizes that if catalogers have not found an authority record in Orbis or LCDB, the next step in the searching process need not always be RLIN. It could be OCLC or the LC web authorities (though the RLIN pending file must always be searched as a last step). The new draft also contains a link to a chart that provides guidance on the advantages and disadvantages of choosing one database over another. Committee members were a little fuzzy on some of the specifics of searching the OCLC authority files. They will do a little more research and consult with a couple of staff members more familiar with OCLC searching. The draft will then be sent to the "Best Practices" committee (which has been doing a similar comparison of RLIN vs. OCLC for copy cataloging) for comment.