NACO Coordinating Committee Minutes

Date: 23 April 2008

Present: Steven Arakawa, Ellen Ellickson, Sarah Elman, Maria Hunenko, Cécile Mandour, Stephen Young, Rick Sarcia (chair and recorder).

Absent: Mickey Koth.

1. Partial independence for NACO catalogers

The committee discussed the possibility of granting partial independence for simple personal name headings, particularly for those catalogers who come to the Yale library with previous NACO experience, though the practice could be extended to new NACO catalogers, as well. The headings would be only those with a simple surname, simple forename and middle initial (if applicable), and possible inclusion of date(s) if readily ascertainable, with no cross-references, qualifiers or additions to a name (such as titles of nobility, etc.)

Some advantages of granting partial independence might be that it will give NACO catalogers trying to gain independence additional and ongoing practice at formulating and submitting headings; could also keep them more familiar with NACO rules; and will possibly get them to full independence quicker. In addition, it could increase the number of PCC bib records submitted by Yale.

The group could not come to a clear consensus on whether or not to take the simple headings into account in some manner when evaluating a cataloger for full independence. For now, the committee agreed that the status of partial independence would be kept as a verbal agreement between reviewer and those under review, and up to the discretion of the reviewer as to when to grant partial independence, if at all.

2. Use of OCLC validation

It was also noted that NACO reviewers should remind those under review to make use of the OCLC Connexxion validation feature to help reduce the number of errors they might not otherwise catch. Records can be validated manually before adding them to the online save file. The question also came up as to whether the Connexion client could be set to automatically validate records when they go into the save file, as it does when contributing records to the national file. [It cannot.]

3. Issuing body references

Steven raised the question of whether or not it could be possible to submit a series authority record without a reference from an issuing body (if that would be the only required reference), and code the record as provisional, to try and reduce the time and effort involved in formulating some SARs. (Note: current Yale policy is that the requirement to make a SAR is waived if the only reference would be for the issuing body.) Rick will try to get an answer to this question either from someone at PCC (or possibly CPSO) or by querying the PCC list.

4. NACO independence

Keiko Suzuki, Librarian for the East Asia Library, and Tatiana Barr of the History and Social Science Team were recently granted independence for series headings.

5. New meeting time

NCC now meets on the fourth Wednesday of each month from 11 am-12 pm in room B78 of SML.