Present : Tom Bolze, Youn Noh, Becky Slitt, Daniel Lovins (chair), Britta Santamauro (recorder). Meeting began at 3:00 p.m. in the Law school Cafeteria.

Note: Action items are in boldface green

Daniel reversed the order of agenda items in order to allow more time for Tom's presentation.

Tom quickly summarized Matthew's report to the Catalog Librarians and handed out the YES (Yale Element Set) Metadata Standards Crosswalk and the YES Local Metadata Crosswalk tables. Youn added that YES comes close to qualified Dublin Core, but that the Metadata Committee is still in the process of analyzing and discussing future recommendations.

Tom raised the question about the usefulness of subject headings. A brief discussion about faceted vs. stringed LCSH followed. Daniel pointed out that faceted subject headings are better for rapid assignment (by using words from a given thesauruses in separate 65x fields) but navigation will be severely handicapped (i.e., given loss of hierarchy, etc.).

Daniel suggested having the next meeting in room 409, to do some hands-on testing on subject navigation. Daniel also noted that he could further investigate the use of subject heading navigation through his appointment in PIC.

Tom introduced his idea for a digitization project that grew out of his work on the Gay & Lesbian Literature committee. Manuscripts & Archives own dust jackets from gay & lesbian novels of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Tom said that those dust jackets often add significantly to the semantic content of the novels.

Tom said that he would investigate whether digitizing the dust jackets could be covered by a Davis Grant, and that he will talk to a Professor in the Comparative Literature Department to see if he would support this initiative.

Becky noted that the article seemed a bit nebulous, lacking real specifics. Especially concerning seemed the fact that during the reorganization at Cornell shifting positions created gaps with no one in place to fill them. Daniel invoked Alan Greenspan's “irrational exuberance” as a phrase that might equally apply to the hurried pace of Cornell's reorganization. A discussion developed as to whether or not the word “reorganization” fits the changes that are going on at Yale. It was agreed that technology has changed the way we are cataloging but that many catalogers will still be doing the same things that they are doing right now.

Another major concern was the fact that Cornell lost language and subject expertise among their cataloging staff (e.g. there is no longer a resident expert in Slavic language and culture). Catalogers' language and subject expertise is directly related to the quality of subject headings and all the issues surrounding tagging, folksonomies etc.

Daniel suggested identifying pressures that Catalog Departments are responding to. Is cataloging as a whole losing attractiveness (i.e., problem of cataloging courses no longer being taught, decline in number and quality of prospective Catalog Dept. employees), is there truly no longer a need for expert hand-crafted metadata? Can anybody (even Google robots?) do it? How much is driven by environmental changes.

Daniel encouraged task force members to submit annotated citations of pertinent articles to the task force bibliography. These annotations could grow into position papers for local use or professional publication. They could address the catalog profession as a whole or might focus on the particular vision of the Yale Catalog Department.

Daniel updated all of us on the progress of the pilot project and invited all members to meet with Rebekah Irwin to tour the Digital Images Online Lab at Beinecke on Friday 16 th , at 3.00 p.m. Rebekah will also come to the Catalog Librarians meeting in February to report on her work.

Britta asked whether we should still be discussing articles from Eden's “Innovative Redesign and Reorganization of Library Technical Services”. It was agreed that it is a good idea to discuss some of the pragmatic approaches and case studies. Daniel noted that the articles are of differing quality and volunteered to select the articles that he thought were most worth reading. Britta said that she would like to discuss the article addressing concerns of support staff.

Youn suggested the article by Phil Agne as our next reading.

Daniel will provide a recommendation on Eden's notable articles.

Meeting adjourned at 4.10 p.m.

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