Joint Steering Committee meeting, November 5, 2014

The Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA continued its meeting Wednesday morning.

Subject

6JSC/TechnicalWG/3: High-level subject relationship in RDA

This paper presented a series of recommendations dealing with technical issues relating to the addition of a new “subject” relationship in RDA.

  1. The JSC agreed to add a new “Subject” relationship element to RDA.  The definition will be something like “The relationship between a work and an indication of what that work is about.”
  2. The JSC agreed that the current descriptive relationship designators in Appendix J should be re-defined as sub-properties of the subject relationship. This means removing them from Appendix J in the current structure, eliminating those that have expression or manifestation as their domain (subject relationships in the FR model are restricted to the Work entity), and including the remaining designators in a list of sub-properties of the Subject relationship (it was later decided that this would be Appendix M — although this is likely to be a temporary solution, as the JSC also agreed that the RDA Appendices were not an appropriate place to document the relationship designators).
  3. It was acknowledged that the current descriptive relationship designators (J.2.3, J.3.3, J.4.3, J.5.3) included the non-subject relationship between a resource and a work, expression, manifestation, or item that contains a citation to the resource (Reference to Published Citation; MARC field 510). These will need to be accommodated by new attributes or relationships, along with a set of appropriate relationship designators; a proposal will be developed for next year.

6JSC/ALA/31: Subject Relationship Element in RDA Chapter 23

Here ALA proposed revisions to the text of RDA to implement the structural decisions made in 6JSC/TechnicalWG/3.

  • The subject relationship element will be added to RDA; the instructions will appear in Chapter 23, General Guidelines on Recording the Subject of a Work.
  • The subject relationship will be core.  The core requirement will read something like “When recording the subject of a work, include as a minimum one subject relationship, if that relationship is applicable and readily ascertainable.”
  • The subject relationship may be recorded as an identifier, an authorized access point, a structured description or an unstructured description.  The definition of unstructured description will be expanded to include uncontrolled terms (e.g., keywords).
  • The use of controlled terms will be related to terms taken from an “identifiable subject system” which may also contain rules of application, etc.
  • The instructions will allow the use of relationship designators to be recorded with an authorized access point or identifier for the subject.  Specific relationship designators (for now) will be recorded in Appendix M: Relationship Designators for Subject Relationships [or some such wording].  The relationship designators removed from Appendix J will be added here, and possibly designators proposed by ALA — depiction of and set in [decision not yet made on this].

Place

6JSC/BL/22/rev: Place Associated with the Corporate Body

The proposal to redefine the sub-categories of the element Place Associated with the Corporate Body was accepted, based primarily on the text in the LC response.  The two sub-categories will be Location of Conference, etc. and Other Place Associated with the Corporate Body.

6JSC/LC/27: Revision of RDA 16.2.2.8 (Place Names for Jurisdictions)

The proposal was approved.  The result should be a clearer set of instructions for Type of Jurisdiction recorded as part of a place name (16.2.2.8), as an element (11.7.1.5), and as an addition to the authorized access point representing a government (11.13.1.6). The revisions reorganize existing instructions, and there should be no change in the results of applying the revised instructions.

6JSC/TechnicalWG/4: Court and Jurisdiction in RDA

The paper represents an attempt to disambiguate the uses of the term “Jurisdiction” in RDA in order to distinguish between the place governed and the governing body. The paper proposed to limit the term “Jurisdiction” to the place and to find other terms for referring to various types of corporate bodies.  There was no consensus on the recommendations presented, and several JSC constituencies agreed to work together to investigate the problem further.

Manifestations and Items

6JSC/ISSN/5: Change in mode of issuance for online resources

The ISSN International Centre sought to add an exception to RDA 1.6.2.1 to provide special treatment for changes in mode of issuance for online resources, so that a new description would not always be required for changes between serial and integrating resource.  The JSC will return the paper to ISSN with their comments, and will attempt to initiate a more extended conversation between the JSC, the ISBD Review Group, and the ISSN International Centre.

6JSC/ALA/27: Revision of RDA 2.12.9.2 and 2.12.17.2: Source of information for Numbering within Series and Numbering within Subseries

The proposal, which defines an order of preference for sources of information for these two elements, was accepted.

6JSC/LC/28: Noun phrase occurring with a statement of responsibility (2.4.1.8)

The proposal sought to clarify when noun phrases are part of the statement of responsibility and when they are other title information.  The proposal was accepted, using language from the ALA response for 2.3.4.3, and option B in the LC proposal for 2.4.1.8.

6JSC/ALA/32: Expanding the scope of Statement of Responsibility …

The proposal was to delete the elements Performers, Narrators, Presenters (7.23) and Artistic and/or Technical Credits — both of which record the names of persons, families, or corporate bodies responsible for the content of the resource. Such statements are to be transcribed as statements of responsibility (2.4) — with an option to record some statements of responsibility in notes (2.17.3.5).  The proposal was accepted, using language from the LC response.

6JSC/BL rep/1: Simplification of RDA 2.7–2.10

The paper suggested that the recording/transcription of publication, distribution, and manufacture information (and possibly also production information) could be simplified by providing for both the transcription of statements as they appear on the resource and the recording of relationships in the subelements for Place, Name, and Date.

The JSC agreed that this proposal exemplifies many issues that were raised by the FR consolidation: new entities for Place and Time-Span; the ability to record relationships as identifiers, authorized access points, structured descriptions and/or unstructured descriptions; treatment of aggregates.  These issues will be folded into JSC discussions on these issues.

6JSC/ALA/Discussion/4: Transcription issues associated with the Production Statement (2.7)

The paper argued that Production Statements often did not justify transcription, as many unpublished resources are not self-identifying.  The discussion questioned whether the implication that unpublished resources were not self-describing; it seemed better to allow transcription when there is identifying data present in the resource, but to allow information to be supplied when the resource is not self-describing (it was noted that this situation also applies to the title and to the statement of responsibility).

The JSC will develop a document that will clarify the definitions of “transcribing” and “recording”.  ALA will hold off before developing a proposal based on the discussion paper.

6JSC/ALA/29: Clarifying core element status for “not identified” elements in the Distribution and Manufacturing Statements

The proposal sought to avoid a cascade of uninformative “[element] not identified” statements in Distribution and Manufacturing Statements.  The JSC agreed

  • to remove the “core if” requirements for Distribution Statement, Manufacturing Statement, and Date of Copyright — as well as for subelements of these elements.
  • not to add the alternatives proposed by ALA: with the removal of the core requirement, the element need not be recorded when no identifying information is available.

6JSC/ALA/28: Creating a priority order for sources of information for Date of Manufacture (RDA 2.10.6.2)

The proposal was accepted.

6JSC/ALA/33: Clarifying instructions for sequences of plates (3.4.5.9)

There was general support for revising these instructions, but significant differences in the details.  ALA will prepare a follow-up proposal, with input from LC.

6JSC/BL/16: Merging Recording Base Material (3.6.1.3) and Base Material for Microfilm, Microfiche, Photographic Film, and Motion Picture Film

The JSC agreed to merge the specific application to microfilm, etc., into the general instructions for Base Material.  Changes in the instructions were approved.  The list of terms will be reviewed on Friday during the discussion of RDA Vocabularies.

6JSC/MusicWG/9: Additional terms for Base Material (3.6.1.3) and Applied Material (3.7.1.3)

The proposed terms will be discussed on Friday during the discussion of RDA Vocabularies.

 

Tomorrow’s agenda will include proposals relating to titles of works; works and expressions; and persons, families, and corporate bodies.

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