Joint Steering Committee meeting, November 2, 2015

The Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC) began its 2015 meeting today.

Preliminary note:  This week’s blog posts are going to be an interesting experiment.  At the last moment, my plans to travel to Edinburgh for the JSC meeting fell through and I was unable to attend.  Fortunately, Kathy Glennan, the ALA Representative to the JSC, takes remarkably complete notes and has made them available to me.  These notes are my only source of information; if she gets anything wrong (highly unlikely!), I wouldn’t even notice.  However, I am editing and condensing her notes, so if there are any mistakes, they will probably be mine.  In any case, we are going to try this and see whether it works.  In this case, my usual caveat about these summaries being preliminary and tentative is particularly important.

The Committee consists of six representatives from JSC constituencies:

  • American Library Association: Kathy Glennan (University of Maryland)
  • Australian Committee on Cataloguing:  Ebe Kartus (Australian Catholic University)
  • Canadian Committee on Cataloguing:  Pat Riva (Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec) [substituting for Bill Leonard (Library and Archives Canada)]
  • Deutsche Nationalbibliothek: Susanne Oehlschlaeger
  • Library of Congress: David Reser
  • United Kingdom: Alan Danskin (British Library)

Also participating are:

  • Gordon Dunsire, JSC Chair
  • Judy Kuhagen, JSC Secretary
  • Kate James (LC), Examples Editor
  • Simon Edwards (CILIP), chair of the Committee of Principals
  • James Hennelly, Managing Editor, ALA Digital Publishing

The agenda of the meeting is available at:  http://www.rda-jsc.org/sites/all/files/6JSC-A-5.pdf

Monday’s agenda began with an Executive Session, which consisted mostly of reports.  Other discussions included:

  • Transition to the new RDA governance structure:
    See http://www.rdatoolkit.org/sites/default/files/statement_from_cop_050815.pdf
  • JSC business processes:  The group discussed how to manage the workload of the RDA revision process.  To help with this, it is likely that much of the specifics of RDA revision will be delegated to working groups; most of these groups will be given a specific timeframe and a list of tasks and will be disbanded when their work is finished.  The intention is to make JSC working groups more international in membership.

The public session began with more reports.  These will be posted on the JSC website shortly.

The major papers are grouped on the agenda under general topics; the first group of topics deal with modeling issues.  This will be a very significant part of the JSC’s work for the next several years, as RDA will need to be significantly revised in order to support the new FRBR Library Reference Model (FRBR-LRM), which is being drafted under the auspices of the FRBR Review Group.  The new model is still in draft, and the draft will undergo a worldwide review before the final version is published.  However, it is already clear that there will be significant changes needed.

Models: extensions and refinements

This topic consisted of two papers:

6JSC/PlacesWG/1:  Place as an RDA entity

Abstract: This paper from the JSC Places Working Group presents the possible treatment of place as an entity in RDA.  It reassembles RDA instructions for elements associated with place and edits them to conform with the style of RDA treatment of other entities.  The paper identifies specific issues, recorded as footnotes, that require further investigation.

This paper is related generally to the need to develop a new approach to documenting guidelines and instructions for entities in RDA, and specifically to the likelihood that FRBR-LRM will include Place as an entity (although not as one of several “Group 3” entities).  The discussion dealt primarily with “big picture” issues rather than with the specific text included in the document.

With specific reference to Place as an entity, there was considerable discussion of the definition of place.  It was argued that the essence of the concept is the existence of boundaries enclosing the place; and it was noted that coordinates are only an approximate specification of those boundaries.

Another major issue was the need to deal with sub-categories such as jurisdictional and non-jurisdictional places, and to be able to make clear distinctions between the place, the jurisdiction, and the corporate body that governs the jurisdiction.  The JSC has been trying to resolve this issue for some time and may decide to refer the issue to the Place Working Group.

Other than that, the paper contained no recommendations, and nothing further can be done until other issues are resolved.

There was an interesting aside in the discussion which might provide some insight into the developing FRBR-LRM model.  If I am interpreting Kathy’s notes correctly, a distinction is being made between the primary entities that deal with bibliographic resources (WEMI) and secondary entities that function as entry points for discovering resources.  Place would be one of these secondary entities.  Such secondary entities will have more limited functional requirements than the primary entities.

6JSC/ALA/Discussion/5:  Machine-actionable data elements for Measurements, etc.

Abstract: In looking toward a future of linked data, RDA instructions should be revised and expanded to accommodate more machine-actionable data elements. This paper gives particular consideration to creating or revising instructions on Measurements, Extent of the Carrier, Pagination and Foliation, Dimensions, Extent of the Content, and Duration.

An ALA Task Force has been working on machine-actionable data elements since 2011.  This extensive paper presents possible text for revised instructions that include a property named Measurement that will provide instructions for recording machine actionable measurements in general, and revised versions of the instructions for Extent, Dimensions, and Duration that would apply the Measurement instructions in recording those elements.  Another area of concern in the paper is to remove content (expression) data from chapter 3.  For instance, it is proposed that Extent of Carrier record be limited to the physical extent (e.g., the total number of pages) and that elements for Pagination/Foliation and Extent of Content be added to Chapter 7 to record content attributes.

The paper suggests, and the JSC confirmed in discussion, that RDA needs to support both machine-actionable and human-readable data.  The latter would be in the form of aggregated statements (much like the current extent statements) that would be created by machine processing from the machine-actionable measurements when possible, with an option to record the statements as text strings when necessary.

The JSC expressed its thanks to the ALA Task Force and will consider replacing it with a JSC Working Group to continue developing the proposal.  No specific revisions were approved at this time.


Tomorrow’s agenda will complete the consideration of modeling issues.

 

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