The International Federation of Library Associations & Institutions - 2000 general cibference

Information Outlook, Dec, 2000

The ISBD (5) Working Group (for serials) met and discussed issues related to revision of that document. Representatives of the WG will meet with representatives of the Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR and the ISSN Network in November to see whether the standards issued by the three groups can be harmonized, making international cooperation easier. Each of the groups is working currently on revisions, leading to an excellent opportunity to cooperate on changes to be made.

The ISBD (CM) Working Group (for cartographic materials--largely composed of members of the Section of Geography and Map Libraries) met to decide what revisions can be made to parts of the document related to print materials; a list of recommendations to changes it would like to be made to cataloging of electronic resources will be drawn up and submitted to the ISBD Review Group because an individual ISBD cannot have provisions that conflict with another one.

The Task Force on Guidelines for OPAC Displays discussed several drafts of the guidelines. A decision was made to meet in Amsterdam in October 2000 to finish the document, with some work taking place via e-mail before then.

The WG on the Use of Metadata Schemes discussed some of the data elements that would be needed in "core" records if the schemes were to meet the use of required data elements in the FRBR. Each of the members will look at one data element in ten metadata schemes to see how it is treated. Further consideration will be given to the issues of when metadata schemes might be used in a library setting.

Among the plans for a program for Boston 2001 will be a joint workshop with the Section on Information Technology on Unicode.

Report on the IFLA Section on Classification and Indexing

by Dorothy McGarry

In addition to its two Standing Committee meetings, the section sponsored an open program session (please see the IFLA web site for more details and the papers). The theme of the program was "Current Issues in Information Retrieval." Papers included "A Draft Version of a Consolidated Thesaurus for the Rapidly Growing Field of Alternative Medicine," "A New Classification for the Literature of Religion," and "Multilingual and Multiscript Subject Access: the Case of Israel." The half-day workshop on "Crosswalks Between Languages, Cultures, Religions in Classification and Indexing" included talks on "Cross Concordance: Classification and Thesauri," "Classification of Religion in LCC," "The MACS Project: Multilingual Access to Subject Headings (LCSH, RAMEAU, and SWD)," and "Problems in the Use of Library of Congress Subject Headings as the Basis for Hebrew Subject Headings in the Bar-Ilan University Library."

A working group that was looking into the use of subject heading languages in national libraries completed its work, and the chair, Magda Heiner-Freiling (Der Deutsche Bibliothek), prepared an article that appears in Cataloging and Classification Quarterly, v. 29, 2000, p. 189-198, "Survey on Subject Heading Languages Used in National Libraries and Bibliographies."