ALA has accounced:
"What library issues are most important to ALA members to share with
the incoming administration? How can libraries serve as catalysts in
communities to help the administration put its agenda into motion?
ALA's Executive Board and Membership Meeting Committee are sponsoring
a Special Membership Town Hall Meeting on Saturday, Jan. 24th, from 3
PM to 4:30 PM in the Four Seasons Ballroom at the Colorado Convention
Center."
Nowhere in the long list of topics to be addressed is cataloguing
mentioned.
Certainly the decline in the quality of cataloguing at the Library of
Congress, such as abandonment of series access to materials, is
impacting library budgets. Work which could have been done once
centrally, is repeated countless times in libraries not only all over
the United States, but all over the world.
The purpose of the the International Federation of Library
Associations' (IFLA) Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC) Program was
that each publication would be catalogued it its country of
publication, and that descriptive record could be used in all other
countries. The Library of Congress in abandoning series entry, and
the Joint Steering Committee in proposing to abandon in Resource
Description and Access (RDA) the International Standard Bibliographic
Description (ISBD), are both retreating from international
obligations.
We need to get the beam out of the eyes of both our own Joint Steering
Committee and the Library of Congress. Both need funding, the Library
of Congress in order to make quality cataloguing records available,
and cataloguing standards, so that they will be freely available to
all libraries regardless of size.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (m...@slc.bc.ca)
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
