Lois Mai Chan reported on the IFLA sharing of Subject data in the metadata record. Eric Childress reported on CORC which will be going into production in the summer of 2000. CORC records will be integrated with WorldCat. Assignment of Dewey classification numbers is still problematic and will not be part of the production model unless significantly improved. FAST (faceted assignment of subject terminology) is a new research project related to CORC (see more below).
A discussion forum will be held at Annual 2000 on the work of the sister subcommittee on metadata and classification. A program is being developed for Annual 2001 on subject data in the metadata record. Speakers will address the report of the subcommittee, FAST, geographic area codes and other geographic terminology, fictitious and imaginary places, hierarchy, display, implementation, integration, multiple thesauri, subject vs. form data, etc. Shelby Harken will chair the coordinating committee.
Four committee members discussed several metadata schemes in relation to subject data. Robert Pillow noted the value of Getting mileage out of metadata by Jean Hudgins, Grace Agnew and Elizabeth Brown, which is #5 in the LITA guides series (ALA members price $22.00). The TEI header has no subject field. EDTML (dissertation and thesis markup) has a keyword list from which terms are selected by the content provider; OCLC MARC records are created from the EDTML records. EDTML was developed at Virginia Tech. GILS for government information was developed in 1994 as part of the paperwork reduction act. There are 30 fields and a thesaurus can be recorded. The DESIRE project (... Research in Education) reviewed 20 schemes; more info at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/desire/overview/rev_toc.htm EDNA is an education project in Australia which added nine elements to the DC set, including numeric classification.
At the forum, Lois Mai Chan presented a summary of the paper mentioned above (http://www.govst.edu/users/gddcasey/sac/MetadataReport.html). Diane Dates Casey then discussed the subcommittee’s recommendations. Eric Childress and Becky Dean then discussed subjects in CORC, particularly FAST which is based on LCSH terms but does not precoordinate the terminology into subject strings. That is, “650 $a Painting, Modern $y 20th century $z Germany $v Exhibitions” would be dispersed into “650 $a Painting, Modern” and “654 $y 20th century” and “654 $z Germany” and “655 $a Exhibitions” and all with “$2 lcsh”. CORC guidelines ask for indirect geographic names, e.g. $z France $z Paris. It has not been determined how intergalactic and undersea regions, fictitious persons, and imaginary places will be represented; LCSH treats the latter two categories as topical but most CORC users seem to expect imaginary persons and places with real persons and places. Some other DC issues were discussed: no uniform title category (this is a very library-specific category and has little support outside library world); new sub-groups have been formed for discussing DC issues, e.g. DC-Library and DC-Type (“joining” the group means subscribing to the list at http://purl.org/dc).
notes compiled by: sherman.clarke@nyu.edu