I’ve been informed that LC has made some changes and catalogers are pissed. Here’s a petition to Prevent the Library of Congress From Abandoning the Creation of Series Authority Records. Here’s the opening paragraph of the petition:
“On April 20, 2006, the Library of Congress announced to the library community, via a member-only e-mail list for the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), that on May 1st, 2006, it would cease creating series authority records as part of the Library of Congress (LC) cataloging. There was no prior indication of this deleterious cataloging policy change to any other bibliographic entity including the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), to our knowledge, nor any discussion regarding its impact on the library community. The manner of communication prohibited any feedback from library communities regarding the decision, as there was no possibility given of reducing the effect of this decision by opening discussion for amelioration, or delaying the decision until libraries could address the change in their cataloging and online catalogs. The practically immediate enactment of this change gives libraries no chance to change their online catalog indexing methods to recover from the removal of series access and authority control in LC cataloged records. This extreme policy change directly and negatively affects the daily cataloging and series public access functions of many thousands of libraries in the U.S. and worldwide.”
via SuzyQ
(Though I’ve got to admit this is all over my head.)
I know series authority control is not a topic a lot of non-catalogers get. LCs action means that until online catalogs index a series statement in a 490 0 MARC field which is now unindexed, a patron can’t find them. It means that series won’t have one name anymore, but can have many names, so a patron couldn’t find all titles in that series by searching the series name. There won’t be any see references to the approved form of the series name. Since most libraries use LC cataloging without much checking, this means either libraries go without series searches or have series searches that don’t pull together all series; or, all libraries in the U.S. and worldwide will have to each, individually, perform the series work that LC used to do. One large library doing the necessary series work one time; or, thousands of libraries doing the same work thousands and thousands of times; or, no series access anymore? Yes, it’s a bad thing. To sign the petition, go to:
http://www.petitiononline.com/MARC830/petition.html