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Unlike last year’s flight out to ALA’s Midwinter meeting, my Friday morning flight to Philadelphia was uneventful, and that plus having Mary Beth as my traveling companion once again was a great thing! On Saturday, I attended ACRL’s Western European Studies Section’s (WESS) because they were sponsoring a romance languages and cataloging issues discussion group. It began with a 45 minute discussion about what RDA means to the non-catalogers of the group and why certain data no longer displays in online catalogs (e.g. |h [GMDs], and publication dates). The conversation next turned to display issues with utilizing Summon in catalogs, and from the statements made, it is apparent that Summon’s performance does not always meet librarians’ expectations (e.g. the language limit function does not always limit properly). One librarian from a university 1 1/2 hours away from WFU piped up and said, “I’m just so tired of being fed the propaganda of Summon.” I chuckled at that one. Following this session, I participated in my committee meeting, the ANSS Subject and Bibliographic Access Committee, where we generated a list of cataloging questions and topics for the upcoming months. Some of the questions and topics included: subject headings for social work; how is the relationship between a person or corporate body now labeled in RDA bibliographic records; what is FRSAD; and subject headings for food deserts and community gardening. In the afternoon, I attended the Catalog Management Interest Group where one individual from Kent State spoke about catalog and display issues with RDA implementation at his library. The removal of the GMD (general material designator) that is found in the subfield h of the 245 field (e.g. [videorecording], [microform]) was problematic for both the librarians and public. After writing a letter to Millenium, their ILS vendor, they eventually decided to display a visual icon by each title in a results list that is based on the type of record that is found in a cataloging record’s leader 06 position and the carrier type term found in RDA’s 338 field. I’ve heard comments from ZSR staff that they miss having the GMD display in a results list, especially when looking for a videorecording. At the Catalog Form and Function Interest Group, a librarian from Stephen F. Austin State University talked about her university’s experience utilizing VuFind and Summon together in their catalog. After performing a search in the library’s catalog, results are displayed split-screen style with books and more on one side and articles and more on the other.

Sunday morning at the Alexander Street Press breakfast, I heard psychologist Dr. Philip Zimbardo speak about his Stanford Prison Experiment which was conducted in 1971 and continues to be one of the most discussed and studied psychological studies today. At the Cataloging and Classification Research Interest Group, a librarian from the University of Central Florida Libraries discussed workflow tips and tricks to add table of contents (TOC) information based on RDA standards to cataloging records. These access points aid record discovery and adds patron value to cataloging records. If one chooses to use publishers’ TOC information on a web site to copy and paste into a record, make sure one compares that to the book in hand. He has found erroneous book chapters listed on the web site that were not listed in the actual book. At the Authority Control Interest Group, Janis Young from the Library of Congress (LC) reported on two big vocabulary developments: LC medium performance terms for music and the LC demographic group terms. The first set of terms is a cooperative effort of the LC and the Subject Access Subcommittee of the Music Library Association. The 802 proposed terms are available on a tentative list, and they will be approved on February 10, 2014. The second set will be used to describe the demographic characteristics of creators and contributors and audiences. New MARC fields 385 and 386 will accommodate audience characteristics and creator/contributor characteristics respectively. These terms will be full faceted and are scheduled for late 2014. My last session of the day was attending the Anthropology Librarians Discussion Group. Dr. Janet Monge of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Anthropology and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, was our guest speaker. Dr. Monge discussed the Open Research Scan Archive (ORSA) with which she has been involved. With the assistance of the local hospital’s CT lab, the museum has scanned over 5200 human and nonhuman specimens of its collection (e.g. objects, bones, mummies) for use by researchers in anthropology, biology, and medicine.

In addition to all the meetings I attended, I did manage time to squeeze in some fun by attending with colleagues two great receptions, one at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and the other at the National Constitution Center. Mary Beth and I also checked out Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, which came highly recommended by Susan Smith, on Sunday during lunchtime.