Technical Services Special Interest Section

The Subject Analysis Committee and its subcommittees met during the American Library Association annual meeting in Toronto. The SAC Subcommittee on Subject Analysis Training Materials is developing PowerPoint slides for its course on assigning subject headings and analyzing bibliographic resources. This course will be given prior to the ALA meeting in Orlando 2004. This will be an excellent course for newer law catalogers prior to learning law subject headings and it will be a wonderful refresher for experienced catalogers. This would make a good pre-conference for law catalogers. There will be training for people to teach the course once the development is finished.

The Subcommittee on Semantic Operability has started a glossary, an inventory of projects and a list of evaluation criteria for the semantic operability projects. (HILT (http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/) is an example of a semantic operability project.) As subcommittee members examine the various projects, they will be looking for

• conditions which optimize effectiveness of harmonization, both among the indexing languages of the same type, and among languages of different types
• simplification of existing languages
• approaches to integration and harmonization of subject vocabularies used in various metadata standards to achieve effective and efficient resource discovery

The Subcommittee on Subject Reference Structures in Automated Systems presented a panel which highlighted their report and the work of online system vendors to enhance the subject heading reference structures supported by MARC in their integrated library systems. The report makes recommendations for providing access to reference structures and better displays of reference structure and bibliographic records. The draft report is available at http://www.ala.org/Content/ContentGroups/ALCTS1/
Cataloging_and_Classification_Section/Committees3/Subject_Analysis/
Subject_Relations/Final_Report.htm

The main committee met Sunday morning and Monday afternoon. In addition to reports from the various subcommittees and liaisons, a brief report from the Library of Congress Cataloging Policy and Support Office was read. The subject heading news included

• establishing specific names for earthquakes, i.e. San Francisco Earthquake, Calif., 1906;
• changing the subdivision -Journeys to -Travel
• adding MARC 781 fields to geographic name authority records which has been held up since that field has still not been implemented for LC staff
• -Great Britain, -Wales, -England are all now authorized for law subject headings and the instructions for use are in instruction sheet H955, Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings. There are special instructions for legal topics that apply mainly to England or mainly to Great Britain.

The classification news include

• news about the success of ClassWeb
• publication of a new edition of LC Classification Outline
• use of both parentheses and angle brackets in the classification schedules with the parentheses indicating formerly valid but now obsolete numbers and with the angle brackets indicating optional number never used by LC but provided for other libraries
• religious law schedules continue to be developed
• classification practices for Asia calligraphy are being revised

SAC is planning a program for ALA Orlando 2004 dealing with better subject access for Spanish speaking library patrons. SAC's representative to the committee revising NISO Standard Z39.19 described the work of the committee to review the standard for construction, development and management of monolingual thesauri. SAC's liaison to the PCC Task Force on SACO Program Development reported on the group's work to restructure the SACO program to submit new subject heading proposals for inclusion in the Library of Congress Subject Headings.

The Subject Analysis Committee meetings and programs at ALA are always an enjoyable experience and I wish more of you could attend.

Marie E. Whited
Lillian Goldman Library at Yale Law School
marie.whited@yale.edu