Sunday, July 18, 1999

Joe Thomas called the meeting to order at 5:00 p.m.

Secretary/Treasurer Report:

Membership: In September 1998, we received a total dues credit of $3750.00 which represented $6.00 for each of the 595 members of TS-SIS.

Election Results: The election for the 1999/2000 Executive Board was conducted by mail ballot. 595 ballots with accompanying biographical information and candidate statements were mailed to members the week of March 1, 1999. 268 ballots (45%) were returned by the deadline of April 2, 1999.

Financial Status:

Technical Services Law Librarian

Linda Tesar reported on a very successful and enjoyable year as Co-Editor with Anna Belle Leiserson. Currently, they still need to find columnists for “Technical Services in Smaller Law Libraries,” and “Automation.” Linda also announced plans to celebrate TSLL’s upcoming 25th anniversary in the next volume. Finally, she encouraged members to contact the editors with ideas, article proposals, or problems.

TS/OBS/RIPS/CS SIS Joint Reception

Mary Burgos submitted her report on the Joint Reception. The reception was held on Saturday, July 17, 1999 from 6:00 to 7:30 P.M. in the Grand Hyatt Hotel. Once again Innovative Interfaces generously sponsored the reception, this year increasing their contribution to $4000. This year’s reception did not compete with the ALL-SIS reception and as a result, the turnout was much better than last year.

Standing Committee Reports

Acquisitions: Carmen Brigandi reported increased activity on the listserv. She also mentioned Rob Richards’ two Web sites for legal publishing mergers (listing who owns who) and library collection development policies.

Cataloging & Classification: Melody Lembke, outgoing chair, submitted the committee’s report. The committee’s main accomplishment was the organization of several standing subcommittees: Description and Entry, Subject Analysis, and Administration. Another subcommittee has also been established to discuss the possibility of using England instead of Great Britain. The Library of Congress has asked for the law library community’s input on this question.

Exchange of Duplicates: Joe Thomas reported for Melinda Davis who was unable to attend. There are currently 42 members of the Exchange of Duplicates Committee. Everything is now in a database rather than on paper slips. A current problem for the group is title inconsistencies within the database. Sometimes the same item may appear more than once as different members use different variations of the title.

Preservation: Pat Turpening reminded everyone of the Preservation Program, D7: Preservation at the Crossroads: A Debate Between the Traditional World of Print and the Brave New World of Digital, and the following roundtable. The Committee also scheduled a tour Tuesday afternoon of the LC Binding facility. Pat presented the results of her survey regarding preservation in law libraries. She received 36 responses and will try to get more. The biggest priority for those surveyed is repairing heavily used volumes. Finally, Sally Wambold contacted the chapter presidents offering the Committee’s help with preservation issues.

Serials: Joe Hinger conveyed the Serials Committee’s disappoint-ment at their inability to get program proposals accepted. The Committee proposed two programs and a full day workshop for the Washington meeting but all were declined. On a different front, the Committee is still compiling an article on serial statistics. They also discussed the question of whether the Committee should remain a standing committee or become a subcommittee of another committee. No consensus was reached and the Committee will revisit the issue at a later date.

Other Reports

Education Committee: Janet announced the new chairs for the standing committees: Acquisi-tions, Carmen Brigandi; Cataloging & Classification, Chris Long; Exchange of Duplicates, Kristina Kulman; Preservation, Pat Turpening; Serials, Joan Liu. Janet also explained the program availability for AALL 2000 in Philadelphia. TS-SIS will be guaranteed one Sunday afternoon slot with which we can do with as we please. The last time slot of each day will also be reserved for the SIS’s but we must compete for these slots. The deadline for program proposals is August 16th. Janet asked for more ideas and explained that not all the ideas submitted had been followed through completely. An open forum to discuss next year’s program proposals is scheduled for Monday at 4:45.

Nominations Committee: Nonie Watt reported for the Nominations Committee. Alva Stone was elected Vice Chair/Chair-Elect and Cindy may was elected Member-At-Large. Nonie thanked the candidates and Joe Thomas for the enjoyable experience.

OBS/TS Joint Research Grant: Corinne Jacox explained the current status of last year’s grant projects. LeGrande Fletcher’s bibliography on Nevada legal materials was published in the Spring 1999 issue of Law Library Journal. Christina Tarr requested and was granted an extension on her project to study cataloging and Amazon.com. The guidelines for the joint grant are now available on the OBS-SIS Web site. No one applied this year so no grants were awarded.

Research Roundtable Special Report: LeGrande Fletcher delivered a special report for the OBS/TS Research Roundtable. The group met earlier this morning. Twenty-four people attended the meeting which Ellen McGrath co-monitored. Frank Houdek, editor of Law Library Journal, asked people to submit technical services articles to him for publication in the Journal. He relayed his philosophy of attempting to have one article of interest to each member of AALL in each issue of Law Library Journal.

Representative Reports

MARBI: Rhonda Lawrence reported on the topics currently under discussion by MARBI. MARC is no longer USMARC; the new name is MARC21 to reflect the harmonization with Canadian MARC. The project to harmonize this format with UK MARC is on hold. There will be a two-day preconference at ALA next year on Metadata. ALA has asked AALL to cosponsor the event. Loose-leafs are at the heart of the group’s current discussions on the definition of seriality. Potentially, they may no longer be cataloged as monographs. The may become serials or something completely different. Rhonda reported on two other significant issues. The first item mentioned is a new proposal for non-filing characters, Proposal 98-16R http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marbi/1998/98-16r.html. Nothing has been implemented but the issue is being heavily discussed. The other item of significance, Proposal 99-06 http://lcweb.loc.gov/marc/marbi/1999/99-06.html, concerns 856 fields. MARBI voted to accept the proposal which changes the repeatability of subfield u (URL). Now, a second URL will require a second 856 field.

CC:DA: Ann Sitkin explained that CC:DA does not revise rules, the group makes recommendations; some are accepted, some are not. She announced that [computer file] will eventually be replaced by [electronic resource]. Much work has been accomplished by the task forces. Two really important issues concern the proposal to revise content vs. carrier (when to make a new record) and seriality. See http://www.ala.org/alcts/organization/ccs/ccda/tf-024g.html for the report by the Task Force on Rule 0.24 and http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/jsc/ser-rep0.html for Jean Hirons’ report, “Revising AACR2 to Accommodate Seriality.”

SAC: Marie Whited announced that delimiter v had been implemented over the past year. The Subcommittee on Form Headings/Subdivision Implementation must continue its work because delimiter v is wreaking havoc with authority control systems. A second area of interest to SAC is metadata. The Subcommittee on Metadata and Subject Analysis is currently working on types of vocabularies and classification in metadata records. See http://www.aallnet. org/sis/tssis/commrept/1999/sac9902.htm and http://www. aallnet.org/sis/tssis/commrept/1999/sac9906.htm on the TS-SIS Web site for Marie’s full reports from February and June, respectively. Marie has completed her term as AALL’s representative to SAC and will be succeeded by Melody Lembke.

SISAC: Joan Liu reported that SISAC and BISAC had partially merged to form BASIC, an acronym for Book and Serials Industrial Communication. BASIC will study areas of interest to both groups such as activities with EDI/EDIFACT message development. Other SISAC activities will remain under SISAC’s jurisdiction. SISAC has also established a new Binding Task Force to work on transmitting binding data as EDIFACT messages. For Joan’s full report, see http://www.aallnet.org/sis/tssis/commrept/1999/sisac.htm.

Renee D. Chapman Award

Jean Pajerek presented the Renee D. Chapman Memorial Award for outstanding contributions in technical services law librarianship to this year’s recipient, Dr. Jolande Goldberg. As Senior Cataloging Policy Specialist for Law Classification at the Library of Congress, Jolande is responsible for the development of all the new and revised LC law classification schedules that have appeared over the last 25 years. She is currently working on the schedules for religious law and a revision of the Roman law schedule.

Announcements

Carol Avery Nicholson, member of the Professional Development Committee, will be soliciting members’ help with three workshops: Basic Cataloging (to cover 2 1/2 days), Advanced Cataloging (1 day), and Technical Services Management (2 1/2 days). The Professional Development Committee would like members to submit proposals (see RFP’s on TS-SIS home page) for programs that can be held at the annual meeting or travel around the country.

Linda Tesar asked for volunteers to man the TS-SIS table in the Exhibit Hall.

Joe Thomas reported that only 250 of the current 650 TS-SIS members are subscribed to the TS-SIS listserv. He had planned to use the listserv as his main avenue of communication during his term of office but worried that not all members were connected. As a result, the list will be purged early in August and repopulated with the membership rolls at AALL Head-quarters. This means that non-members will be unsubscribed and will need to resubscribe.

OBS-SIS will be investigating the question of merging with TS-SIS over the course of the next year.

Jack Bissett, outgoing chair of OBS-SIS, has been elected as 1999/2000 SIS Council Chair.

Joe thanked Martin Wisneski, the TS-SIS Webmaster, for his work maintaining the Web page.

Comments from the New Chair

Janet McKinney thanked all the outgoing and incoming board members. She announced that she hopes to work on the following issues during the coming year:

® Program proposals – We need to find a way to speed up the process.

® TS Practices vs. Handbook – Joe had asked this past year’s board to look at the TS-SIS documentation on the Web. We’ve discovered several inconsistencies between the written procedures and actual practices.

® Exchange of Duplicates Program – should this be handled by a standing Exchange of Duplicates Committee or should the standing committee become a subcommittee of another standing committee such as Serials?

® Member at Large duties – during his/her second year of board membership, the Member-At-Large chairs the committee in charge of the Joint Reception. Currently, the first year of a Member-At-Large carries no specific duties. Janet would like to review this for possible changes.

® Education Committee Chair – should the Education Committee Chair be the incoming Vice Chair or the incoming Chair?

® Strategic Plan – Janet would like to develop a strategic plan over the course of the coming year. What is our mission compared to OBS-SIS?

Finally, Janet asked everyone to fill out their surveys when they receive them this fall and send them to Alva.

There being no further business, meeting was adjourned.