The IG Chair opened the meeting, and gave a report on the IG's petition for renewal. The notification that the IG was up for renewal was received from O&B about a month before Midwinter. Discussions were held via email and ALA Connect on whether the IG should be renewed and on the currency of its charge; membership were strongly in favor of renewal. One difficulty was that no IG reports were found prior to 2008 (even at the ALCTS Division office.) The renewal petition was submitted via email prior to Midwinter, as required, with all available documentation attached. The Chair will report to the IG membership on the renewal decision when it becomes available.
The IG also discussed its ALA Connect space. The meeting reports for 2008 and 2009, as well as the text of the renewal petition have been posted there, and the decision on renewal will also be posted there. This should assist future chairs when the next renewal petition is due. The space is not necessarily easy to find, since it resides under the "Communities" heading rather than "ALA Groups."
Jennifer Bowen gave a brief presentation on the eXtensible Catalog project, and issues they have encountered in working with FRBR as part of its development. She has agreed to make the slides from her presentation available.
The majority of the IG meeting time was taken up with an open discussion of IG business and FRBR issues. Topics of discussion included:
Outreach to other groups and communities in ALA and ALCTS: This was a suggestion made at Annual 2009, and again during the online renewal discussion. One idea for outreach was to compile a list of projects working on FRBR, posted to ALA Connect, with three categories: implementations, experimental/research projects, and projects not using FRBR that might benefit from more knowledge about it. The Chair agreed to take on this project, and Matthew Beacom volunteered to assist (thank you, Matthew!)
Year of Cataloging Research announcement: The LRTS Editorial Board welcomes any articles on FRBR that members of the IG would like to submit as part of the YoCR.
RDA Preconference at Annual 2010: There will be a major preconference on RDA at Annual 2010. The emphasis will be on hands on experience with using RDA, but an overview of FRBR will also be presented as background. This preconference is scheduled for Friday, so it conflicts with the usual meeting time of the FRBR IG. We discussed several options to try to resolve this conflict: change the time of the IG meeting, cancel the meeting and instead promote the preconference, or hold the meeting as scheduled, but focus on areas other than cataloging. Since the IG meeting has already been scheduled and will be difficult to change, that was eliminated as an option for Annual 2010, but may be revisited in future. The IG membership did not want to cancel the meeting, for several reasons: preconference coverage of FRBR tends to be more basic than IG members find interesting or useful, there will likely be conference attendees interested in FRBR that cannot or will not want to pay the extra fee for the preconference, and there are other aspects related to FRBR that we can explore. Suggestions for topics included user interface design and implementation, FRBRoo, data modeling (in general, not just the particular FRBR data model), and FRAD and FRSAD. A panel discussion covering one or more of these topics will be considered for the Annual 2010 IG meeting.
The meeting closed at 12:00.
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