Colleagues,
At Council III in Las Vegas, the IFC promised to revise further the Labeling and Ratings Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights and address concerns raised in that session. As a result we have split that Interpretation into three separate Interpretations, Labeling, Ratings and User Generated Content. The first two are ready for you review and comment. The IFC will further revise them in light of your comments on Connect, via email and during Council Forum I and/or II. We will NOT bring these documents to Council for a vote at Midwinter. Instead, we will continue to solicit suggestions, revise and bring them to Council at Annual for your consideration.
Both the Labeling and the Ratings drafts are attached in Word.
Best wishes,
Doug Archer
ALA IFC Chair
archer.1@nd.edu
Just wanted to 'ditto' Daniel's comments and kudos.
As to the MARC and RDA statement in the RATING SYSTEMS draft:
1. Do you mean MARC21? Which is the section for the rating description (rather than MARCII)
2. I concur with Daniel that we need wording that specifies that we are only sharing information as labeled by the producer of the work - as the mix of materials include physical and virtual items; wording should be inclusive of the various formats.
Thanks again for all your work! Elena
Elena Rosenfeld
Colorado Chapter Councilor
I wish to commend the IFC for their additional work on these interpretations. I have no issues with the labeling interpretation.
With the Rating Systems document, I have two suggestions:
1) Where it says "Because both MARCII and RDA provide an opportunity ..." I am virtually certain you mean AACRII, not MARC II. AACRII stands for Anglo American Cataloging Rules II and until recently was the "bible" of catalogers everywhere. RDA is the successor to those rules.
2) I don't quite have the wording to supply it yet, but I think there should be a clearer statement that only ratings that are on the physical container of an object are up for consideration to be entered into the bibliographic record, if a library chooses to do so to put their remote users (i.e. people accessing the catalog from outside the library) on an equal footing with in-library patrons. I'm concerned that the current paragraph:
Because both MARCII and RDA provide an opportunity for libraries to include ratings in their bibliographic records, many libraries have chosen to do so – some by acceptance of standard records containing such ratings and others by a desire to provide the maximum descriptive information available on a resource. Libraries are not required by cataloging codes to provide this information. However, if they choose do so because of factors such as cost, limited staff time, etc. or a desire to provide information not otherwise easily available to users, they should add a disclaimer to their catalog records or to their discovery tool displays indicating that the library does not endorse any external rating system.
MIGHT open the door to including ratings not originally on the packaging. That would be an unintended consequence. My position and that of catalogers I consulted during 2014 Annual was that it should be acceptable (tolerated?) to add a rating if and only if that rating physically appeared on the packaging of the item. If there's no rating on the package, there's no reason to have one in the bibliographic record.
Finally and not as a concrete suggestion, I urge the IFC to continue to hold in their minds and hearts that there are two groups of library users. Those that can visit the physical library to browse the shelves and those who rely solely on remote catalog access to make a decision whether to request a given item. Make sure that these two groups are treated as equally as possible in your policies.
Thanks again for the extra work you have put into this issue. - Daniel Cornwall, Alaska Chapter Councilor.