1999 Lois Swan Jones Professional Development Award Recipient Report

Due to the generosity of the Lois Swan Jones Professional Development Award, I was extremely fortunate to be able to attend the 1999 annual conference of the Art Libraries Society of North America in Vancouver, British Columbia. I was able to profit in particular from the cataloging-related meetings and presentations.

On March 27, I attended the meeting of Art-NACO participants, with whom I plan to make the McNay a contributing member, and later the Cataloging Problems Discussion Group, in which members shared examples of problematic cataloging. The focus of this year's group was mainly with unedited derived records and especially with the newly-implemented form subdivision "v" in MARC bibliographic records, how this implementation affects systems and how retrospective implementation might affect future workflow as well as system designs. That evening, a critical panel discussion was held to discuss the history of Anglo-American Cataloging Rules down to its present (1998) revision, and how these rules apply to cataloging in an art/research milieu. Now that the cataloging record is almost always found in an electronic format, uniform access and stability are major concerns of those responsible for creating and making this information available.

On March 28, I attended the meeting of the Cataloging section of ARLIS. Of particular concern was the Cataloging section's liaisons to AACR and CCDA committees of the American Library Association, thus ensuring that feedback from art catalogers will have an impact on national standards.

At noon, I visited with a representative from RLIN in the exhibit hall to explore possibilities of future use of their cataloging database and how it could benefit the McNay Art Museum library.

The panel session held that afternoon was an overview of how the changes and developments in cataloging and indexing affect the art/research environment. The example of retrospective authority control imposed on the complete run of the electronic version of Art Index was particularly enlightening. The imposition of technology over historic practice was also demonstrated with several interesting examples.

The two days I was able to spend at the conference were extremely informative and I digested a great deal of useful information over a brief period of time. Thanks to the LSJ Award, I was able to participate in this year's conference.