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NACO/CONSER/SACO
Richard A. Lammert, Concordia Theological Seminary

ABSTR AC T Annually, the Operations Committee (OpCo) of the 
Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) presents a two-day meet-
ing in Washington, DC, to advise participants in the PCC programs 
of what they need to know to work cooperatively with all the other 
catalogers in the program. This year, the in-person meeting was 
replaced by several online sessions, but the purpose was the same. 
This Listen and Learn session is intended to update Atla participants 
in the NACO, CONSER, or SACO funnels with the information that 
was presented at OpCo, so that their work in the Atla funnels will 
adhere to the current practices in the PCC programs. The session 
also presents news of changes coming in programs and tools that 
funnel participants use.

During Atla’s last fiscal year (September 2018–August 2019), catalog-
ers at Atla member institutions contributed 605 new NACO records 
and modified 263 existing NACO records. These contributions were 
from nine active libraries, defined as a library that contributed 
at least one record during the fiscal year. CONSER contributions 
were made by only one active institution, with 123 new CONSER 
records and 1,417 modified CONSER records. Atla’s newest funnel 
program, the SACO funnel, saw 10 new subject headings and no 
new or changed LC classification numbers. These were made by 
one active library; the number of active libraries has increased to 
two during the current fiscal year. The number of SACO proposals 
might seem small (especially when compared with the NACO and 
CONSER contributions), but ten to twelve proposals per year is what 
the Library of Congress expects of an institutional member—so the 
Atla funnel is right in line with expectations.

The main purpose of this Listen & Learn session is to report 
on the May meeting of the Operations Committee (OpCo) of the 
Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC). Originally scheduled for 
May 7–8, the in-person meeting was canceled because of COVID-19 
concerns, and replaced with a three-hour online meeting on May 
21. However, additional reports and presentations have been added 
to the online agenda (www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/OpCo-2020/

http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/OpCo-2020/Agenda-OpCo-2020.pdf


Listen and Learn Sessions  211

Agenda-OpCo-2020.pdf), much of which was used in this summary 
presentation. Interested catalogers can look at the agenda to find 
more material and to find items that weren’t accessible for this Atla 
presentation.

There are three standing committees of the PCC that do much of 
the basic work that affects PCC catalogers. The Standing Commit-
tee on Applications, during the last year, completed guidelines for 
minimally punctuated MARC bibliographic records and created a 
pilot mapping between Appendix I relationship designators in the 
existing RDA Toolkit and relationship elements in Beta RDA Toolkit.

The Standing Committee on Standards was involved in several 
activities during the last year. The committee revised some of the 
explanatory text in the Provider-Neutral E-Resource MARC record 
guidelines in order to provide readers with more context, provided 
input to the PCC Policy Committee on policy issues concerning 
diachronic works and element labels in the beta RDA toolkit, and 
worked with the Library of Congress to add demonyms to geographi-
cal entities in id.loc.gov. Of particular interest to Atla catalogers is 
an item that the committee included in its “parking lot”: the commit-
tee is still waiting for LC’s response to revisions made to PS 6.27.3 in 
August 2017 following PCC endorsement of its proposal for reconcil-
ing pre-RDA and RDA practices for creating authorized access points 
for language expressions. Atla’s best practices follows the PCC policy, 
which is still at variance with LC’s practice.

The Standing Committee on Training reported on three task 
groups under their jurisdiction. 1) The Minimal Punctuation Train-
ing Task Group was charged with developing a training curriculum 
for PCC participants in minimal punctuation. The task group has 
completed their work. 2) The LRM Training Task Group is charged 
with developing a training curriculum for PCC participants in the 
IFLA Library Reference Model (LRM). The group has completed 12 
training modules, six of which are currently available on the Cata-
logers Learning Workshop, with the rest to follow. 3) The NACO 
Participants’ Manual Task Group is charged with revising the NACO 
Participants’ Manual primarily to update references to various cata-
loging standards, such as RDA and the LC-PCC policy statements. It 
will also revise the document to reflect current policies and practices. 
Reference will be made to DCM Z1 when possible, rather than dupli-
cating text from that source.

http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/OpCo-2020/Agenda-OpCo-2020.pdf
http://id.loc.gov


212  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

Speakers from OCLC are always included in the OpCo program, 
since what OCLC does affects almost all PCC libraries in some way. 
OCLC presented information on its Cyrillic Project, which had as its 
goal adding Cyrillic script, primarily to the descriptive cataloging 
fields, to bibliographic records for Russian-language materials lack-
ing Cyrillic script. That project has been completed, with a 588 note 
added to all records modified as part of the project. With the possi-
bility of using minimally punctuated records, OCLC has added to its 
macrobook two new macros—one to add and one to remove punc-
tuation. OCLC announced that a macro-like functionality to gener-
ate authority records will be “coming soon” to Record Manager. The 
first release will work only with personal names; a later release will 
include non-personal names.

OCLC has made one change that has an immediate impact on 
NACO catalogers. Because of concerns that COVID-19 would keep 
catalogers from being able to use the online save authority file, OCLC 
has removed the ninety-day expiration date for that file. Authority 
records will still age out, but will remain in the save file without 
being deleted. However, an authority record lock will age out and 
be released at the end of the ninety-day period.

In the past, OCLC would usually accumulate needed updates 
to the MARC formats and implement them once a year. OCLC has 
moved away from annual updates, following now a schedule of 
approximately quarterly updates, documented through release 
notes. Two updates this year are noteworthy. In March 2020, OCLC 
made changes solely for the authorities format that had accumulated 
over many years. In April 2020, OCLC made changes affecting encod-
ing levels (perhaps better known as the “ELvl” fixed field). The goal 
of this update was to eliminate the OCLC-defined codes I, J, K, L, and 
M in favor of standard MARC 21 codes. These codes were originally 
used when libraries other than the Library of Congress were not 
permitted to use the standard MARC 21 codes. Now, OCLC prefers 
that catalogers use blank instead of “I,” and “7” instead of “K.” Even-
tually, OCLC will make a global change in its database to replace all 
of the OCLC-defined codes with standard ones.

Minimally punctuated MARC records, which have already been 
mentioned, were prominent in several other presentations at OpCo. 
The new PCC guidelines address the elimination of two types of 
punctuation: field-terminal punctuation and medial (ISBD) punctua-
tion. A PCC library can omit the first, or both the first and second (or 



Listen and Learn Sessions  213

remain with the status quo, retaining all punctuation). The choice 
of punctuation is made at the point of authentication and should 
not be revisited. Under current PCC policies, catalogers should not 
convert an existing, authenticated PCC record from fully punctu-
ated to minimal punctuation or from minimally to fully punctuated. 
It remains doubtful, however, that catalogers will see much, if any, 
change in bibliographic records. Lucas Mak reported that Michigan 
State University has decided not to implement the elimination of 
punctuation, based primarily on OPAC display issues. Beth Picknally 
Camden noted that the University of Pennsylvania has not made a 
final decision; however, an examination of their database showed 
that currently there are only eight records (out of several million) 
that have no punctuation.

The PCC continues with its URIs in MARC Pilot Project. As of May 
18, 2020, there were over 2,400 NARs added or revised by pilot proj-
ect participants. (A 667 field in the authority record identifies these 
records.) Until the project is completed, there remains a moratorium 
on adding 024 fields by catalogers other than project participants.

OCLC reported on the “Entity Reconciliation for Linked Open 
Data” to support the development of an infrastructure to reconcile 
entities, such as names, for linked open data. This project, funded by 
the Mellon Foundation (with a match from OCLC), builds on OCLC’s 
work with linked data beginning in 2009 (FAST, VIAF) and continuing 
through the last decade. The project started in January 2020 and is 
scheduled to be completed in twenty-four months. OCLC is creating 
an “entity backbone,” containing descriptions of creative works and 
persons and aggregating links to other representations of these enti-
ties, provided via a robust set of APIs under a persistent and reliable 
URI scheme. Perhaps most important, OCLC will develop methods 
by which entity descriptions can be enhanced by library and infor-
mation professionals or added to the backbone if a description does 
not exist. The resulting production services, APIs, and UIs will be 
delivered and accessible to anyone who wishes.

This summary does not exhaust what was presented at the PoCo 
meeting. Among other topics are Beta RDA Toolkit topics (which 
will remain a perennial topic until the “beta” is no longer beta) and 
reports from the PCC Task Group on Metadata Application Profiles. 
Paul Frank of the Library of Congress usually includes a presenta-
tion on NACO topics at the PoCo meeting. His presentations have not, 
unfortunately, been posted to the agenda. One can hope that he will 



214  AT L A 2020 PROCEEDINGS

eventually add these. Of particular interest will be what the agenda 
calls “revisiting personal identifiable information in NACO records.”

For follow-up questions, or more information, please contact Rich-
ard Lammert (richard.lammert@ctsfw.edu) for NACO/SACO/general 
questions and Michael Bradford (michael_bradford@harvard.edu) 
for CONSER questions.


