210 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.