Technical Services

Brinna Michael, Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Chair

Members Present

  • Brinna Michael, Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Chair
  • Leslie Engelson, Murray State University
  • Heather Hicks, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary
  • Christa Strickler, University of Notre Dame
  • Christina Torbert, University of Mississippi
  • Alexis Weiss, Atla, Atla Funnels Coordinator
  • Seth Miskimins, Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University
  • Anna Appleman, Columbia Theological Seminary
  • Becky Givins, Covenant Theological Seminary
  • John Vinke, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary
  • Stephanie Garrett, Catholic International University
  • Jeff Brigham, Andover Newton Theological School
  • Tim Hasin, Molloy University
  • W. Field, William Booth College

Absentee Members

  • Michael Bradford, Wayne State University
  • Bro. Andrew Kosmowski, North American Center for Marianist Studies, Secretary
  • Armin Siedlecki, Pitts Theology Library, Emory University

Agenda

  1. Steering Committee Reminders
    1. A reminder of the current Steering committee members
    2. Call for nominations (self or otherwise) to fill two vacancies
  2. Liaison Reports
    1. See “Round Robin Reports” below.
  3. TCB Report
    1. See “Round Robin Reports” below.
  4. TSIG Year in Review
    1. See “Year in Review” below.
  5. Open Discussion

Year in Review

TSIG has had a quiet year. Updates to the membership scope as discussed and approved at the 2023 business meeting were finalized and the website was updated to reflect those changes. The new membership scope expands and explicitly invites those working in a broad range of technical services roles beyond cataloging to join. A proposal writing workshop was held this winter with the support of the conference planning committee. The workshop provided a review of proposal writing, types of sessions, and the submission process.

Round Robin Reports

CC:DA – Report written by Michael Bradford, delivered by Brinna Michael.

Upon the retirement of Donna Wells, a year ago, the position of Atla Liaison to CC:DA (ALA Committee on Cataloging: Description & Access) was left vacant until spring 2024.

For the 2023/2024 year, Michael served as an Intern/non-voting member of CC:DA. His role was to help take the minutes of the meetings, held at Midwinter and Annual.

This spring, there was a call for volunteers on the TSIG Listserv to stand for election as the new Atla Liaison. As no others stepped forward, Michael was named to the position.

As of July 1st, in addition to being the Atla Liaison, he is also a full-voting member of the committee.

For this last year:

CC:DA responded to requests for comments by the RDA Steering Committee on the following proposals:

The Committee has a Procedures Task Force that has been revising the documentation and manual that governs the committee and will be ready for approval by Core Leadership and ratification by the committee this summer.

The Documents Online Repository Task Force was charged last summer with identifying a permanent online repository and locating historical committee documents spread around online and in local files, and to determine a retention cycle.

The CC:DA Task Force on Personal Names in Official RDA was charged in Sept. 2023 with submitting a proposal to the North American RDA Committee (NARDAC) with revising the instructions on personal names. An interim report is expected by ALA Annual.

During the Midwinter Meeting, the committee receives reports from various communities, such as NARDAC, OCLC, and PCC. The complete minutes for Winter 2024 is here: https://connect.ala.org/HigherLogic/System/DownloadDocumentFile.ashx?DocumentFileKey=bcf43395-542d-826b-a0b6-5b0798935781.

Michael was unable to attend the ALA Annual Meeting on June 29th and July 1st.

On July 1st, Michael sent an email to the TSIG listserv requesting quick turnaround feedback/comments on the new RDA proposal for: RSC/ReligionsWG/2024/1, which proposes to change the word “church” to “place of worship,” and moves the instructions for some religious bodies to either a general corporate heading rule or to a community resource area, as they deal with a specific religion only.

Atla PCC Funnels – Reported by Alexis Weiss.

  • SACO Funnel
    • Producing proposals fairly well, due in large part to the addition of the Atla Metadata team as official members of the funnel
  • NACO Funnel
    • Numbers are down from previous years, largely due to the departure of Richard Lammert (previous PCC Funnels coordinator)
    • Anna Appleman and Heather Hicks have volunteered to help move funnel members who are not currently independent through that process by reviewing work
  • PCC Operations Committee
    • Agenda and recordings: https://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/OpCo-2024/Agenda-OpCo-2024.pdf
    • These meetings are open to all, so if you are interested in attending the meeting virtually next May, contact Alexis for more information.
    • Reminder to join the PCC mailing list if you are interested in keeping up to date on PCC: http://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/discussion.html
    • SACO Updates:
      • There is a large project ongoing to modernize many headings, specifically floating headings.
        • e.g., “Christianity and Buddhism” is being deleted in favor of “Christianity—Relations—Buddhism”
        • e.g., “Democracy and Christianity” is being deleted in favor of “Christianity—Political aspects” and “Democracy”
      • A large project to update headings related to Indigenous peoples and topics
      • Atla has been involved in work to change/remove/update the term “Cults”
  • NACO Updates:
    • Upcoming NACO training is tentatively scheduled for September
    • Paul Frank has retired, and Tricia Mackenzie has taken over his role as liaison for NACO to the Library of Congress

TCB: Technical Services in Religion & Theology – Reported by Christa Strickler. It has been an exciting and challenging year for TCB. First, the editorial board has been expanded from an Editor in Chief and two Editors to include an additional Editor. Nicholas Friesner joined the editorial board in early fall to fill that additional role. Nicholas brings a wealth of editorial experience and has been a critical part of the team as the publication develops. Also, TCB published the first themed issue on system migrations which attracted much interest from readers. Staffing changes at Atla Open Press have posed some challenges, including the departure of Christine Fruin and the upcoming departure of Christy Karpinski. The editorial board is also experiencing turnover as Christa Strickler steps down as Editor in Chief and Anna Appleman finishes her terms as Editor. Andy Sulavik, the Technology and Collections Services Librarian at Manatee County Public Library, will be joining the editorial board as the new Editor in Chief, and Tim Hasin, Head of Technical Services at Molloy University, will be joining as Editor.

Other

During the open discussion at the business meeting, members raised several points of discussion, summarized below.

Leslie Engelson put forward a request for members to nominate themselves for upcoming Atla Board positions as Armin Siedlecki’s term ends this year and Leslie’s term ends next year. Currently, Leslie and Armin are the only technical services representatives on the Board, and it would be nice to continue to have representation. For those interested in nominating themselves, contact Susan Ebertz on the Nominating Committee.

  • Christa Strickler followed up with a question about Board service requiring in-person attendance at meetings four times a year.
    • Leslie clarified that the Board meets three times a year: in person at Atla Annual in June, in person in October, and online in February (starting 2026).
    • The reasoning for having at least two required in-person meetings is that previous experience during COVID with all virtual meetings has shown to be less productive, less conducive to building rapport between Board members, and overall unpleasant to spend so many hours on video calls.
    • Leslie added that all costs of travel, housing, and food are covered by Atla for Board members for these required in-person meetings.
    • Christina Torbert added that there are special provisions for Board members needing to have a hybrid option for attending meetings, for example, those living internationally.
  • Brinna Michael asked about the length of a Board term.
    • Leslie shared that Board members are elected to a three-year term which can be renewed once, if reelected.
  • Leslie Engelson asked for thoughts or advice on matching vendor records to OCLC records and having those vendor records updated with the corresponding OCLC number.
    • Brinna Michael mentioned that Emory Libraries has recently undertaken OCLC’s reclamation service, but Leslie is hoping for an ongoing process rather than a one-time project.
    • Christa Strickler mentioned Notre Dame is doing the OCLC data sync process.
  • Christina Torbert asked for thoughts on writing functional requirements for a request for proposal from subscription agents.
    • Leslie Engleson asked if this process has ever resulted in a change in vendor, which Christina confirmed has happened before.


Brinna Michael prompted attendees to consider sharing topics they are interested in learning more about, tools they’d like to see demonstrated, a particular person’s work they’d like to learn more about, etc. The goal is to gather possible ideas for programming during the coming year as well as potential presentation topics for Atla Annual 2025.

  • Leslie Engelson is interested in learning about practical applications of AI in technical services work.
    • She has used AI prompts to help automate reformatting of table of contents information.
    • Brinna suggested perhaps having a two-part session: discussion about applications and then hands-on testing/exploring.
  • Christa Strickler mentioned that she might propose a session on cleaning up eResource bibliographic records.
    • Heather Hicks asked about how Christa has approached clean-up projects previously, specifically what tools she used.
    • Christa mentioned that a good deal of Notre Dame’s electronic resource metadata management happens through OCLC’s Collection Manager. They make a great deal of local changes using MarcEdit, but noted that many of those local changes are likely to be lost in an upcoming system migration. Christa added that she prefers working directly in OCLC to avoid that issue.


Leslie Engelson asked about thoughts on the recent PCC RDA training and whether it was helpful for implementing new RDA and/or the new toolkit.

  • There was consensus that new RDA is challenging to understand, particularly the new concepts (nomen, res, etc.).
  • Leslie mentioned that the training did help her understand the structure of the new toolkit.
  • Becky Givins and Heather Hicks discussed their experiences with attempting to implement old RDA in the midst of system migrations.
  • Brinna Michael suggested a discussion group to try and work through new RDA together.
  • Becky asked for thoughts on the usefulness of the toolkit for producing NACO records.

W. Field asked if anyone had experience using Microsoft Sharepoint/Teams in conjunction with the library catalog for discoverability purposes.

  • John Vinke discussed the possibility of permissions management and how that might be a challenge for resources that should be openly accessible.