Technical Services Committee (TSC)
REPORT TO THE FACULTY
April 12, 2001
Submitted by Carol Diedrichs, Chair

TSC meets six times a year on the second Thurs. of every other month (February, April, June, August, October, December) from 10:30-12:00. In early 2001, the committee streamlined its agenda to focus on a number of larger issues and leave the more minor policy decisions which do not affect users to the individual technical services departments.

Activities to date

1. Authority control:

   TSC monitored the progress of Cataloging Department in implementing authority control in June 2000. This effort within Cataloging has been led by Noelle Van Pulis. TSC addressed policy issues as needed.

2. Pinyin conversion:

   The Pinyin Conversion Project is an effort to convert romanized Chinese data from the Wade-Giles to Pinyin romanization schemes. Pinyin is a system for writing the Chinese language in the Latin alphabet. It is used throughout the world, including by the United States government and by the news media. Most users of American libraries today are familiar with the pinyin romanization of Chinese names and places, and providing access to the Chinese language with that system will make it easier for them to locate material. The use of pinyin romanization by libraries should also facilitate the exchange of data with libraries internationally. In order to change to pinyin, the Library of Congress (and other libraries such as OSU) will have to convert existing files so that the Library¹s database will reflect the new standard.

   Magda El-Sherbini led a small working group which made the proposal for this conversion for the OSU Libraries. The Cataloging Department is now implementing the decisions made by TSC on recommendation of the working group.

3. Electronic resources:

   There were a number of ongoing and thorny issues related to electronic resources which were discussed throughout the year.

   1. Single vs. Multiple records:
      Since the national cataloging community and the OhioLINK community continue to struggle with finding a solution to this issue, TSC established an interim policy which would allow both the single and multiple record approach to be used within OSCAR (this is our current practice). Each resource/dataset would be evaluated for treatment when the project to catalog was designed. At present, our general approach for items purchased/acquired one-by-one such as electronic journals, free Internet sites, databases etc. is to catalog with multiple record treatment. Individual sets of resources acquired such as ITKnowledge have been cataloged in an experimental way as single records. Decisions will continue to be made on a title by title basis.

   2. Title access within aggregators:
      The committee continued to investigate options for making available catalog records for serial titles buried in full- text aggregators such as Lexis-Nexis. At the 12/14/00 meeting, the committee speculated that initiatives such as CrossRef might make this need unnecessary. As a result, we agreed to wait 6 months to see how these initiative had advanced before reviewing again. Subsequent to that meeting, we identified a company which can make HTML lists of titles in aggregators available to individual libraries for load to their home page. This product and a proposed experiment is on the agenda for the TSC meeting on 4/12/01.

4. Tables of Contents:

   The load of TOCs from OhioLINK finally advanced after years of waiting for problem resolution from III. TSC discussed the pros and cons of loading these TOCs without authority control and with User Services determined that the benefits outweighed the disadvantages.

5. CORC Project:

   The CORC Project was concluded in June 2000. This project experimented with using OCLC's CORC interface to catalog free Internet web sites. Subsequent to the project, CAC approved a policy governing the addition of these sites to the catalog. The Serials/Electronic Resources Department has since determined a workflow for the selection and addition of these titles to OSCAR which is being implemented with a test group of collection managers in spring/summer 2001. Tschera Connell led both the project and the ongoing implementation.

6. IUG Enhancements:

   TSC prioritized and voted for its preferred enhancements to the III system in the areas of Cataloging, Serials, and Acquisitions.

Ongoing Activities

1. III Millennium Modules:

   Laura Tull has been working the Law, Health Sciences and OSUL Technical Services Departments to design a schedule and implement the various Millennium modules for technical services including Serials, Acquisitions and Cataloging.

2. URL Checker:

   The committee continues to monitor the issue of implementing a URL checker for the online catalog.

3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations:

   With the implementation of the OhioLINK ETD Center, Magda El-Sherbini and Jim Murphy are addressing the issues of how this material will be cataloged and reflected in the online catalog.

4. Access to aggregator titles:

   See 3b above.

Document last revised: 4/11/01
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