Recently in Access Category

I've spent the last two days at the International Coalition of Library Consortia meeting. One of the participants here was talking about her role in as the head of the consortia.  She said that she turned to her members to be the experts in the content and that her job was to facilitate them gaining access to that content.  I really liked the way she put that because it demonstrates the value of both the selector of the content and the facilitator in providing that content.

Those two distinct roles are very important and we have people embodying those roles in  many of our libraries.  At Penn State, the selector identifies the content that they wish to purchase and in the case of our electronic resources, our electronic resources librarian facilitates the access of that content and negotiates the best value for University Libraries.  Both of these roles are crucial in providing our users with resources. 

Before the American Library Association midwinter meeting, the Future of Bibliographic Control Working Group will issue a final report. In advance of that report, the Working Group presented a draft report to the Library of Congress this past week. The Library of Congress has made this podcast and it is available for viewing at:
www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/meetings/webcast-nov13.html

The charge of the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic control was to:
* Present findings on how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices can effectively support management of and access to library materials in the evolving information and technology environment
* Recommend ways in which the library community can collectively move toward achieving this vision
* Advise the Library of Congress on its role and priorities

The Working Group was appointed in November of 2006 Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at LC. Working Group information is available at:

http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/

This report will most likely be discussed widely at the American Library Association meeting in January. The Directors of Technical Services in Large Research Libraries will be talking about this at our meeting at ALA. If people are interested, we could have a discussion here at Penn State about the recommendations after their final report is issued.