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• Committee Business
• Wiki Discussion
• OCLC Records
• RDA
• Authority Control
• Bibliographic Description
• Presentation by Elhanan Adler

Date: July 5, 2009

Time: 3:30-5 pm

Present: Elhanan Adler, Lenore Bell, Joan Biella, Sharon Benamou, Edie Creeger, Yossi Galron, Donald Goldman, Riny Goldsmith, Janet Heineck, Yitzchok (Michael) Kahn (recording), Heidi Lerner, Stanley Nachamie, Jasmin Nof (Chair), Nancy Sack, Marlene Schiffman, Avrom Shuchatowitz, Rachel Simon, Aaron Taub (Vice Chair).

Committee Business

• 2008 minutes approved.
• Brief appreciation of Bernard Rabenstein ז"ל.
• Yitzchok Kahn designated to record minutes; Sharon Benamou recorded sections of the minutes.
• Nancy Sack’s term as a committee member has expired. Sharon Benamou will be taking her place.

Wiki Discussion

• A new section providing standard equivalents for less well-known Hebrew month names (e.g. “hodesh ha-ziv”), has been added.
• Discussed whether people are finding the Wiki useful
• Heidi notes that it allows people to add ideas, makes it a more collaborative cataloging environment (the challenge of inputting data from Word documents was mentioned).
• Drawback is that it is not one central resource for all Hebraica cataloging needs, and it does not currently link to other such resources.   
• Princeton’s Hebrew acronym page needs to be updated but this is not an immediate priority.
• Discussed whether the Wiki should be linked from the HebNACO page.  Nancy will check on moving HebNACO funnel information from the Stanford server to AJL’s server.
• Instructions for logging in to the wiki will again be sent out on the heb-naco listserv.

OCLC Records

• All records can now be updated via OCLC’s new Expert Community program (for more information go to http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/quality/expert/).
• Discussed how to inform colleagues of changed records. Decided to send record number (ocm/ocn) to heb-naco listserve.

RDA

• John Attig will be giving a presentation on RDA during the conference.
• Heidi Lerner shared that Stanford was chosen as one of the 26 libraries to test RDA. She will focus on testing the standard on Hebrew materials.  Test libraries will first be trained in RDA; testing will last for 6 months.

Authority Control

• Joan spoke about how last year non-Roman references were added to authority files. Though the 6 months have past since implementation, other priorities at LC have postponed publication of the testing results.  Dave Reser of the LC Information Office will be sending out a questionnaire to solicit feedback.  Until formal policies are instituted, LC’s Israel/Judaica section developed guidelines on how to formulate non-Roman authority headings.
• A handout of the interim guidelines on adding non-Roman references was distributed and discussed. Lack of specificity for non-roman names was questioned, since current recommendations stipulate not adding qualifiers ($c, $d).  Joan explained that the intention was to recommend non-roman references that would be helpful, easy to formulate, easy to input, stand-alone, and not require consensus among libraries on authorized terms.
• The role VIAF will play in non-Romanized name authorities was discussed.
• JNUL headings can be added to 4xx fields in authority records.
• When creating Hebrew references, feedback can be solicited and funnel reviewers will respond with recommendations.
• Joan and Lenore strongly urged everyone to give them feedback on their interim recommendations; the document is a work-in-progress and will be updated as needed. 

Bibliographic Description

• Romanization standards:  Ladino romanization table has been approved; Judeo-Arabic table awaiting approval.
• It was decided not to pursue a policy statement regarding best descriptive practices for original script fields, pending the release of RDA.  Catalogers, of course, are always free to add variant title fields for ketiv male/haser.
• LC's Israel & Judaica Section sought formal AJL Cataloging Committee approval for its proposal for romanization of Yiddish words of Hebrew and Aramaic origin originally presented at AJL/Cambridge in 2006.  The proposal suggests following the romanization provided by the Weinreich and Niborski dictionaries for consonants and vowels.  However, the initial article should be hyphenated, as in Hebrew romanization, and diacritics for het, tet, and kuf should be retained, and the spaces between words should be retained (hal emoyed).  The proposal was approved.
• Yiddish words and phrases with new forms of romanization will be added to the wiki as encountered.

Presentation by Elhanan Adler

Elhanan Adler gave a presentation on the challenges posed by ketiv male/haser to Hebrew bibliographic description and how the NLI has circumvented the problem.

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