Patricia Siska, Cataloging Section Moderator for 1998/1999, convened the business meeting promptly at 10:30 a.m. She thanked Liping Song for acting as Vice-Moderator for 1998/1999. Unfortunately, Ms. Song has had to decline Moderatorship for 1999/2000. An election was held for a new Moderator and Vice-Moderator. Carol Pardo will be Moderator, and Emily Roth will be Vice-Moderator for 1999/2000.
Deborah Kempe, the Northeast Regional representative and a member of the Section, reported on ARLIS/NA Executive Board activities, including the strategic planning survey. The board liaison for the Section is Karen McKenzie.
The new Section column editor for ARLIS/NA Update will be Mark Bresnan. Kay Teel and Madelyn Cook continue their responsibilities as the Section's webpage editorial team. The Cataloging Section webpage is at http://w3.arizona.edu/~arlis/.
Kay Teel will represent the Section on the newly-formed ARLIS/NA Statistics Task Force. Section members commented that it would be useful to compile statistics on attendance at Section-sponsored sessions. It was noted that forty-two members were in attendance at the business meeting.
Ms. Siska announced that the Section had sponsored four sessions at the Vancouver conference, and thanked the organizers, speakers, and attendees for their participation. The sessions were: "The Future of Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules," "Paving the Cow Path?: How the Past Affects the Present in the Cataloging and Indexing of Bibliographic Materials," "Auction Catalogues and SCIPIO Recon," and "Finding Aids: When Collection Level Records are not Enough." In addition to these sessions, the Cataloging Problems Discussion Group and ArtNACO Discussion Group met at the conference.
Ms. Siska introduced Daniel Starr, chair of the Cataloging Advisory Committee (CAC). Mr. Starr described the current activities of the Committee. The CAC is drafting proposals for establishing headings for buildings and headings for anonymous artist relationships such as "school of …" or "follower of…" In addition, the CAC is working on a core bibliographic standard for exhibition catalogs, to be submitted to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), as well as guidelines for cataloging exhibition catalogs. The CAC will also respond to the draft SCIPIO standard. Mr. Starr indicated that discussion for all of these CAC activities will be solicited using ARLIS-L and the Cataloging Section webpage. The local art cataloging discussion groups in the New York metropolitan area and in southern California will also discuss the draft proposals.
The members discussed the suggestion that ARLIS catalogers create a new, separate e-mail discussion list for cataloging questions. After some debate, it was decided that ARLIS-L is an appropriate forum for cataloging questions. It was recommended that messages have a flag such as "CAT:" in the subject line. Members also supported the continued posting of minutes of local art cataloging meetings to ARLIS-L.
The last item of business was a call for session proposals for the 2000 conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Claudia Hill suggested a session on new art terminology and submitting proposals to the Subject Authority Cooperative (SACO). There was also interest in how other vocabularies, such as the Getty thesauri, accept new terms. The impact of foreign cataloging records in RLIN on subject cataloging and reference searching was another suggested topic. Daniel Starr indicated that several of these subjects could be combined in a session on art cataloging in the twenty-first century.
Elizabeth O'Keefe recommended a session on museum resources and projects such as the Art Museum Image Consortium (AMICO) viewing from a cataloger's perspective. Emily Roth and Elizabeth Robinson suggested a session addressing cooperation between catalogers and reference librarians, including cataloger involvement in bibliographic instruction. Nancy Norris proposed a session on art cataloging basics.
Session proposals for the next ARLIS/NA conference will be submitted to Emily Roth and Carol Pardo. It was agreed that session organizers should urge the Conference Planning team not to schedule cataloging-related sessions against each other, or back-to-back in one day, as happened in Vancouver.
Ms. Siska adjourned the meeting at 12 p.m.
Submitted by Kay Teel