Working Group report/meeting

In its way, it was cool to be a part of a webcast that was in such demand
that it overwhelmed the system.  Of course, those of us in the midst of
presenting didn't know that we were not being seen until afterward.   I had
kind of been hoping that C-SPAN would think this was worth broadcasting,
too.  In any case, due to popular demand, LC has put up an unedited version
of the webcast at
http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4180.  I understand
that demand is already very high, and that there may also be some difficulty
viewing parts of this presentation.   Karen Coyle has provided a brief
summary of the meeting on her blog at http://kcoyle.blogspot.com.

In answer to some of the questions that have come up here:  The Working
Group does have a 43 page draft report, but the deadline was such that we
were unable to get it into "releasable" form in time for the meeting at LC.
Further, there were some questions of etiquette involved (should the entire
thing be released before (or at the same time that) the person who
commissioned it had a chance to see it?  Probably not) and a question of
receptivity (if reports such as this are available in advance, experience
shows that people inevitably focus only on those parts that concern
themselves most directly and they come to the presentation with their
opinions already set).  

So we made a power point presentation that presented the first and second
order recommendations.  Missing were the background and rationale, and the
third order recommendations.   During the 90 minute presentation, Olivia
Madison presented the general conclusions and guiding principles of the
Working Group, and then Brian Schottlaender and I split up the remainder of
the report, summarizing some of the background, emphasizing some
recommendations more than others, and including some of the third order
recommendations.   

During the day, the WG also met with some congressional liaisons, as well as
with some of the LC managers most affected by the report.  Following the
presentation, we met briefly with Deanna Marcum, and then held a "post
mortem" to plan our next steps.  We had known going in that there were
several areas in the report that we were incomplete, and some
recommendations missing.  These will be fixed before the report is released
for public comment.  Also, we were able to see a few additional areas that
needed some attention, based on the content of the four meetings we held
that day. 

You might be interested to know that the week before the presentation we had
a conference call to review the recommendations and identify those that we
were in full agreement with, those that we agreed with, but thought that our
presentation/wording, etc. still needed some work, and those that there
might still be some disagreement or discomfort with.   There were no
recommendations that fell into the third category.  In other words, this
group of diverse people, coming at the work with different interests,
passions, and experiences, ended up in unanimity on all recommendations put
forth.  

One of the things that we have tried to do in this report, is to provide
both a vision of a future, AND to recommend things that need to be done in
the interim.  In other words, we aren't recommending implementation of a
future that isn't here yet.  I suspect that there will be very few
recommendations that cause much angst in any quarter.   The only
recommendation that might cause a stir was our recommendation to suspend
further developmental work on RDA until after FRBR has been more adequately
tested on real data and the results of those tests can be analyzed.  

Janet Swan Hill, Professor
Associate Director for Technical Services
University of Colorado Libraries, CB184
Boulder, CO 80309
janet.hill@...
     *****
Tradition is the handing-on of Fire, and not the worship of Ashes.
- Gustav Mahler

***********************************************************************

E-mail AUTOCAT listowners:             autocat-request@...
Search AUTOCAT archives:  http://listserv.syr.edu/archives/autocat.html
Selected AUTOCAT commands: http://www.cwu.edu/~dcc/Autocat/options.html
  By posting messages to AUTOCAT, the author does not cede copyright

***********************************************************************