Summary of Virtual Meeting, September 9, 2011

Present: Erin Blake, Ellen Cordes, James Eason, Marcy Flynn, Mary Mundy, Lenore Rouse, Helena Zinkham

News from the SAA annual meeting

James and Marcy reported on SAA, and James' presentation to the Visual Materials Cataloging and Access Roundtable (VMCAR)

two volunteers from SAA are interested in test-driving, so James sent them examples

discussed DCRM(G) as a "companion standard" to DACS

• keep in mind that the revised version of DACS won't be ready before DCRM(G) goes to press, so we don't want to cite specifics of DACS
• DACS explicitly calls for material-specific standards to be used in certain areas (elements?) when needed 
• need to make it clear in the introduction to DCRM(G) that you can't cherry-pick from different standards: you can encode a MARC record as DACS and still use DCRM(G) in it, but only for those parts of the record where DACS says you should turn to other standards (added example sentence to II.2. "DACS encourages use of material-specific standards as companions when creating physical descriptions")
• does EAD allow for the encoding of more than one set of descriptive rules? [EB: when writing up the notes I looked up <descrules> in the tag library, and by implication you can have more than one set of rules, since the description is in the plural, "A subelement of Profile Description <profiledesc> for the enumeration of the rules, standards, conventions, and protocols used in preparing the description.")
• do we need to add "companion standard" to the glossary? No, it doesn't have a specialist meaning, and the meaning is clear from context. 

Silhouettes

• currently don't have any examples of them in the text, but rules as written will accommodate them
• agreed they're not drawings, and that "1 picture" would be the most common SMD (with "1 item" as a fall-back if it's non-pictorial)
• some silhouettes have backing sheets and some don't, so sometimes there will be more than one thing to measure, sometimes not
• Mary will find some places where silhouettes can be incorporated into the text as examples
• Ellen will add silhouettes to the list of things to include in the examples appendix

Bibliographic records vs. Archival finding aids

• some of us tend to forget that DACS can be used to make a MARC record as well as EAD finding aids
• James will work on distinguishing them in B1.3

SAA Standards Committee

• agreed we want to seek the SAA Standards Committee's endorsement of DCRM(G): if endorsed, DCRM(G) would be linked to from the SAA Standards webpage, and SAA members would be notified of DCRM(G)
• needs to be proposed to the committee based on a recommendation from an official group within SAA, with VMCAR (Visual Materials Cataloging and Access Roundtable) being the obvious one
• James will shepherd the procedure when the time comes (i.e. once the document is final), see Procedures for SAA Endorsement of an External Standard 

For next meeting (Sept. 16)

• James will work on a revised draft of Appendix B1.3 (companion standards)
• Erin will add ex.ill. examples and James' remaining changes to Appendix B so they can be discussed
• Erin will draft something for 5D4 (extent of multipart resources) so it can be discussed 
• James will go over Area 5 examples to look for ones that sound too collection-like (as opposed to multipart resources)

For September 23 meeting

• Mary will have Appendix A draft ready for discussion, plus some minor edits to other parts (she won't be at the Sept. 16 meeting)