Summary of Virtual Meeting, October 7, 2011

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

Area 5: Physical Description

We reviewed the revisions to Area 5 sent to the DCRM-L list October 6, and came up with a new version during the meeting. Here's a summary of what we came up with:

• added "Optional" after headings of 5C3 and 5C4 instead of "If considered important" in the body, because that phrase is reserved for indicating something can be added in a note (i.e. we agreed that it's optional to provide Additional physical details for prints and drawings)
• moved "Stereographs" up to 5B because it's about the SMD (what you count) not Additional physical details
• because dimensions of digital images in electronic form do not go in "dimensions" element, added "Omit this element for born-digital images in electronic form"
• agreed in principle that "Additional physical details" would be the appropriate place for file size, file format, image resolution, dimensions in pixels, or other information about digital images in electronic form
• justification: MARC21 on field 347 "Digital File Characteristics" (emphasis added) "Technical specification relating to the digital encoding of text, image, audio, video, and other types of data in a resource. This information could also be recorded in field 300 (Physical Description) $b (Other physical details)." 
• not sure if there's a compelling reason to keep file size in parentheses in the SMD; James will check (might have been an ISBD thing)
• added new section to 5B to explain that "photograph" is the SMD for photomechanical prints that reproduce photographic originals
• tried using "paper" instead of "sheet" when naming what's measured in the Dimensions element for unmounted photographs, but it didn't work.
• what gets measured for one image made up of multiple sheets shouldn't differ between the two options for the SMD
• the two SMD options for one image made up of multiple sheets are still causing problems
• emphasized that the 300 is the same whether the sheets are loose or pasted together by adding an example below "If considered important, make a note indicating whether the repository’s instance is assembled or loose."
• agreed in principle that flipping the options made sense: have the default be "5 photographs forming 1 panorama" rather than "1 photograph on 5 sheets" but need to review notes on why we went with the original order of preference.

Things we didn't get to

• reviewing dimension examples with sheet size removed 
• reviewing revised multipart resource dimensions (incl. provision for measuring containers when resource was created or issued in a container)
• reviewing if it's okay to have deleted the "issued in pocket" rule (formerly 5E2) because it's so rare and so specific (if we keep it, maybe better to re-phrase so that it says to provide an indication of how the accompanying material was accommodated as-issued?)
• reviewing glossary definitions of format, collection, and multipart resource
•  

Action items

• Erin will incorporate agreed-on changes into master document
• Erin will draft explanation that "photograph" is the SMD for photomechanical prints that reproduce photographic originals
• James will double-check why we decided file size should be in parentheses in the SMD (from ISBD?) then, unless there's a compelling reason not to, move file size as well as other digital file characteristics into the Other physical details element.
• James will review his notes from previous discussions of one image on multiple supports

Next meeting

• October 14: everyone except Helena expects to be able to attend