CAGER Committee
Report to the Technical Services Planning Committee
December 2001

The Committee has met via conference call on the first Tuesday of each month at 2:00 pm. During the year the membership underwent a several changes. Kim Montgomery (UCF) replaced Linda Sutton, Bob Sun (UWF) replaced Marvin Williams, and Naomi Young (UF) replaced Jimmie Lundgren (resulting in the loss of one co-chair). Also, USF-HSCL's former representative, Charles Gordon, (who had become a 2^nd USF representative) withdrew from membership. FAMU, FGCU, and FAU remain un-represented.

The Committee's activities this year have been largely reactive, in that the topics with which the Committee has concerned itself have arisen as a result of the actions of other groups, such as the Digitization Services Planning Committee.

Following the formulation of guidelines for cataloging materials in the Florida Heritage Collection, much of my own time (and, I assume, that of other committee members) has been devoted setting up in-process records for titles being digitized, and, once notified by FCLA of their completion, finalizing the catalog copy.

Modifications were made to the cataloging guidelines in order to accommodate a problem with display of in-process items in local catalogs that had not yet been given URL's. This consisted of the creation of an 856 field in the record that would display the information that the item was "NOT YET AVAILABLE; in process for electronic access". But, since the presence of the 856 field was the trigger for FHC's inclusion of an item in the group of "Items Available Online", another accommodation had to be made to prevent the this 856 field from causing the item to be included. That solution was finally provided in a suggestion from Rich Bennett.

One additional set of guidelines was formulated and adopted this year. It is primarily the work of Jimmie Lundgren. It was intended to guide catalogers in describing Florida maps and aerial photographs, and was of particular need at University of Florida due to some of their digitization efforts.

The Committee was occupied for a time this year with questions related to the loading of netLibrary titles into institutional catalogs. Questions related to the display of the records, coded notes that would be attached, and the handling of irregularities in name and subject headings that were discovered. These questions were answered individually (and differently) by each institution.

On TS-PLAN, there was a particular request for information from CAGER about authority control guidelines in the LTQF records. The short answer is that there are, by design, no authority control guidelines, other than the following (from the introduction):

"catalogers should apply the most current AACR2r rules for description, OCLC bibliographic formats and standards tagging, and Library of Congress subject headings"

None further were planned due to the fact the no authority records were envisioned in LTQF, or deemed possible because of the multiplicity of contributors. A few errors in names and subjects have been discovered in records this year, and were handled by notifying the cataloging institution via their CAGER member. We elected to follow this notification procedure rather than simply make the correction in LTQF, because it was assumed that the institution had another record in its own catalog for the print version of the digitized item, and that the institution would wish to effect the same correction there.

Jim Michael, Chair