Does this change in series policy indicate that LC is giving up its
participation in PCC? I don't see how LC catalogers can code records as
PCC, either full or core, if they have not complied with one of the basic
standards of the program, namely to search the authority file and use the
established heading and the series treatment decision that is recorded in
the SAR. One of the basic tenets of PCC participation is the requirement
to make sure that all headings under authority control must be supported by
an authority record, and that new usages of a series title be recorded as
cross references or become new series, if necessary. If LC is not going
to submit to these requirements, I can't see how they can continue to
participate in the program, at least not for records that contain series.

Another question I have regards encoding level for these records. Can LC
continue to code its records with 490s as full, national level records if
they are not going to do any series checking or series authority
creation? When these records are distributed to OCLC, will OCLC
automatically overlay any existing member record with the LC version? This
could result in better quality records--including those of PCC
contributors--being overlaid by a record that is not as high quality. I
think that LC should not use a full encoding level for records with 490s
but should use a minimal level code in order to avoid the overlay problem
in OCLC.

A third question has to do with the records that Casalini creates for LC
and for other subscribing libraries. Will Casalini also use 490s for
series to be in compliance with LC's new policy? If so, this would seem
like a retrograde action to me, since the Casalini catalogers have just
recently been trained to check series and create SARs.

A fourth question: the new policy statement says that LC copy catalogers
using a record from another library will strip out 440s and 830s, and
replace them with a 490. Given that the (supposed) point of the new
policy is to save time by not doing series work, why is LC making its copy
catalogers go to extra trouble to strip out fields that may be perfectly
fine as is? This also has negative repercussions for overlay of records
in OCLC, when these lccopycat records are redistributed to the utilities.

It's pretty obvious that I am not at all in favor of the change of policy
at LC. I think it will have a negative impact on the catalogs of all
libraries that use LC records, especially those (like my own library) that
accept LC records without scrutiny because we expect the quality to be
excellent. As PCC participants, Chicago catalogers routinely perform
series authority work for the records we create, and we are still able to
maintain a high level of productivity. I think that LC's decision to
discontinue all series authority work is an extreme solution, and one that
will have a negative impact on all users of their records.


Pat Williams
Head, Monographic Original Cataloging
University of Chicago Library