Serial Publications Section

Annual Report 2002

Administrative matters

Officers: The Standing Committee is chaired by Marjorie E. Bloss (USA). The Information Coordinator is Elizabeth Gazdag (Hungary). Hartmut Walravens (Germany), had to resign his position as Secretary late in the year due to his chairing the newly created Newspapers Standing Committee. Agneta Holmenmark (Sweden) graciously agreed to take over this position until new elections are conducted at the 2003 IFLA Conference.

Mission Statement and Strategic Plan: The Standing Committee members reviewed and updated its 2002-2003 Mission Statement and Strategic Plan. The Strategic Plan notes a number of action items that will be reviewed in detail throughout this report. These documents can be found on IFLANet.

Financial report: Administrative monies were appropriately allocated and wire-transferred to the appropriate people as were project monies. Remaining project funds were returned to IFLA HQ as all projects have been completed. (Descriptions of these projects will be covered separately.) The remaining funds held by the Financial Officer are for administrative money only.

Newsletter: Two issues of the Newsletter were issued this year. Paper copies were sent to all members of the Standing Committee and were submitted to IFLANet for inclusion.

Recruiting New Committee Members: One of the goals of the Standing Committee on Serial Publications has been to increase the number of members. To this end, Chair Marjorie E. Bloss sent a letter to all members of the section as well as various Serial Interest Groups encouraging them to nominate people for the Committee.

Round Table on Newspapers Becomes a Standing Committee: The Professional Committee and the IFLA Board agreed that IFLA to eliminate the category of round tables. Round tables were instructed either to become standing committees, become subcommittees of existing standing committees or to dissolve altogether. The Round Table on Newspapers (a Round Table of the Serial Publications Committee) recommended and the Professional Committee approved standing committee status for the Round Table effective in early December 2002. Hartmut Walravens is continuing to chair the new standing committee.

Current projects

Basic Serials Management Handbook: The Committee needs to find out from Judith Szilvassy if she is interested in working on an English revision. She has been working on a revised Hungarian version. The French translation of the Handbook has not yet been completed. After discussion with IFLA HQ, it was decided to mount the Russian translation of the Handbook on IFLANet and establish a link from it to the Russian State Library’s website.

Russian Workshop: A special workshop focusing on serial publications and continuing resources was held on October 2, 2002 in Moscow for Russian librarians. Funds have been found for accommodations for speakers and an interpreter but not for speakers’ transportation. It will be a one-day workshop and will have sessions on definitions, access to full text databases, directory of international databases, and electronic journals. (See separate section describing the Conference in greater detail.)

Directory of Union Catalogs: Agneta Holmenmark and Marjorie Bloss contacted Sara Gould about finalizing the updating and about project funds. Bloss determined that project funds had never been transferred back to IFLA HQ and did so in December 2002.

Survey of Article Databases: A survey was sent to national libraries but response was meager. Due to the low response rate to the questionnaire, the Committee decided not to continue with this project. The requested project funds were paid out to the expert working on this project (Andreas Heisse) and the remaining amount was returned to IFLA HQ.

Acceptance of ISBD(CR): Created in 1988, the ISBD(S) was in need of revision as a result of new serial developments (electronic resources) and greater clarification of thinking on quasi-serials (e.g., conference publications and loose-leaf services). Furthermore, the library community expressed a desire to bring ISBD(S), the ISSN Network and the AACR community into greater harmonization. Karen Darling represented the Serial Publications Section in this important task.

As stated by Ingrid Parent, (Chair of the ISBD(S) Working Group) "The scope of the standard was expanded to include continuing resources of all kinds not only serial types of publications… As a result, the name of the standard was changed to International Standard Bibliographic Description for Serials and Other Continuing Resources or ISBD(CR)."

The Committee sent the draft standard to IFLA Serial Publication Committee members in the fall of 2002 for their comments and for a vote of approval or disapproval. Some editorial comments were made that were accepted. The Serial Publications Committee voted to support the ISBD(CR), which has now been approved by the library community. It now supersedes the ISBD(S).

IFLA 2002 Conference Activities

The Standing Committee jointly sponsored a workshop with the Cataloging Standing Committee entitled "Seeing Serials in a New Light" from ISBD(S) to ISBD(CR)." Papers were given by:

Paul V. Bunn (The British Library, Boston Spa, UK), "Bibliographic standards for serials: recent developments"

Edward Swanson (St. Paul, MN, USA), "Editing ISBD(CR): approach, scope, definitions"

Unni Knutsen (National Library of Norway, Oslo, Norway), "Key points from the new standard – 1"

Karen Darling (University of Missouri-Columbia, USA), "Key points from the new standard – 2"

David Baron (The British Library, Boston Spa, UK), "The national context, the UK situation"

The Round Table on Newspapers presented a meeting on "Newspapers of the British Isles". Papers were presented by:

John Lauder (The British Library, London, UK) "Partnerships in preservation: the experience of the Newsplan 2000 Project"

Ian Hutchinson (University of Stirling, Stirling, UK) "Scottish newspapers and Scottish national identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"

Elizabeth Melrose (North Yorkshire County Library, Northallerton, UK), "Local newspapers in England"

Aled Jones (University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK), "Print, language and identity: newspapers in Wales since 1804"

ISBD(CR) Seminar in Moscow

Nina Khakhaleva, member of the Standing Committee and Deputy Director General at the Russian State Library (Moscow), was the primary force behind this conference. She was the one who identified the venue and funding sources and provided the agenda for the seminar. The seminar was organized by the Russian State Library under the auspices of the IFLA Section on Serial Publications and sponsored by the Ministry of Culture in Russia.

The theme of the seminar was "Innovations in Serials Management". It pursued two main objectives: to promote the new terms in the theory of seriality and to set forth the practice of acquisition and service in the electronic environment, especially e-journals.

The programme was split into two blocks according to main topics. Members of the Serial Publications’ Standing Committee, Hartmut Walravens, Karen Darling, and a paper written by Françoise Pelle presented the first block but read by Karen Darling. Participants were updated on Standing Committee activities and projects (such as the translation of the Basic Serials Management Handbook), the work that had been done on ISBD(CR), and new developments in the ISSN Office.

Russian reporters presented the second block of the programme. They reviewed the contemporary market of serials emphasizing changes in the structure of the publishing industry.

More than 160 participants from 30 regions of Russia attended the seminar.

Open Session and Workshop Plans for 2003 IFLA Conference

During the 2002 IFLA Conference, the Standing Committee agreed to present both an open session and a workshop for the next year’s conference in Berlin. The topic for the open session is "Rules, Formats, Cooperation". It will focus on the discussions on whether Central Europe should adopt AACR and MARC 21 in light of resource sharing and international cooperation.

The workshop will focus on "Management of Electronic Journals". It will explore the changes that have been made in libraries as a result of electronic journals to including workflow and staffing. The workshop will be co-sponsored with the Standing Committee on Reference Work.

And in closing…

The Committee Chair would like to thank all members of the Standing Committee for their productivity and hard work. Although the committee is a small one, the achievements for 2002 have been huge. All committee members are to be commended for going far beyond the call of duty.

Ms Marjorie E. Bloss
Chair/Treasurer 2001-2002