Executive Board Meeting 1994

March 25, 1994

Friday, March 25, 1994
Gourmeli's Restaurant
Boston Marriott Hotel
Boston, MA

Minutes

Present:

James Cheng, Joy Kim, Hisako Kotaka, Karl Lo, Ed Martinique, Shizuko Radbill, Andrew Wang, Abraham Yu

The meeting was called to order by Karl Lo at 12:00 noon during a lunch hosted by Andrew wang. Changes were proposed in the time schedules for the Program Committee and the Gereral Committee meeting scheduled for the following day. The agendas for the two meetings were reviewed.

I. Program Committee Meeting

The focus of this meeting will center upon the reports of work accomplished by the Task Forces on the cooperative cataloging of analytics and the retrospective conversion of CJK records. Following the report of Daphne Hsueh on the progress made in the retrospective conversion project, Eugene Wu will describe the plans made for retrocon at the Harvard-Yenching Library and Weiying Wan will recount the experiences of the RLG RLIN retrocon project at the University of Michigan. Next, Shizuko Radbill will discuss training to use OCLC's Epic and FirstSearch programs. Abraham Yu will treat the subject of authority control in catalog records.

II. General Membership Meeting

1. Annual Report

    After a short break, the General Membership Meeting will convene with Karl Lo's annual report. Karl will emphasize the Group's good fortune to have the strong staff support at OCLC to push for the development of the CJK Plus system and the migration of the CJK system to PRISM. The same staff has also been responsible for the increase in users of the OCLC CJK Plus system; most notably, the University of California at Berkeley East Asian Library. Karl will also mention the ongoing programs undertaken by the Program Committee and possible directions for the future like popularizing CJK technology for use in public, corporate, and special libraries.

2. Discussions

    Charging a membership fee as a method to define the members and determining their addresses in order to send out ballots, announcements, and other information was discussed. After weighing the pros and cons and considering other methods to define membership, the Executive Board decided not to call for fees. It was decided to use the current membership list and to call for new members through the participants of the upcoming general membership meeting.

    The proposal to have an Election or Nomination Committee elected at the general meeting was approved.

    James Cheng proposed that the position of Chair of the Program Committee should be limited to a period of two years to ensure that new ideas and fresh energy will always obtain in that important committee. The proposal was passed. It was also agreed that volunteers to seve on the Program Committee would be solicited from the full membership. During the 1994-95 interm, Abraham Yu was appointed chair of the Program Committee.

    On the question of changing the bylaws, it was decided that only specific proposals from the general membership would be entertained.

III. OCLC Reports

Andrew Wang reported on the progress of various OCLC initiatives.

    1. Current projections indicate that the CJK Plus system will migrate to PRISM in September this year. The transition is expected to proceed smoothly. Current users will train themselves in PRISM operations.

    2. Make OCLC CJK records accessible through Internet, a boon to international users. As a result, telecommunication costs may decline as may CJK software costs, providing major relief to current OCLC member libraries.

    3. The dispute over romanization systems, pinyin vs. Wade-Giles, may be rendered moot with the continuing development of conversion software.

    4. Batch-mode processing of CJK records may become a possibility in the near future.

    5. The OCLC CJK database will become the largest in the world after the following agreements are fulfilled: the Waseda University collection, Japan MARC records in current file at LC, the National Central Library tapes and the Taiwan Normal University tapes in Taiwan, and the Shen-lien tapes in China. The OCLC CJK database is projected to increase in the next two to three years to twice its present size.

    6. Standard types of call numbers in more than 60 percent of RLG libraries with CJK records have been successfully converted into the OCLC database.

    7. Phase 2 of the China Project at OCLC will end April 1, 1994. Forty-thousnad records have been created. With funding for the project exhausted, Bob Hayes, special assistant to the President of OCLC, is actively seeking more funding .

Karl Lo adjourned the Executive Board meeting at 2:05 p.m.

(Recorded and respectfully submitted by Ed Martinique)