AAS ConferenceAmelia McKenzie travelled to San Francisco from 31 March to 9 April to attend and speak at the LC International Colloquium on Rethinking Southeast Asia Collection Development. Papers at the Colloquium discussed aspects of Southeast Asian acquisitions, cataloguing, preservation and digital projects. Amelia's paper focused on sustainable cooperation in developing Indonesian collections. While in San Francisco Amelia attended the US Association of Asian Studies Annual Conference and some of the associated business meetings of CEAL and CORMOSEA. As usual the CEAL meetings contained useful updates on the actvities of US colleagues and particularly LC. It was reported that Philip Melzer has replaced John Byrum as chief of the Regional and Cooperative Cataloguing Division, as LC continues a round of staff changes. The Chinese vendor CNPITC is to provide monograph catalogue records for books supplied to LC - about 70% of its acquisitions. In a similar project LC is working with Kinokuniya of Japan to obtain shelf ready books. Records will be supplied via OCLC. Meanwhile, work continues on the revision of guidelines on Korean word division and romanisation.CJK newsSince the NCJK system ceased operation at the end of November 2005, the Chinese, Japanese and Korean staff have switched to the Libraries Australia Cataloguing Client (LACC) for cataloguing work. In the early days of implementation, staff spent quite some time discussing with Libraries Australia Products team to set up the daily downline loading of NLA catalogue records. Other issues including diacritics and Z39.50 functionality for CJK copy cataloguing were also on the agenda for quite a while. In March the Z39.50 gateway finally allowed copy cataloguing records with CJK script to be downloaded in their entirety, a huge relief for the Chinese unit which depends heavily on copy cataloguing. In February and March respectively the online Chinese and Korean Acquisitions Lists resumed. However Libraries Australia is currently unable to generate the lists in the required format, so Voyager is being used. Chinese unit has started purchasing MARC records from one of its suppliers in Beijing. The records are in MACR 21 format with LC subject headings. They will be loaded into Libraries Australia for holdings to be added. In a staff development move, Wan Wong, Senior Librarian, Chinese Unit, Asian Collections and Anne Xu, Senior Librarian, Document Supply Service, swapped jobs on 1 May. Wan and Anne worked together in the weeks prior to the swap, which will last initially for three months with the option of extending. Chinese staff commenced trials of two Chinese e-book products, SuperStar and Founder Apabi. The trial will be conducted in the Asian Collections Reading Room and selected PCs in the Main Reading Room. |