Looks like the Dewey team made it back from ALA in an appropriately small number of pieces. The consensus: success! My only personal regret is not being able to spend more time waiting in line for the shuttle bus between hotel and convention center. (Ah yes -- the convention center. So compact and conveniently located.) OCLC and DDC made splashes at their respective breakfast updates and at the OCLC booth; Joan went from "evil incarnate" to medal-winner in five days (of which happy tale more later), pausing only for various meetings and to report on DDC editors' activities to ALCTS/CCS/SAC (you know -- the Subject Analysis Committee of the Cataloging and Classification Section of the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services); and I gave a talk on "Subject access to cultural objects: A review of challenges and opportunities" as part of a panel on "Cataloguing Cultural Objects: Toward a metadata content standard for libraries, archives, and museums." The topic of this panel session -- the CCO Guide -- is a new set of rules for cataloging cultural works and images that is intended to be complementary to AACR2 and its successor AACR3 ... or, as we should all get used to saying, RDA. The latter turned out to be the buzzword -- buzzabbreviation? -- of the conference, at least among the catalognoscenti. Meanwhile, topics discussed at the Dewey breakfast included segmentation practice, options in religion at 290 and elsewhere, graphic novels at 741.5, and Dewey research at OCLC. More bloggery on all these issues coming right up!
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