OCLC CJK Users Group 1995 Annual Meeting

Friday, April 7, 1995

Ballroom Diplomat

Omni Shoreham Hotel

Washington, D.C.

Minutes

General Membership Meeting

The Chair of the OCLC CJK Users Group, Karl K. Lo, opened the meeting (after a continental breakfast provided by the OCLC Asia-Pacific Services (APS) staff) at 8:00 a.m. with mention of the achievements made during the previous year. First, the OCLC migration to PRISM was a success. Lo also commented on the APS' annual report, the growth of the Online Library Union Catalog (OLUC) database, the projects in China and with the JAPAN MARC tapes, and the International Seminar on Chinese Document Database which took place early in 1995.

As the departing Chair, Lo felt impelled to speak about the popularization of the OCLC system. There was a 12 percent growth in new members this past year but an even higher rate should be sought. The friendliness of the system accounts for one aspect of its success. To popularize the system further, the price should be made affordable; a search only package should be created and offered at a price lower than that for the cataloging system. OCLC should go beyond technical services to the reference departments of institutional libraries and especially to the individual users of the library.

Lo made a second proposal to have the OCLC CJK Users Group join forces with users in the Asia-Pacific area. Although countries in the Asia-Pacific area have different bibliographic standards and codes, one common factor is the use of nonroman scripts and the OCLC CJK system is capable of using nonroman scripts. By joining together the user base increases 10 times its present size, which probably will lower the unit price. A price decrease of 50 percent will be significant enough to make the OCLC system more attractive. Both factors will undoubtedly attract more members, but the original goal of OCLC was to afford more assistance to the system's users and, by meeting user demands, OCLC cannot fail to grow. Lo insisted that these remarks were not a consensus of the Users Group members but his own personal opinion.

As his chairmanship drew to an end, Lo thanked the members for their active participation in the Users Group's projects which went far to making OCLC a success. He also expressed his gratitude for the friendly and courteous support of the Asian Pacific Services staff.

Election Results

Lo reported on the results of the recently-held election:

1. •Vice Chair: Abraham Yu (UC-Irvine)
   

2. •Chinese Officer: Karen T. Wei (Illinois)
   

3. •Japanese Officer: Hideyuki Morimoto (UC-Berkeley)
   

4. •Korean Officer: Philip A. Melzer (LC)
   

5. •Officer-at-Large: Elise Chin (Washington)
   

OCLC Staff Reports

Andrew Wang said that the extension of the user base was an important consideration. As the annual report (distributed at this annual meeting) indicates, OCLC growth in the past year could be measured by institutional users, installations, and usage as well as in terms of the size of the database. The price for CJK units must be balanced between the two extremes of pricing OCLC products out of the market and, on the other hand, pricing CJK products so low they would be priced out of OCLC.

Wang illustrated the important points of the annual report with transparencies of the printed pages. He estimated that 95 percent of the CJK records in OLUC have CJK scripts. He asked the Users Group members to complete the survey questionnaire about the Waseda Information Network (WINE MARC) records. In Taiwan, Wang stated, the code used now has over 80,000 characters. Although the International Standards Organization has adopted Unicode, no CJK-language country uses it yet. Romanization schemes are another impediment to increased interaction.

New users of the OCLC CJK Plus System includes the Chicago Public Library; King County Library System, Seattle, WA; Los Angeles Public Library; and the San Francisco Public Library. Prices for reference use of the CJK database is expected to be announced in June this year. The union list of the OLUC provides other than OCLC record call numbers.

Eugene Wu (Harvard-Yenching Library) felt the price for public services searches should be reduced to entice libraries to invest in CJK OPAC hardware. Wang said that OCLC pricing decisions are decided outside the Asia-Pacific Services and that regional networks also collect usage fees. He thought one fee for an unlimited amount of searches might be the answer. Wu also said that the possibility of libraries to overlay OCLC records for local use would increase OCLC's popularity. Wang said that OCLC is not in the local systems business; instead, subsidiary information standardization networks work with local systems. The one-time cost for such work would be advantageous, Wu thought. Wang said that local system vendors charge annual maintenance fees of 10 to 15 percent of the initial charges.

Hisako Kotaka discussed the technical issues of the CJK Plus System and the migration to the PRISM system. The searching problems in the authority file had been addressed in the new version. When she sent out the annual report to the Users Group's members, version 2.02 had not yet been mailed but she would release the new version on her return to Ohio. The communication bugs were worked and CJK users can now use a variety of communication options. Computer specialists at OCLC identified the bug that disconnects the user without notification. The new system uses a GUI interface that required making many changes in the software. The 2.01 release solved the disconnect problem. Format integration and card printer bugs were also discovered, causing much work to pile up. The 2.02 version will resolve the problems reported by users. Kotaka expressed her appreciation for the reports and support from the users. In the OCLC CJK Plus PRISM Seminar scheduled for the afternoon, Kotaka would report in detail on these matters.

Cataloging operations, said Kotaka, will be beneficially affected by newly expanded search capability. Several other new features of version 2.02 will make catalogers more capable and productive. The afternoon seminar will have three case reports in which the software's new features will be discussed in detail. The members giving the case reports, Hideyuki Morimoto (UC-Berkeley), Min-min Chang (HKUST), and Hsu-Kuang Wang (Oregon), can also be resource persons for users wanting to adopt new features.

Wang said he would talk to the appropriate people at OCLC to create a volume price policy for the software, since current policy and marketing issues seem to be hampering utilization of technically workable options. James Cheng (UCLA) mentioned the likelihood of all of Waseda University Library's records being input into OLUC. There was some further discussion about National Diet Library records, retrocon records going to RLIN, and the paucity of OCLC users in China. Kotaka ended her report by saying that once version 2.02 has been distributed, the enhancement of new character input codes will proceed.

Lo called for a small break in the program so that members could refresh themselves.

Program Committee Meeting

CCC Non-Roman Core Record Task Group Final Report

Abraham Yu (UC-Irvine) gave the final report of the CCC Non-Roman Core Record Task Group which was appointed in April 1994. Of the nine members of the task group, eight came from RLIN user libraries and one from an OCLC user library. The task group's purpose was to design a cataloging record format that would represent national cataloging standards. All NACO libraries will input this kind of record. See Appendix I of these minutes for an outline of the final report.

OCLC CJK Plus PRISM System at the UCLA East Asian Library

Amy Tsiang (UCLA) shared the experiences at the East Asian Library of the users of the OCOC CJK Plus PRISM System. Many of the problems she described had been reported to OCLC and had been rectified in version 2.01. There were, however, several problems that remained. Overall, Tsiang's evaluation was positive, especially about the program's new features, like dialog boxes, additional methods of searching, etc. Tsiang published a paper on the subject in CEAL Bulletin no. 106 (June 1995), pages 35-38. There were many comments from the floor about the system's features, some of which were disliked (response time, card printing, etc.) and others liked (pinyin to Wade-Giles conversion, record validation, etc.) Wu suggested a listserver or e-mail setup should be created solely to discuss and resolve questions like these.

Enhancement and Linkage of the Name Authority File with the Bibliographic Database

Yu returned to the podium to take up enhancing and linking the Name Authority File with the bibliographic database. He first described the problems of personal names in the database and then offered a model of what CJK personal name headings should include. See Appendix II of these minutes and Mr. Yu's article in CEAL Bulletin no. 106 (June 1995), pages 1-17.

Authority Control Regarding CJK Personal Names

Lo began the discussion concerning Yu's proposal by opening the meeting to all participants. Barbara Tillett of LC should be contacted for implementation. OCLC CJK Users Group members should join forces with RLG and LC. Pressure should be exerted to make this task an urgent national one . Yu said that RLG and LC could not at present support vernacular data in the name authority file and that other languages in the JACKPHY group did not need this enhancement.

Progress Report of Cooperative Cataloging for Chinese "Big-Set" Analytics

Analytic cataloging of large sets was the next topic taken up. Several of the larger East Asian collections had been busy this past year acquiring and analyzing such sets. Harvard-Yenching hopes to retrocon Chinese titles, estimated at 330,000 records, into machine-readable form.

Lo brought the meeting to an end by presenting the new Chair, James Cheng, with a "virtual" disk. Cheng mentioned that there was now more than sixty members attending the annual meeting. Future projects included establishing a listserver with OCLC. Analytic cataloging should continue to be guided by the Group's Program Committee. The Group's actions should include East Asian studies centers in Europe. Cheng asked the members to consider the form of the annual meeting for next year. The date of the meeting is important because some members would like to attend both the OCLC CJK Users Group meeting and the RLG CJK Users Group meeting.

(Recorded and respectfully submitted by Ed Martinique)