Authentication Codes and Encoding Levels for CONSER Serial Records

CONSER recently issued the agenda for the CONSER/BIBCO Operations Meeting to be held May 1-2, 2008. Included is a link to the report, "Report and Recommendations of the PCC Working Group on Authentication Codes and Encoding Levels for Serials and Integrating Resources." The report includes discussion of the treatment of the "new CONSER record," also referred to as the "CONSER standard record" or as an "access level record." The working group makes both short-term and long-term recommendations. In conclusion, they state:

We recognize that in many ways the underlying goals of the group that developed the new CONSER record are very close to the goals used when creating the core level record: providing guidance on elements essential for access, identification, and retrieval, and relying on cataloger expertise and judgment to know when additional elements are needed for a particular item. However, we are deliberately not recommending the use of encoding level “4,” because we want the concept of the new CONSER record to be viewed with a fresh eye in this new environment, both by administrators and catalogers. The focus of the core record development was on “what can we omit from a record?” The focus of the new CONSER record group was on “what do we need in a record?”