CONSER Editing Guide Revision: Request for Comments

CONSER requests comments on their draft revisions for the CONSER Editing Guide.  The deadline for comments is January 31, 2011.

View the draft revisions and instructions for submitting comments on the CONSER website.

Applications are being accepted for NASIG Awards & Grants

The North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) is now accepting applications for various awards and grants.

View the announcement here.

The application deadline in January 18, 2011.

LRTS Request for Grant Proposals

Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS), the journal of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), announces the availability of grants of up to $1,000 (funded by an ALA Carnegie-Whitney Grant) to assist authors with preparing literature reviews. 

The purpose of the grants is to provide funds that will be used for clerical and research support, thereby allowing the author/s to concentrate on analyzing the resources and writing the literature review.  Possible tasks might be collecting citations, sorting and organizing citations by themes and categories, locating and gathering resources to be reviewed, verifying citations, funding purchases of articles not owned by the home institution of the author, and so forth.  Funding also could provide a mentoring opportunity by  funding assistance by a library school or information science student.

Highly cited, literature reviews provide an essential professional service to practitioners, scholars, and students by identifying the key themes and the most important publications appearing in successive two year periods.  Books and articles by accredited scholars and researchers, i.e., primarily peer-reviewed publications provide the basis for a literature review.  A good literature review is evaluative, selective, and critical, and goes beyond summarizing and quoting from the selected sources.   Literature reviews explain why the sources cited are important and valuable, may compare them to prior works, and create a structure that organizes the two-year body of content to make it comprehensible and to identify themes, not only for those who have followed the developments it describes, but to future researchers.  All sources referenced appear in the endnotes; a separate bibliography is not published.  Although commissioned, LRTS literature reviews go through the same double-blind peer review process as unsolicited manuscripts.

 LRTS seeks authors for the following topical areas and coverage periods:

• Acquisitions literature published 2010-2011
• Serials literature published 2010-2011

Papers should be submitted not later than June 30, 2012. Grant recipients will be required to submit progress reports to the LRTS Editor twice a year.

The grant proposal must include:

1. Requester name, title, and contact information
2. The literature to be reviewed (see list above) 
3. The requester's credentials to write the literature review
4. The amount requested
5. Budget plan and rationale for how the funds will be expended 

Proposals are due by January 31, 2011.
Applications and inquiries should be submitted to Peggy Johnson, LRTS Editor, lrtseditor@ala.org

2010 CONSER Annual Report Now Available

The 2010 CONSER Annual Report has been posted to their website. Highlights include:

• information on new CONSER member libraries
• highlights from the May 2010 operations meeting
• information on the Open Access Journal Project
• Serials Cooperative Cataloging Training Program (SCCTP) update

CONSER RDA Testing

The CONSER Program has shared some of their Resource Description and Access (RDA) testing information.

A three-part document covers issues related to RDA, the CONSER Standard Record (CSR), and the Library of Congress Policy Statements (LCPSs).  It includes the following sections:

• RDA as Modified by CSR: Recommended Guidelines
• Differences between CSR, RDA, and LCPS
• Using Existing OCLC Bibliographic Records for Serials: CONSER RDA Testers

A webinar recording from September 29, 2010, consisting of RDA test discussions for CONSER catalogers is also available.  It is just under one hour long and will be of interest to RDA testers and those dedicated to following the test process.

Helpful links were shared in the webinar:

The Program for Cooperative Cataloging has a web page devoted to RDA testing: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/RDA-PCC.html

The University of Chicago Library has kindly shared its RDA testing information as well:  http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/staffweb/depts/cat/rda.html  Included is a link to Renette Davis' presentation "Changes from AACR2 to RDA for Cataloging Serials."

"CONSER Cooperative Open Access Journal Project" by Les Hawkins

CONSER members have discussed a plan to provide CONSER-authenticated records for online journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). This column provides information on the Cooperative Open Access Journal Project, which is a multi-library project to provide high quality bibliographic records containing accurate ISSN data. If successful, the project could serve as a model for cooperatively providing records for other online journal collections.

The CONSER website has a page devoted to the project: http://www.loc.gov/acq/conser/Open-Access-Project.html

"CONSER Cooperative Open Access Journal Project" is published in the Serials Review, vol. 36, issue 3 (Sept. 2010), pages 167-168.

DOI: 10.1016/j.serrev.2010.05.007

"Print Serials Workflow in RDA" by Mary Curran

In her latest column in the Serials Librarian, Mary Curran shares a sample Resource Description and Access (RDA) workflow for serials cataloging. The goal is to provide serials catalogers with an introduction to RDA.

"Print Serials Workflow in RDA: A Draft Workflow for RDA Toolkit Based on JSC's Sample Workflow for a Simple Book" is available in the Serials Librarian, vol. 59, no. 3 & 4 (Oct. 2010), pages 244-262.

DOI: 10.1080/0361526X.2010.504918