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Gary Collins
Unilever plc


Date:    Wed, 12 Jan 2000 15:01:37 -0600
From:    "Gregory A. Pass" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance,
         and Early-Modern Manuscripts

As a reminder, I would like to reiterate an announcement made earlier
concerning a public hearing to be held at the upcoming Midwinter Conference
of the American Library Association in San Antonio, TX, for comment and
discussion on the draft document of Descriptive Cataloging of Ancient,
Medieval, Renaissance, and Early-Modern Manuscripts.  This session is
sponsored by the Bibliographic Standards Committee of RBMS/ACRL and will be
held on Friday, January 14, 8-10pm at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention
Center, rm. 208.  All are welcome to attend.

==========================

I would like to announce the availability of the draft text for a new set
of
manuscript cataloging standards entitled DESCRIPTIVE CATALOGING OF ANCIENT,
MEDIEVAL, RENAISSANCE, AND EARLY-MODERN MANUSCRIPTS (also known more
economically as AMREMM).  These rules are intended as a supplement to
AACR2 -- similar in scope to Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Books (DCRB)
and
Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts (APPM) -- to allow creation of
item-level MARC catalog records for pre-modern manuscript materials in
library on-line public access catalogs as well as in the national
bibliographic utilities OCLC or RLIN.  The document is available in a
variety of file formats at URL: <ftp://165.134.156.3/vatican>.  A public
hearing will be held to invite comment and discussion on these proposed
cataloging rules at the Midwinter meeting of the American Library
Association in San Antonio, TX, on Friday, January 14, 2000, from 8:00 pm
to
10:00 pm.  Scheduling and other information can also be found in the RBMS
Newsletter, pp. 2-3.  All are welcome to attend.

These cataloging rules have been developed under the auspices of Electronic
Access to Medieval Manuscripts (URL: <http://www.csbsju.edu/hmml/eamms>), a
project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in cooperation with the
Bibliographic Standards Committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section
of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the
American Library Association, and tested at the Vatican Film Library at
Saint Louis University.  The Electronic Access project was instituted in
1996 with the aim of increasing the ability of researchers "to access
medieval manuscript catalog records, research information, images, text and
tools" in a more efficient manner through electronic means.  This project
brought together an international group of manuscript specialists
comprising
catalogers, historians, art historians, and curators from the library and
academic communities to advise on the formulation of these rules.  These
rules represent a broad consensus in defining the categories of information
that an on-line manuscript description should contain and how these records
should be implemented according to AACR2 in a MARC environment.  It is
hoped
that the combination of record structure and content information that is
offered will be flexible enough to accommodate a range of scholarly
manuscript descriptions.

Comments or questions are invited and may be directed to me at the address
given below.

Thank you.


Gregory Pass

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gregory Allan Pass
Assistant Librarian, Vatican Film Library
Pius XII Memorial Library
Saint Louis University
3650 Lindell Boulevard
St. Louis, Missouri  63108
Tel. (314) 977-3096 / Fax (314) 977-3108
http://www.slu.edu/libraries/vfl
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