The Program for Cooperative Cataloging Standing Committee on Training’s (SCT) Task Group on NACO Continuing Education was formed in spring 2000, principally arising from a desire expressed by NACO members for refresher training sessions to assist them in keeping up with rule changes and with changes to NACO philosophy. The Task Group was specifically asked to:

• Define the intended audience and expected costs and benefits to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging;
• Develop a curriculum highlighting areas of greatest need for continuing education sessions for current NACO participants;
• Provide recommendations for implementing continuing education sessions that will reach as wide an audience as possible;
• Recommend frequency and structure of sessions;
• Recommend a mechanism for continuous review of the training materials.

Contact between members of the group was mostly by e-mail; a Website -- primarily for the use of Task Group members, but whose address was disseminated via the interim report submitted in October 2000, was established, courtesy of Central Washington University; in addition, some of the members managed an informal meeting at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago.

During the first half of its existence, the Task Group began to address most elements of its charge, some in rather more detail than others. The immediate needs were to try to define some of the terms and concepts involved in our charge, and to determine just where and how the work of the group would take into account NACO participants’ background, their initial training, and their patterns of contribution. Some of the group’s thoughts derived from the experience of its own members; but it was also possible to refer to, and share, the work of the other three SCT Task Groups established at the same time, as each of their charges overlapped, in some way or another and to a greater or lesser extent, with NACO "continuing education." This overlap was, as the work of the group progressed, to prove increasingly significant, and is dealt with in more detail later in this report.

In running through these basic questions, and in attempting both to define our intended audience and to understand what kind of "refresher courses" or "continuing education" might be needed, two different needs emerged: one related to the problem of keeping up with changes to the rules and the authorities format; the other to the maintenance of contributors’ proficiency. The former is the updating of existing skills, the latter the need to ensure that even the basic skills are maintained (or, in extreme circumstances, revived).

The group made significant progress on its charge during this early period, most of which was documented in its interim report. Since October, however, virtually all attention has been focused on the part of the charge concerned with curriculum development, and in building on the earlier work carried out in this area. An outline curriculum was agreed upon, and work on drafting some sections was begun – and in some cases completed. But, as the interim report had attempted to make clear, the group was concerned that the issues surrounding the development of the curriculum, in particular those of context, needed further exploration and discussion. In the end, the group decided to concentrate on these at the expense of completion of the specific points in its charge, in the hope – and expectation – that the SCT would see these as being of greater value in the longer-term development of NACO and support for its participants.

The Task Group was unanimous in the belief that the medium (or media) of delivery of any curriculum it might initiate would be instrumental in the curriculum’s shape and overall construction, if not in the underlying content. The group was also certain, from its own experience, that it was far from clear what that medium should be. Indeed, this issue underlay the establishment alongside this Task Group of a separate group to address Web-based training and distance education. The work of that latter group would be essential to the development of any curriculum as it will have covered the general issues of which this proposed curriculum is a specific example.

The final report of the Task Group on PCC Participant and Training Documentation addresses the same general issue. Confirming that group’s assessment, it was concluded that the needs of the expanding community of NACO participants would best be met by providing multiple means of access to the same information. In addition to considering the various documentation delivery methods, continuing education sessions could be delivered in a variety of ways, e.g., in a face-to-face workshop, a video-conferencing workshop, a self-paced Web tutorial.

The primary audience consists of NACO contributors at participating NACO institutions who need or want ongoing training in any or all areas of name and series authority work. This group includes NACO contributors who have never received direct training from a NACO trainer (either regionally or at LC). The TG identified as secondary audiences former NACO contributors now working at non-NACO libraries and the cataloging community in general with an interest in name authority work. Although catering to those audiences may be beyond the scope of this group’s mandate, some of the training materials created for NACO participants could be used to promote PCC membership.

The aim is to keep costs to the program to a minimum. Potential cost areas include rental of a room and audio-visual equipment for training sessions, Web site development and maintenance, and printing and distribution of training materials. ALA charges $50 a room for a 2-hour session (or any portion thereof) plus the cost of audio/visual equipment. (Most workshops and meetings wind up costing about $250 a session.) The cost of printing and distributing documentation was discussed in the final report of the Task Group on PCC Participant and Training Documentation available on the Web.

Benefits to current NACO contributors include continued awareness of the full range of authorities-related rules and rule interpretations, and NACO policies, procedures, and documentation, as well as greater consistency in their application. In addition it is hoped that active NACO participants would expand their range of contributions, and that new libraries would be encouraged to join the NACO program, particularly when members of their staffs had been NACO contributors in previous positions.

2. Develop a curriculum highlighting areas of greatest need for continuing education sessions for current NACO participants

In order to begin consideration of any curriculum development is was necessary to think about where such a "product" would fit within the family of PCC training, documentation and support. There are clearly parallels with CONSER, but equally – because the NACO program is much larger and lacks a coordinating body – significant dissimilarity.

Staff turnover at NACO institutions means that it cannot be assumed all NACO contributors will have received, at some time, "standard" training. In addition, different NACO contributors concentrate their efforts on different kinds of headings. Some choose to specialize; other simply have limited exposure to certain types, languages, etc. In the belief that the areas of greatest need would vary from individual to individual and institution to institution, the group became convinced of the need to create and maintain a new NACO manual that would bring together (or at least makes reference to) the relevant information in AACR2, the LCRIs, Z1, NACO Participants’ Manual (NPM), FAQs on the Web, PCCLIST announcements, etc. This work seemed to the Task Group to be a prerequisite to the development of the continuing education work it was charged with addressing.

Assuming that the concept of a new NACO manual – with the CONSER Cataloging Manual as a model – would in some way be acceptable, the group was left struggling with defining the content of any NACO continuing education curriculum and associated documentation. The first job was to clarify where the dividing line is between initial training and "continuing" education and how the "refresher" curriculum would relate to the NACO Training Manual. How much duplication, if any, would be desirable? Where would the NPM fit in?

Members of the Task Group agreed that the initial 5-day training does a good job of presenting the procedural information that NACO contributors need, and covers the authority format and relevant rules and interpretations for each type of name heading. On the other hand, the training manual is not put together in such a way as to be useful as a reference tool after the course is finished; it is set up strictly to serve as the basis for the 5-day course. There is, for example, no index to the contents. Nor is there a comprehensive table of contents. There seems to be no easy way to extract, say, a narrowly focused two-day continuing education course from the training manual. Likewise, it contains exercises, not something generally found in a reference tool.

Continuing education documentation, the group decided, would present a more in-depth look at each type of heading, tackling the more difficult and/or less frequently-encountered headings, and making use of additional examples, including surrogates from the library items themselves. It would be indexed or internally linked (if in a suitable format) to enable users to find more quickly the information they need in formulating a heading or references. This new manual would contain everything in the NACO Participants’ Manual, and more, but unlike the NPM, which is arranged by MARC field, the new manual would be arranged by type of heading with introductory and supplementary material on procedural issues of NACO participation and rule changes.

The irony of creating a new NACO manual (or at least recommending that it be created) whilst bemoaning the scatter of current NACO documentation did not escape the members of the Task Group. Nonetheless, it was felt that it would be useful to extract from each of the various primary and secondary sources the information relevant to NACO work, and to arrange it in a way that could serve as a reference tool for both beginning and experienced NACO contributors. Such a manual could serve as one part of a larger BIBCO manual, with the other part devoted to bibliographic records. There seems little doubt that much work would be needed to pull together all the strands. The preliminary work that the group undertook for its own needs demonstrated to the members just what a major – and worthwhile – effort would be required.

The Task Group created an outline for the proposed new NACO manual (see Appendix). Its structure aims to follow general workflow patterns; at its heart is a series of modules covering the different types of headings dealt with by NACO participants. Patterned stylistically after a combination of the CONSER Editing Guide and the CONSER Cataloging Manual, the curriculum is perceived as being useful as both a NACO training tool and as a NACO reference source. Specific topics can be extracted whenever focused continuing education is needed in the NACO community. The group anticipates that the manual will be created in a way that allows it to be easily updated whenever changes must be accommodated, and expects it to be routinely augmented with additional helpful components as appropriate.

Progress was made on some topics in the curriculum (see http://www.lib.cwu.edu/~dcc/naco-continue-ed-index.html for links to "modules" in development) but, just as the original version of the CONSER Cataloging Manual was not completed all at once, we expect the "missing" sections of the curriculum to be produced by LC staff and NACO participants with special expertise in those specific areas. In the meantime, the TG undertook a preliminary revision of the NACO Participants’ Manual (in a separate document), and this is in the final stages of drafting. The long-term goal, as we see it, is to incorporate the content of the NPM into the new manual and ultimately retire the NPM.