Theology Cataloging Bulletin
Vol. 22, No. 4 • August 2014 3-1 Section 3

Section Three: News and Views of the Members of the 
ATLA Technical Services Section

Edited by Leslie Engelson

LC GENRE/FORM TERMS FOR RELIGIOUS MATERIALS PROJECT

There is no news to report. The religion genre/form terms document submitted in August 2012 is still under review. Staff 
changes at LC have made it impossible to adhere to the planned schedule.

Submitted by
Erica Treesh, Database Manager for Religion Complete (ATLA RDB®)
American Theological Library Association

BEST PRACTICES TASKFORCE REPORT

At the 2014 Annual Conference in June, both the NACO Listen and Learn session attendees and the NACO Funnel 
members gathered to discuss best practices for personal name authority records. 

Those gathered discussed the usefulness and purpose of the optional fields in name authority records. If the purpose of the 
optional fields is solely to uniquely identify the individual whose name is being established, then the only information that 
needs to be recorded in the optional data fields is information which will do just that. If the purpose of providing the optional 
information in coded fields is also to retrieve information about individuals by searching on common characteristics, then 
recording all readily available information as well as consistency of terminology used becomes equally important.

The majority of participants seemed to favor providing as much information as is readily available and to work towards 
consistency of terminology.  

One major area which lacks appropriate terms in standard sources is the area of occupation. Neither the Library of Congress 
Subject Headings nor the Dictionary of Occupational Titles include many relevant occupations for the field of religion. 
Participants suggested that a thesaurus of occupations in the field of religion should be developed and published as a 
recognized standard. Once that is done, the occupations can be used in the MARC 374 field and coded as from a standard 
in the subfield 2.

Such a thesaurus is now under development and will be widely circulated once a draft is ready. The Best Practices Taskforce 
is also working on a draft of a Best Practices for Personal Name Authority Records. That draft will also be circulated once it 
has been approved by the Taskforce.

Submitted by
Judy Knop
Chair of the Best Practices in the Field of Religion Taskforce

CHANGES IN RECORDING UNIFORM TITLE DATES FOR BIBLE

The Joint Steering Committee at its November 2014 meeting will be considering a proposal to change the way dates 
are recorded in Bible uniform titles. Specifically, the proposal calls for replacing the instructions in RDA 6.24 Date of 
Expression of a Religious Work with a reference back to the instructions in RDA 6.10 Basic Instructions on Recording 
Date of Expression. The impact of this change is that catalogers will need to search for the earliest manifestation of the 
expression rather than using the publication year of the item in hand (6.24.1.4). My understanding is the date of publication 
of each manifestation of the Bible is useful to scholars   because each manifestation is significant due to the sacredness of the