RDA Part I draft available!
Exciting news! The draft of RDA Part I is available! It’s true! You’ve been waiting to see how FRBR (and lots of other things) are changing our old friend Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR), and now you can start to get an idea.
This is just Part I, mind you. Drafts of Parts II and III will come next year. But there are a total of 182 pages in the PDF of the draft, so you have lots of good holiday reading. (The very last page is the end of Appendix D, and says, “D.2 OPAC Displays. [To be added]“. Tantalizing!) Here are the contents:
- Introduction to part I
- Chapter 1. General guidelines on resource description
- Chapter 2. Identification of the resource
- Chapter 3. Technical description
- Chapter 4. Content description
- Chapter 5. Information on terms of availability, etc.
- Chapter 6. Item-specific information
Section 0.4.1 says:
Chapters 2-6 each cover a set of descriptive data elements that support a particular user task (e.g., identify or select) and reflect attributes and relationships associated with one or more of the four primary entities defined in Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) — work, expression, manifestation, and item — that support that task….
Instructions in chapters 2-6 are presented in groupings that correspond to the logical attributes of entities defined in FRBR. For example, in chapter 2, the “title” grouping covers instructions pertaining to all data elements subsumed under the attribute that FRBR defines as “title of the manifestation” (i.e., title proper, parallel title, variant title, key-title, etc.). In general, the arrangement of individual elements and groupings within each of the chapters in part I reflects the order in which their corresponding logical attributes are listed in FRBR.
The RDA Prospectus was revised last week. And they’ve set up RDA-L, a mailing list. I don’t know how much discussion there will be, but I imagine things will heat up over the next year or two as it comes near to final release in 2008. If there is good FRBR-related discussion then I’ll give a pointer to the list’s archives (when they’re on the web).
If you don’t know what AACR is or what everything in RDA means, then you may find it all pretty confusing. They are an enormous set of rules and guidelines for describing books, CDs, DVDs, maps, and anything else, so that you the user can find what you’re looking for in a catalogue. They can describe anything, and do so well enough that if you’re looking in a catalogue to see what is there or if the library has an exact particular thing, you can make a decision based on what’s in the catalogue without having to go to the library (which could be on the other side of the world) to look at the real things. (For books, subject headings are also added, which tell you what the book is about. Cataloguing rules like RDA don’t cover that.) The relationships in the FRBR model mean that what can appear to you in the catalogue, and the links that you’ll be able to follow to go from thing to thing, will be helpful and informative and make it easier for you to decide “Is this what I’m looking for?” or “Is this about what I’m interested in?” or “This is what I want — can I get it?” You may find online catalogues annoying and confusing, but lots of people want to make them better, and this is one of the ways they’re doing it.