Oliver, Changing to RDA
Chris Oliver is head of Cataloguing Services at the McGill University Library in Montreal, and she’s also chair of the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, the alliteratively named “national advisory committee on matters of cataloguing and bibliographic control” that represents Canada at the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (and, formerly, on changes to AACR).
Feliciter is the magazine sent to members of the Canadian Library Association.
Chris Oliver + Feliciter 53:7 (2007) + Resource Description and Access = Changing to RDA (744 KB PDF).
The article caused some discussion on mailing lists and blogs. FRBR and FRAD are mentioned. I quote a four lines:
One of the most important documents for the library user is one that the user is probably totally unfamiliar with … This entity-relationship model, known as FRBR, focuses attention on how the data in records relates to what a user needs … FRBR has illuminated the deep bones of the bibliographic record and has underlined the centrality of the user’s needs. It has changed the perspective on cataloguing from a cataloguer looking at a record in isolation to a user seeking the record within the context of a large database or catalogue.
Christine Schwartz doesn’t like that line about the perspective: “I find this statement insulting.”