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.”
I couldn’t agree with Natalie Christine Schwartz’s comment any more. As a sole practitioner in high school library in California I catalog for two types of users, for my students, staff, and other library patrons, and for myself as an information seeker. I catalog using whatever records I can find and enhance records as much as time allows to enable my patrons to access the hidden information located within items where it exists. Where I do see the point of the original post is that often the rules actually seem to dis-allow certain kinds of information. I haven’t yet seen the new edition of Sear List of Subject Headings but for years the editors at H.W. Wilson have continued to make a blanket statement about the number of subject heading an item should have (3)!? and various other restrictions placed on the use of headings for items in the catalog. I find those restrictions to be absurd in this day of Internet search engines.
FRBR is terrific, unfortunately most of my colleagues know nothing about it, and most of the school library automation vendors don’t seem to to care about it either.
[Name corrected by William Denton, who got it wrong in his original post.]
Comment by Thomas T Kaun — 20 October 2007 @ 4:52 pm