You’ll recall that Resource Description and Access (RDA) is the new set of cataloguing rules that’s being worked on right at this moment and is meant to replace the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules which, if you live in an English-speaking country or possibly even if you don’t, your library uses as the guide for what to write out about a book or CD or map when it’s making a listing for its catalogue. If you’re in the cataloguing world, you know what a big deal this is, and there’s a lot of debate about what’s going on. If you’re not, well, the rest of this won’t make lot of sense. I’m posting an entry about this because FRBR is fundamental to RDA, so RDA is of interest to the FRBR world.
Tuesday of last week — I know that’s a while ago but I told you I had some catching up to do — Marjorie Bloss (RDA project manager) sent out e-mail: Full Draft of RDA Delayed:
The Co-Publishers of RDA Online (the American Library Association, the Canadian Library Association, and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals) have reached the conclusion that further time is required to complete the development of the new software that will be used for distributing the full draft of RDA for constituency review.
The full draft was originally scheduled for release on August 4, 2008. Instead, it will now be issued in October 2008. The three month time period allocated for comments on the full draft is unchanged, and in this new schedule will extend from October into January 2009. More specific dates for RDA’s final release will be forthcoming shortly.
Members of the Committee of Principals (CoP) and the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA (JSC) agree that the importance of distributing RDA content in a well-developed and tested version of the new software is such that a two-month delay is justified. They concluded that this extension is worthwhile given the ultimate value of the exceptional effort that is going into RDA and feel that the review by constituencies will be enhanced as a result.
All right, so it’s going to be delayed a bit. Not unexpected, perhaps. It’s a huge project. There was discussion of this on the RDA-L mailing list and elsewhere, but I’ll just point out some dependably good commentary and insight from Karen Coyle, who posted RDA Update at ALA and talks about the online RDA service, where instead of reading a book to see what to do a cataloguer can use a web-based system:
The good news is that ALA hired the smartest woman in the world, Nannette Naught, to create the online system and she has actually taken RDA, as we have seen it in its paper-ish form, and turned it into a huge complex of entities and relationships with their related instructions, scope notes and examples. It will be possible to create customized views and workflows within the system, and even add instructions relating to your library. (Since I can’t see the purpose of each library doing this, I’m wondering if there won’t be a market for customizing that ALA can respond to.)
The bad news is that this online subscription service will be the only way to access RDA….
I think the RDA product looks great, and I intend to spend much time with it during the review period — in part because that is probably the last time I will be able to use it. I will be one of the many people who are interested in library data, even working with library data, but because I am not in a traditional institution I will not have access to the cataloging standard. I don’t mind that I won’t have access to the nifty tool designed for catalogers — I don’t need that. I do need to know what the rules are, however, so that I can continue to help people interpret library data.
I work in a library, so I’ll probably have access to the online RDA system, depending on how the subscription model goes and if the cataloguing department gives me an account. It’s understandable that the online service will cost money, but it’s too bad it can’t be provided for free, subsidized by some national libraries or an eccentric millionaire. For-pay and proprietary standards seem old-fashioned to me. If RDA is good, and everyone has access to it, the bibliographic universe would benefit. If the FRBR and FRAD implementations are useful, the FRBR world would have something to build around.
I’m not a cataloguer, but I’m a library geek. A customizable online cataloguing system sounds really interesting. Regardless of what RDA is like, if a cataloguing system can be integrated with local tools and workflows, and if this was tied into a standards-based “discovery layer” or “next-generation catalogue” (as the current lingo goes) then we’d be getting into something really intriguing, with all parts of the online library environment fitting together. I don’t have a vision for what this would look like, but we can see what the online RDA service looks like and have a think about it.