Week 1

Week 1

RDA: ready for take-off?

Annual Conference of theNew England Library Association Hartford, CT.

October 19, 2009

John Attig, ALA Representative to the Joint Steering Committee

copy from notes of slides 1 to 6

1.

Not my title, but I added the question mark. So – is RDA ready for take-off?

Well, not really, since there will be an extensive period of testing by the Library of Congress and other libraries before general implementation by the cataloging community.

However, that testing will start as soon as RDA is released.

2. RDA ready for take-off

RDA is coming soon – if you don’t insist that I define “soon” too precisely. I can say that the text of RDA has been final since last June. The software for online access is being developed, and we expect beta testing of the product to begin soon. User testing by the US national libraries and selected institutions will begin shortly after publication.

We are still hopeful that testing can be completed during 2010 and that a general implementation at the beginning of 2011 will be possible. With all that in mind, I want to give you a general sense of what to expect from the new cataloging code.

3. Why replace AACR?

Let me start by explaining why a new code is necessary, and what we hoped the new code would accomplish.

The decision to develop a new edition of AACR was made some time ago. The process began in 1997 and the Strategic Plan for AACR (2002-2003) called for a new edition. WHY? AACR2 was originally published in 1978. Think of how the world has changed since then: The Internet happened in the late 1980s and the Web in the early 1990s. That changed everything – even AACR2, but not enough.

The card catalog (most of us had card catalogs in 1978) is no longer on cards (at least, for most of us) and is no longer the only information retrieval tool that provides access to our collections.

We give equal emphasis to abstracts and indexes and full text databases and to digital collections. We are now working to integrate all of these tools together to serve the needs of our users.

AACR no longer stands alone as the standard for description and access. These other tools have their own standards. We may even be using some other standards within our cataloging departments for describing digital library materials.

AACR2 is showing its age. If it is to continue to be relevant in this new environment and if we are to continue to use it efficiently, it needs to change in significant ways.

Yet it is increasingly difficult to retrofit changes to the existing set of rules. In another talk, one of my colleagues showed a picture of the car she purchased in 1978 and asked the audience to think about trying to drive and maintain that car in 2009!  It is completely logical to decide that we need a new set of cataloging rules.

4. Design Objectives

Having decided that a new code was needed, the JSC articulated a set of design objectives for the new code.

RDA was to be designed to provide a consistent, flexible, and extensible framework for the description of all types of resources and all types of content – continuing the design objectives of AACR2.

RDA was to be designed to be compatible with international principles, models, and standards: the IME-ICC Statement of International Cataloguing Principles, the FRBR and FRAD models, standards for defining and representing metadata on the Internet, etc.

RDA was to be designed to be adaptable to the needs of a wide range of resource description communities, not just the traditional world of libraries using AACR2 and MARC.

5. … plus ce change …

Much in RDA will be familiar to users of AACR2: There are strong similarities to the structure to AACR2. When you get down to specific instructions, most are the same as AACR2.

A few instructions have changed – and I will describe some of those changes.

Beyond this, however, RDA points towards

a new way of thinking about cataloging, and new ways of doing cataloging.

The rest of this presentation will describe what is the same, what has changed, and what sort of future RDA points towards.

6. Implementation Decisions

Because RDA is designed to be “adaptable to the needs of a wide range of resource description communities,” there a great deal of flexibility in how RDA can be implemented.


However, most of us will be using RDA – at least initially – to create bibliographic and authority records encoded in MARC 21, and structured according to the ISBD [primarily because MARC itself reflects ISBD structure; however, ISBD punctuation is not required and we might decide to do without it]


In that context, the process of cataloging – and most of the results – will not change significantly.

Highlight in yellow and bigger font is done by Henry