[Koha] RDA, was: Re: Simple MARC or Simple Acquisitions?

[BWS Johnson]

Salvete!


>Well... I'm doubtful about the chances of RDA being a runaway hit:


I'm doubtful for different reasons, but it's still worth thinking about
the concepts as we think about the cataloguing module.


>* it's not easily accessible (they're trying to actually sell the
>recommandation rather than freely distribute it)


Don't get me started, Wilbur. For whatever reason, a lot of the
professional literature is like this, which I think is intensely
hypocritical in a field that believes in open access. I nag about this
constantly. Recently, American Libraries became available for free
online, which is a tiny start, although they've done it with a dumb
reader.

But, more to the point, unfortunately, that's how they've done it for
years.

http://www.aacr2.org/us/products_aacr2.html



>* it's not easily accessible (the mere ToC runs to 75 pages : who's
>going to actually read this, let alone implement it?)


Again, AACR2R is at least 750 pages, and that doesn't necessarily
include the extra looseleaf that comes out. (I'd argue that very few
people actually read it. When I explain cataloguing, I tell people it's
like an elementary school class. The kids in the front of the class have
read everything and actually know what's going on. The kids in each
subsequent row are copying over the shoulder of the student in front of
them. Thus the disparity in the quality of records. ;)


>* it's not easily accessible (with 251 different "entities")


I'd say that original cataloguing as it currently stands isn't easily
accessible either.


>* if you want to make it accessible, you can do "profiles" to use only
>subsets of those 251 entities; but wait: a recommandation with
>different profiles to manage... sounds a lot like Z3950 to me, and is
>in danger of reverting to the mess we have with UNIMARC / MARC21 /
>NORMARC / WHATEVERMARC


*nod* That is one of my big reasons that I don't think it will catch on
too quickly. It seems to contain enough MARC like throwbacks that some
folks will be turned off that it's too similar. I think (and this is
wild rumour) that this was done to appease folks that wanted some sort
of skeletal structure to the thing. If it is eventually adopted, I do
think you'd have much less of a MARC mess in terms of flavour, just as
it's very appealing in linking what would normally be many different
records. (Les Misérables in print, on CD, on VHS, on DVD, et cetera...)
They really wanted this to be international, which is why they took the
AACR part out.


>* it looks a lot like marc too, with entities like "title proper",
>"title uniform", etc
>

It was initially meant as a replacement to AACR2R. Then thinking and
committee work happened. Kathy Glennan has what I would call an English
translation of all this evolutionary stuff here:

http://www.musiclibraryassoc.org/BCC/Descriptive/RDA_Evolution.pdf


>I don't know, I'm not a cataloger either : maybe RDA is the way to go,
>I don't claim I'm competent to pass judgment on the recommandation
>from a cataloguer's point of view, but I don't envision Ex Libris,
>SirsiDynix or, for that matter, the Koha community investing what it
>would take to just try to implement this thing. I'd love to be proved
>wrong though.


It's still fluid. And I'd say very sketchy, since initially as I was
going through the site I spotted that subjects basically were ducked. So
I shot off emails to a few cataloguing geniuses that basically enquired
whether I had read the draft properly and viola, subjects were in fact
just not there yet. So even if we wanted to implement it right this
second, we couldn't. However, I think it would behoove us greatly to
think about some of the very positive overarching premises as we design
things, which is why I thought the slideshow was useful. If we expend a
little effort learning and thinking now, it might partially mitigate the
need for a large overhaul to be compliant in the murky future, since
part of the work is essentially done in advance. Keep our options open,
so to speak. 
I had to have a few meaningful hand holding discussions with actual
cataloguers before I could begin to get my head around what they're
trying to do. If this makes any sense, it's simpler, but the explaining
of it is more lengthy and complex.

Cheers,
Brooke 
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