7 thoughts on “Onward, by fits and bounds?

  1. Pingback: Cataloging Futures
  2. I find your last comment very telling and worrisome (and accurate) about the academic/public library divide. I feverently hope that we can find ways to make sure that RDA does not increase it. It will also affect the school libraries who are even more likely to copy catalog or those who don’t have access to the records of others do unnecessary original cataloging.

  3. I think the key to bringing public and school libraries along as we move towards RDA and a more modern data environment is the vendors who service that sector. I’m afraid that many of them are not keeping close track of the conversations happening in the larger community and by default they hold their libraries back. I’ve talked to some of the vendors serving those communities and have worked with one, but there needs to be greater awareness of these by those vendors if the public and school libraries are not to fall behind.

  4. No doubt many vendors, when asked about RDA, say that they are waiting for librarians to tell them what they want. If public and school libraries aren’t directly engaged in figuring out what benefit RDA might be to them, this becomes a pretty little chicken-and-egg problem, albeit not productive.

    Kudos to Backstage and Quality Books for participating in the test. On the other hand, if I’m correctly understanding Maritta Coppieters’ summary of the impact of RDA/MARC on BSLW as “not much”, it wouldn’t surprise me if many vendors consider RDA to be a lot of fuss about a small set of changes to the MARC21 tag tables. The prospect of Linked Data could be so far from sight as to be invisible to them.

    As you might expect, I think F/OSS provides a platform for the experimentation that will need to take place to grapple with RDA, both now and in its possible future Linked Data incarnation. However, I think the immediate problem is not technical, but economic and perceptual, boiling down to one question: what benefit can public and school libraries expect from RDA in the short term, especially considering the cost of retraining and the RDA Toolkit? “Not falling behind” doesn’t strike me as a compelling argument, even though I can envision a great many potential benefits both to patron service and the cost of metadata maintenance in a truly interconnected world where the data flows freely.

  5. I am about to start my grad school research work on RDA.i am glad to be coming across some of difficulties mentioned here.You folk are fortunate as nothing is being done much,on he topic of metadata we are still stuck on the AACR 2.I would be very grateful if anyone could throw more infor, my way…

Comments are closed.