Yesterday I attended the RDA briefings from test participants session at ALA Midwinter. I only caught the tail end of Beacher Wiggins’ update from the Library Congress, but as I understand it, LC will announce their decision regarding the results of their testing of RDA by Annual, if not sooner. One thing Beacher said struck me: regardless of the decision, we live in a world of mixed data and will have to get used to it. Of course, that’s been the status quo for years, if not decades; RDA is now just the latest player in the metadata standards dance. At least one major academic library test partner has already made its decision about adopting RDA; Christopher Cronin from the University of Chicago, reported that the catalogers there made a unanimous decision to continuing cataloging in RDA after the test is completed.
Besides Christopher, several other test partners relayed their experiences: Penny Baker from the Clark Art Institute Library, Richard Hasenyager from the North East Independent School District, Kathryn La Barre from the UIUC GSLIS program, and Maritta Coppieters from Backstage Library Works. Here’s my idiosyncratic summary of the tester’s experiences:
- Changing to RDA won’t be the end of the world.
- Everybody is continuing to work in a MARC framework; the testing group has not been experimenting (or had time to?) with alternative metadata carriers or frameworks beyond some tests of creating Dublin Core records.
- The testers who work with authority records seem to universally like the new RDA fields.
- Nobody is mourning the passing of the rule of three.
- Nobody likes sticking both the publication date and the copyright date in the 260$c.
- The RDA Toolkit, as a software tool, is still a work in progress. Some like it, some don’t.
- A clear understanding of FRBR is required for understanding RDA. During the Q&A, there was a discussion in the audience about training current catalogers; the consensus seems to be that it is difficult to teach FRBR to catalogers steeped in the AACR2 language, and much easier to explain FRBR to library school students. Is this a sign of a generational divide?
I was very sorry that none of the public library testing partners gave a briefing. However, I think Richard Hasenyager’s conclusion about when and if the NE ISD will adopt RDA applies to many public libraries: the ISD is willing to adopt RDA, but they can’t do it by themselves; the systems and materials vendors need to have full support for RDA records before it is economical for the school district to proceed. If libraries are to shift from AACR2 to RDA, this must be addressed. There is already a divide between academic and public library catalogers; having academic libraries do original cataloging in RDA while public libraries copy catalog using whatever records they can get (thereby adopting RDA by default without necessarily being fully invested or trained in RDA) would not be an ideal outcome.
Onward, by fits and bounds? by Galen Charlton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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.
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.
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.
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…