There is a podcast interview by Scott Mace of Open Source
Conversations with Karen Coyle. The interview is linked from Karen's
blog:
(http://kcoyle.blogspot.com/2007/03/podcast-on-libraries-and-standards.html).
Ms Coyle's range of expertise and felicity in expression is
outstanding. She does an excellent job of making the history of
librarianship and library concerns understandable to a larger
community.
One small quibble: by saying Library of Congress records go into "a"
file of bibliographic records, she ignores other bibliographic
utilities than OCLC, not to mention Z39.50 searching.
One medium size quibble: In advancing the simplistic Dublin Core as
librarianship's contribution to the larger metadata community, she
fails to advance ISBD/MARC as a selection and order of data elements,
and a way of encoding them in a language neutral manner.
I wonder if one of the problems with RDA is that it is trying to be
both an urber metadata standard (to cataloguing rules as ISBD(G) is to
other ISBDs), and at the same time a standard to meet the particular
needs of libraries. Perhaps that is why it is under attack from those
of us who wish to preserve our most successful international standard,
ISBD's choice and order of elements (including statement of
responsibility and place of publication), as well as from those who
would like it to be a metadata standard suitable for all information
communities.
Perhaps we need more than one standard: an urber standard, the
standard for libraries (AACR3), as well as standards for other specific
communities, e.g., museums.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
