Colleagues, By reading your considerations about the relationships between RDA and the larger context of library operations, and even as related to day-to-day library practices as your rich examples suggest, perhaps I would write that:
RDA development implies exerting leadership and leadership being accepted in the field. RDA development involves a highly developed skill for perceiving what is OK and what must be improved in library&cataloguing practices. Most of the time some librarians concentrate in other activities so as not to perform their job as "cataloguing librarians" only, thus they miss a good part of RDA development phases and just wait for something OK for everyday use -- but, is it OK to wait for any "turnkey cataloguing system" (not a computer-based system, but a wider system of accepted practices)? In a number of fields something regarded as "specialised knowledge" becomes widely disseminated and discussed so that citizens participate and add new ideas. Dissemination of knowledge (e.g. through the Internet) also involves valuable time for people, but in some contexts it still seems difficult to "save the time of the reader" in Ranganathan's terms as we discover some users associate "information retrieval" to entertainment and not to what we would find relevant or effective in terms of "cataloguing guidelines". Perhaps RDA reflects this double-fold kind of demand which embraces established library practices and new waves of articulation of largely available resources; Search engines might enable more scanning than search, so you can identify a number of variables which are still not relevant for library practices. It is interesting to note that even search engines have grasped the concept of "literary warrant" which becomes familiar as we consider the well-known pre-coordinated library classification schemes. You see "pages stored in cache" in some search engines in a possible similar way as "preprints" from the former non-digital age. Big differences, and at the same time perhaps some familiar concepts from the background... What happens if anyone needs to describe a document which was found "in cache" and becomes recorded in a local digital repository (thus the former one which was found only 'in cache' vanishes tomorrow)? If you consider Archive.org this becomes a whole major question, but for an individual user doing a doctoral thesis this just means simply to save a copy and write "accessed on date X"... This seems to be off topic, but sometimes we are so involved in some practices by the very duty of performing them and by consequence we simply cannot follow other interesting discussion streams. For example, our mainstream idea of "catalog" might (or must) be attached to institutional contexts in which the logical articulation of what we name as "records" reveals a sense of relevance, consistency and urgency so as to operate well and allow inter-relations in a given field of practice which embraces complexity in a different way even across similar fields of practice. Physicians with conventional scientific training go to the digital library at their fingertips but.... Physicians with alternative backgrounds codify their knowledge in some non-written ways until our days and this would mean even with RDA you will miss a lot of "relevant information" until they become part of established/accepted practices in the same scientific field the majority of libraries operate and make their key cataloguing decisions (of course this example will find a lot of exceptions, this is just the tip of the iceberg) If AACR/MARC records still answer a number of questions, this would mean a sense of security for a number of users' demands. As Dr. David Ellis and others showed us, even in scientific practices you find more demand for scanning activities in some fields and less in others. Google-like demands for scanning and visualizing data now reach the everyday needs of millions of Internet users and are motivating the upgrading of Library and Web practices -- even in some questions are the same ones as those effectively answered by our "mainstream" but "still not so disseminated" practices... Or should we expect something like "RDA records style for mobile devices" as we try to meet user demands? [e.g. for services like: http://www.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/support/mobile_how.html?skinid=9] Best Regards, Samuel Novos endereços, o Yahoo! que você conhece. Crie um email novo com a sua cara @ymail.com ou @rocketmail.com. http://br.new.mail.yahoo.com/addresses
