Samuel said:
>RDA development implies exerting leadership and leadership being
>accepted in the field.
There is some difficulty in accepting leadership which leads in the
wrong direction, particularly the great number of optional provisions
in RDA as last seen.
A prime example is place of publication being optional. Just because
some resources lack place of publication, e.g., many websites, should
not mean that information should be optional for all resources. Some
resources lack author, e.g., newpapers; should author then be optional
for all items? Some resources lack title, e.g., collections without a
collectiive title; should title be optional for all resources?
Place of publication ranks just after author/title/publisher as
relevant information. For legal matherials, particularly some
integrating resources, it is even more relevant than publisher, which
may change name, merge, or divide.
It's difficult to accept leadership which would makes shared
bibliographic records so much less useful for a particular library,
and greatly complicate copy cataloguing which makes up from half to
ninety percent of cataloguing workflow, depending on the nature of
the collection.
It is also difficult to accept leadership which abandons the few good
ideas they have advanced, e.g., removing alternate title from title
proper, and leaving behind Christo centric "B.C." A.D.".
Unless the implementation plan(s) created by the four Anglo national
libraries, and/or the three US national libaries, are stand alone
standards, we would be faced with double lookup for many rules, to a
much greater extent than US libraries now which accept LCRIs that
counter AACR2 provisions. Unless those standards are free, many
smaller libraries will not even be able afford consulting standards.
This is one unhappy and fearful sheep, distrustful of the bell on that
goat up ahead, and concerned about the cliff we seem to be about to
plunge over. Too bad we can't ask Michael Gorman to just redraft the
whole thing.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
