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/ ___} |__ \__________________________________________________________