Anne Laguna schrieb:
I work for a regional public library service in Northern Australia, and am probably out of the flow of things a bit, but: there has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing regarding the details of the RDA, and I am interested to know what will happen to RDA if the LC decide 'they' don't like it?
Well, what is "it"? RDA comes, like AACR2, with lots of options for the "agency" to decide on in their application policy. Within one agency, of course, it is necessary to leave not too much open to the cataloger's case-by-case decision but to get results that are as consistent as possible. For cataloging is not just the production of records (long ago: cards) but the building of a database (used to be: catalog). The interesting thing will thus be what options LC are going to pick. These will then be the ones encountered the most in future records that are going to populate the utilities' databases. And so, these will likely be what you find for the majority of new publications. LC's legacy being enormous, do not expect a revolution of their practice. They will likely pick options that don't hurt much but that mean some sort of improvement, preferably for retrieval. But for details, we'll all have to wait and see. Being aware of their responsibility, they might already be telling more than they do. But then again, they might also still be in a state of confusion, and who would like to disclose that? An uncomfortable state of matters, of course, for decisionmaking elsewhere, like in your library or agengy. But, as Walter Cronkite used to say, "That's the way it is..." B.Eversberg
