My experience leads me to the opposite conclusion. For people who don't already know how to catalog, much of RDA *is* simpler, more transparent, and so forth than AACR2. It's only those of us who have been using AACR2 for years that have so much trouble grasping the new rules. In my job I teach a steady stream of young catalogers, and I was also in the RDA test. Teaching AACR2 while testing RDA gave me a daily side-by-side comparison. I have found that new catalogers very often stumble into doing descriptive cataloging "right" according to RDA when they come to the end of their AACR2 knowledge. In formal classes, I have taught FRBR for at least a couple of years now. I find that people without previous cataloging experience understand the basics of FRBR within about half an hour. Then we do a couple more hours of exercises to cement the concepts (take books, scores, recordings, videos, etc. from the collection and make cards for the work, expression, manifestation, item, related works, responsible persons, and whatever else suits the particular group of students, putting these cards on the relevant spot on a labeled table or even floor). I haven't yet had a student fail to get a firm grasp on these basic ideas within one graduate-length class session. Jean Jean Harden Music Catalog Librarian Libraries University of North Texas 1155 Union Circle #305190 Denton, TX 76203-5017 jean.har...@unt.edu From: Resource Description and Access / Resource Description and Access [mailto:RDA-L@LISTSERV.LAC-BAC.GC.CA] On Behalf Of Billie Hackney Sent: Monday, April 11, 2011 10:58 AM To: RDA-L@LISTSERV.LAC-BAC.GC.CA Subject: Re: [RDA-L] FRBR
Every time I see a discussion about how hard FRBR is to understand (which it is), how difficult the RDA Toolkit is to use (which it is), and the fact that RDA will actually increase the amount of work we have to do to each bibliographic record (which it does), I get more and more discouraged. Cataloging as a profession has been gasping for breath. It desperately needed to become simpler, more transparent, and more attractive to library school students, easier for management to understand. Instead, it seems to me that the opposite is happening, and at the worst possible time. It seems to me that our leaders are taking us over a cliff, and they keep explaining to us why what they're doing is very, very important, as we're plummeting to the ground. This is my own personal opinion as someone who has been cataloging for twenty years -- not that of my employer. Billie Hackney Senior Monograph Cataloger Getty Research Institute 1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100 Los Angeles, CA 90049-1688 (310) 440-7616 bhack...@getty.edu<mailto:bhack...@getty.edu>
