Kevin said: >What is significant and has great potential is the >entire concept >behind RDA, creating a framework that brings metadata into the >current age of information technology.
"Potential"? Possibly. But as coded in MARC21, most of what we have are a "few rule changes". ILS development and coding would have been the places to start, and being post cataloguing would have caused much less disruption. Our present interfaces do not take full advantage of the data coded in MARC records. Had the LC Working Group's suggestion to halt RDA development been accepted, and a task force struck on ILS standardization and development, we would be much further ahead. Had professional cataloguers undertaken catalogue development (abandoned with the card catalogue), that development might have identified what changes (if any) were needed in cataloguing rules and MARC coding. RDA presupposes both coding and systems which simply do not exist. Kevin, I, and many others have made these opposing points many times. __ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (m...@slc.bc.ca) {__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/ ___} |__ \__________________________________________________________