On Fri, 20 May 2011, James Weinheimer wrote:
I guess we have probably exhausted our respective points. I will only discuss
one here:
Again, RDA's standard was made arbitrarily--unless somebody out there can
point to some kind of research done that showed our patrons wanted only a
single author, plus a translator, plus an illustrator only of childrens'
books, although I have never heard anybody suggest this--and then dropped it
all into the lap of the cataloger. Just a couple of years ago--even right
now, that is considered to be *not good enough* and can only be considered a
huge step backward from what it has been.
What will you do when massive numbers of records come in--all following the
RDA standard--that only have a single author? Or do you really think this
won't happen because catalogers are too "professional" to allow standards to
fall? Why not fault the standard itself? Why even allow it to happen and then
have to clean up afterwards?
I go back to John Myers comment earlier. We ALREADY have had a standard
for 30+ years that says that all our users can look under is the first
author/editor/illustrator/producer etc. when there are more than three
entities responsible doing the same function. I have always considered
that to be a massive disservice to users and a violation of longstanding
cherished cataloging principles. Have patrons only wanted the first of
four authors or editors in our current cataloging environment? Have
faculty understood why they were left off of statements of responsibility
and not provided with an access point simply because they came last in
alphabetical order and that was the order decided on by them or the
publisher of their book? I don't recall a lot of criticism of AACR2 for
the decision to only give one name and one access point in this situation
(yes, catalogers have always had workarounds, but we never bothered to
change the standard in 30 years). Given what we've already been providing
for large numbers of multi-creator resources, I really don't see RDA as
being that different. Any number other than providing access points for
ALL creators and contributors is really an arbitrary one that doesn't
serve users very well and doesn't fulfill the objectives of the catalog
that we've cherished for over a 100 years.
**************************************
* Adam L. Schiff *
* Principal Cataloger *
* University of Washington Libraries *
* Box 352900 *
* Seattle, WA 98195-2900 *
* (206) 543-8409 *
* (206) 685-8782 fax *
* asch...@u.washington.edu *
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