A major criticism of mine regarding RDA has been the heavy reliance on terms rather than codes. Mac's comment makes me realize that the codes would be equally language dependent -- what is a mnemonic code in English would be random gibberish to colleagues elsewhere. Where I might previously have despaired at this revelation though, I now think this argues even more strongly for the utility of the vocabulary registries emerging from colleagues with expertise in the realm of linked data. Substantial development is required still to create a cataloging interface to facilitate and a public interface to leverage the use of the registered vocabularies, but they seem a strong contender for breaking the Gordian knot of presenting data held in common in a multilingual context.
John F. Myers, Catalog Librarian Schaffer Library, Union College Schenectady NY 12308 mye...@union.edu 518-388-6623 -----Original Message----- J. McRee Elrod wrote: Heidrun said: >It hasn't been decided yet, but I assume we'll end up with codes ... The MARC $4codes are English based. Would you contemplate using these codes, or having German based ones? Record interchange would be easier if we all used the same codes. If you do use these codes, it is another example of what I find surprising: European willingness to abandon their own language centric practices for English centric ones.
