RDA-L readers, In my earlier post I deliberately began with "please assume for the sake of argument." That is because I realised that some readers would find it hard to accept the RDA formulation, encoded with ISBD punctuation, on account of its wordiness plus the likelihood that some headway can be made with finding the actual data. I pretty much expected what has happened, namely that some of the response would redirect the discussion towards finding out information rather than documenting its absence and unavailability. My post was a straw man inasmuch as, knowing that it would be extremely rare to encounter a situation in which "no information is available whatsoever" I wondered how a statement formulated to accommodate that situation would actually look. So far, I've had several kind responses, particularly about the ISBD use of square brackets about which I specifically asked. But no one has criticized the actual RDA statement as I drew it up. So I think it's properly formulated. Finding materials requiring such description might be as rare as an aircraft landing on water, but in the unlikely event, it looks like we'll all know what to do. Without ISBD there would be no requirement for brackets or other punctuation. The data would simply be recorded. So in a post-ISBD world, you could wind up with this: Place of publication not identified publisher not identified date of publication not identified These statements would not necessarily be displayed in a catalog, other than to library staff and/or patrons with a need to know. In a consultation with a group of public library technical services staff last month, they responded that the RDA statement was preferable to AACR2's [S.l. : s.n., 19--?] Perhaps a data clean-up is in the works to map each of the elements in AACR2 to the respective RDA statement.
Sincerely - Ian Ian Fairclough - George Mason University - ifairclough43...@yahoo.com
