04.12.2013 21:07, Laurence S. Creider:
If I were a business or business group thinking about adopting a new
standard and had a choice between the costs of RDA and a community
standard that was largely open, I probably would not choose RDA even if it
were markedly superior to the other standard.
I think that the most we can hope for is for other content standards that
we can make compatible to RDA so that data can be exchanged in the other
format.
We have to realize that schema.org, mentioned by Jim, is not a
content standard but a markup standard. What you put under a microdata
tag is up to you! There are no mentionable content rules for names
or titles or just about anything you can record in microdata.
So, there is actually no choice between RDA and microdata.
Not even, I'd add, between MARC and microdata, for the latter is just
much less granular, and certainly too much so for RDA stuff.
OTOH, Jim's view about what standards we really need seems to be more
radical...
One might ask a very different question: Is it at all necessary that
every catalog worker has full access to RDA? Just those, I suppose,
who do sizeable amounts of original cataloging. And how many of those
are there these days, anyway. And even then, the approach that Mac
calls "monkey see, monkey do" should in many cases be good enough,
considering there *are* already examples for just about everything in
OCLC or other databases, and they are not too difficult to find.
It might be a good idea to invent some special subject headings that
could be added to fine examples to make them easily findable. And then
copy-and-pasteable. Much faster than an RDA lookup, and no cost.
Is this not what many have been doing for a long time already?
When did you last look something up in AACR, and might that
issue not have been settled with some help from proven examples,
if only you found them?
And for basics, Mac's cheat sheets will always do fine, plus
some transliteration tables and stuff like that which is not
under lock and key in the Toolkit.
That should make access to RDA Toolkit a "nice to have",
not more.
B.Eversberg
