Jakob:
I'm glad you're interested in RDA and think it's a step in the right
direction. I'd like to update you on a few issues you mention in your
post, however, which I hope will reassure you a bit.
Jakob Voss wrote:
Hi,
As you may already noticed the Resource Description and Access (RDA)
cataloguing instructions will be published 2009. You can submit final
comments on the full draft until February 2nd:
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/jsc/rda.html
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/jsc/rdafulldraft.html
Although there are several details you can argue about (and despite
the questions whether detailed cataloguing rules have a future at all
when people do cataloguing in LibraryThing, BibSonomy etc. without
rules) I think that RDA is a step in the right direction. But there
are some serious problems with the publication of RDA that should be
of your interest:
1.) the standard is scattered in a set of PDF files instead of clean
web based HTML (compare with the W3C recommendations). You cannot
easily browse and search in RDA with your browser and a public search
engine of your choice. You cannot link to a specific paragraph to cite
RDA in a weblog positing etc. This shows me that the authors are still
bound in physical world of dusty books instead of the digital age.
The PDF is output from XML files built and maintained for the purpose of
providing a web-based product based on RDA, providing cataloging users
with some of the functionality they're looking for. It's not clear
whether the kind of linking you mention will be possible, but the
impediments to it are not technical.
2.) RDA is not going to be published freely available on the web at
all! See http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/jsc/rdafaq.html#7 Another
reason why you won't be able to refer to specific sections of RDA.
Defining a standard without putting in on Open Access (ideally under a
specific CC-license) is retrogressive practise and a good strategy to
make people ignored, misinterprete and violated it (you could also
argue ethically that its a shame for every librarian not putting his
publications under Open Access but the argument of quality should be
enough).
There's still a lot of discussion about how RDA will be made available.
There's a great deal of concern about whether the licensing regime
proposed by the RDA publishers will be affordable by small users, but
also how the goal of making RDA usable beyond the traditional library
community will be accomplished under such a regime. Many of us have been
concerned that an already hard sell for RDA implementation will be made
even harder by lack of open access for at least the most general
portions of the guidance text. I think that there's still room to argue
for more openness, but I'd suggest that some specific use cases for what
would be gained by open access and how that would provide value for
libraries as well as the web communities might be the most useful thing
right now.
3.) There are no official URIs for the elements of RDA. It looks like
there has been no progress compared to FRBR (IFLA failed to publish an
official RDF encoding of FRBR so several people created their own
vocabularies). To encode bibliographic data on the Semantic web you
need URIs for classes and properties. I don't expect RDA to get
published as a full ontology but at least you could determine the
basic concepts and elements and provide common URIs that people can
build on. There are several attempts to create ontologies for
bibliographic data but most of them come from outside the professional
library community. Without connection to the Semantic Web RDA will be
irrelevant outside the library world. With official URIs people can
build on RDA and create a common ontology of it. Deirdre Kiorgaard did
a good job in collecting elements [1] and Eversberg provides a
database to start with.
There are indeed URIs for the RDA Elements, as well as for the RDA Role
vocabulary and increasingly, the value vocabularies. These are
registered with the NSDL Registry (http://metadataregistry.org). They
have URIs, vocabulary descriptions, definitions (when available), RDF
encodings and XML schemas (at the vocabulary level). Unfortunately,
this activity is not linked from the official RDA pages, but in fact
the activity is going on under the aegis of the DCMI/RDA Task Group,
working with the JSC and CoP to build this essential piece of
infrastructure needed for RDA. The work is being funded by the British
Library and Siderean Software, and also represents a great deal of
volunteer effort by librarians and web professionals. You can take a
look at the Task Group's wiki at
http://dublincore.org/dcmirdataskgroup/FrontPage, where you can see the
extensive work that has been done with specific cataloger (and
developer) scenarios based on the registered vocabularies. The intent
is to have this work completed and reviewed in parallel to the
