February/March Bookshelf: RDA
March 31, 2010
This month and last have been dominated by one thing only – the new international cataloguing code, Resource Description and Access.
As well as working on the hardcore RDA chapters of Practical Cataloguing, I’ve been working on the Cilip Executive Briefings on RDA, which took place on 23 March at Cilip HQ and 30 March at the Bloomsbury Hotel.
In the photo, you can just make out my favourite of the existing cataloguing books I use with our students:
J.H. Bowman. Essential cataloguing. Reprinted with corrections. Facet, 2007.
Lois Mai Chan. Cataloging and classification: an introduction. 3rd ed. Scarecrow, 2007.
And on the screen is Appendix M of RDA, which provides examples by the Joint Steering Committee of how records will look under RDA. I spent a lot of time in February working my way through this, creating mapping tables between the records in the appendix and the existing records on the Library of Congress catalogue.
As well as forming the backbone of a chapter in Practical Cataloguing, charting the changes from AACR2 to RDA, this exercise provided the basis of a workshop with our Advanced Cataloguing & Classification students, which in turn formed part of the paper I gave at the RDA briefings. From my paper:
I recently asked my Advanced Cataloguing & Classification class to work their way through one of the examples in Appendix M of RDA and, in small groups, to reach consensus for each field on whether there had been no practical change from AACR2, a small change from AACR2 or a big change from AACR2. I also asked them to consider the JSC’s statement on its website that most changes can be carried out retrospectively through a global edit facility. A big change might be a change in cataloguing principle, or it might be a change that although small in itself, requires a lot of manual intervention to implement a retrospective change.
What we found was that where there are changes, they are mostly small changes, with one or two massive changes, like those reflecting the relationship of works to each other and to people and corporate bodies involved in their creation.
…
If I were training existing cataloguers, I would run a similar exercise with them to let them see just how many of the changes in their existing workflow will be small and fiddly, or as they might see it, easy but annoying.
A nice consequence of the Briefings is that I’ve been approached to help with training in the workplace, assessing the potential changes to workflows RDA might bring and hopefully making current cataloguers feel happier about embracing the new code.
It’s early days, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to help in every case. But I am happy to see a lot more real-world practices as well as theory books in my future.
[Image: hien_it]
