"For the time being, RDA is doing away with most of the square bracket practices of AACR2, relegating such bracketed or amplifying information to notes. Gone too is the use of Latin abbreviations and abbreviations in general."
As I recall, one reason for doing away with abbreviations like "s.l." and even "etc." was that patrons allegedly find these abbreviations confusing if not stupefying. Over the holidays I read a news report (also cited on several librarian-oriented email discussion lists) that found that "Young adults are the heaviest users of public libraries" [from an article by Anick Jesdanun from the AP, published in the Wisconsin State Journal--the other WSJ--on Monday, Dec. 31, 2007, p. A9]. We have also been told by the Gotta-Change-Everything-Yesterday Chorus that this is the group that lacks the patience to put up with our stodgy approaches to providing information and retrievability because they're used to search engines like Google and information sites like Wikis that provide information--or at least results--instantly. What I don't understand is this: if the people who have grown up with connectivity (the young adults referred to in the AP article) are so disenchanted with our OPACs because they aren't as quick or facile as Google et al. are also the ones who find Latin abbreviations so disorienting as to cause them to bolt from the library, why do we then assume that these same potential patrons are too befuddled to look up abbrevations like "s.l.," "etc.," and even "op. cit." on Google or Wikipedia when they encounter these horrifying space and keystroke savers, then click back to the OPAC? On the one hand they're too sophisticated to put up with current OPACs, but on the other hand they're too cowed by unfamiliar terms to click over to a simple search engine? Really? The second hit on a Google search of "op cit" [note lack of punctuation in search] is a link to Wikipedia, where the first line reads "Op. cit. (Latin, short for "opus citatum"/"opere citato," meaning "the work cited/from the cited work") is the term used to provide an endnote or footnote citation to refer the reader to an earlier citation. To find the Op. cit. source, one has to look at the previous footnotes to find the relevant author." Talk about your heavy data lifting. The second hit on a search for "et al"--sans punctuation or quotation marks in the Google search--is the definition from the Free Online Dictionary. So now I'm wondering not only who those multitudinous "other metadata communities" waiting for our new cataloging rules are, but who these impatient, sophisticated electronic searchers who don't know to go to Google or Wikipedia for simple definitions are. And what's with those extraneous first results in the Google searches? Mike Tribby Senior Cataloger Quality Books Inc. The Best of America's Independent Presses mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
