Mark Ehlert wrote:
As someone who's training others on RDA, I concur that parts of the new code are, if not impenetrable, certainly a tough row to hoe. Chapter 17 has been a real bear for me, for instance, though I think I finally managed to wrap my head most of it recently.
The trouble is that you don't do cataloging just by applying a code of rules, but in a system that gives you forms to fill and options to decide and such. That's very much the environment catalogers live in and are used to. Their language consists of MARC tags and MARC field names, mostly. This will have to be adapted to RDA, or the other way - or it's not going to work. Even if much were to be accomplished along that line of reformulation or retraining, there's still the question of efficiency when you consider that the new code doesn't actually do many new things but more of the old and familiar ones, only in a more thoroughly conceptualized framework of thinking, coooked up by database engineers. B.Eversberg
