The work involved in compiling the constituency responses to the drafts was COLOSSAL. The stated deadlines were there for good reason.
In the U.S., the approximately 50 members of CC:DA were providing raw input from their personal and subconstituency perspectives, to which was added comments from the cataloging community at large via an ALCTS web-form. This raw data was filed in a large wiki space, where the CC:DA members made subsequent comments to provide some communal sense of consensus and priority of the issues. When output to Word documents, there was over 2 MB of data that then had to be distilled down to something coherent and manageable, which itself was submitted for feedback by the committee members prior to final submission to the JSC. All of this TAKES TIME. The deadlines were there to ensure that the responses were submitted on time to the JSC which was operating under the dual time constraints of its own meeting schedule and the deadlines set by the publishers. There was no intent to disenfranchise individuals. But the work needed to be done on time. Incorporating late feedback was not a reasonable option as it would either have to bypass the commenting and consensus mechanisms to which the other feedback was submitted or in running through those mechanisms would have delayed the delivery of the other feedback so that the entire ALA response would not have been considered by the JSC. John F. Myers, Catalog Librarian Schaffer Library, Union College 807 Union St. Schenectady NY 12308 518-388-6623 mye...@union.edu -----Original Message----- From: Wilson, Margaret Here's another consideration. When the first draft of RDA came out I spent a considerable amount of time looking at it and writing comments. I sent in my comments but I had misinterpreted the deadline given (it did not apply to libraries in general--the deadline for that was given somewhere else). My input was not taken, even though I contacted several people about it. I realize I was technically at fault for misinterpreting the two deadlines, but it was so disheartening to have my input ignored (as I recall I had prepared 14 pages of comments relating to problems in RDA for electronic resources, based on my 7 years of experience cataloging them) that I dropped out of the process. It seemed like comments from librarians were not being all that sought after ...
