Kevin said:
>What is significant and has great potential is the >entire concept
>behind RDA, creating a framework that brings metadata into the
>current age of information technology.
"Potential"? Possibly. But as coded in MARC21, most of what we have
are a "few rule changes". ILS development and coding would have been
the places to start, and being post cataloguing would have caused much
less disruption. Our present interfaces do not take full advantage
of the data coded in MARC records.
Had the LC Working Group's suggestion to halt RDA development been
accepted, and a task force struck on ILS standardization and
development, we would be much further ahead. Had professional
cataloguers undertaken catalogue development (abandoned with the card
catalogue), that development might have identified what changes (if
any) were needed in cataloguing rules and MARC coding.
RDA presupposes both coding and systems which simply do not exist.
Kevin, I, and many others have made these opposing points many times.
__ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod (m...@slc.bc.ca)
{__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/
___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
