At 05:07 PM 5/3/2010, Deborah Fritz wrote:
I asked one of the ALA Publishing reps, at one of the RDA meetings at ALA
Midwinter, about tracking official changes to RDA, and was told that this
was on the list of enhancements, and would be addressed once the initial
product was released.
Of equal concern to me is somehow keeping track of and making public all the
change *requests* before they are officially decided and released. It seems
like it would be very useful for us to know whether someone has already
asked about something that we think needs changing, and whether it is either
in the works, or decided for or against (with reasons why in either case)
Proposals to change the content of RDA will continue to be considered
and decided upon by the Joint Steering Committee (or some such
body). For the past several years, the JSC has been posting all
proposals, responses, and decisions on its website at www.rda-jsc.org
-- and will continue to do so as it begins to consider proposals to revise RDA.
There must be some kind of software out there that would help in tracking
these open issues, but I guess the harder question is who would do this?
At this time, it is unclear whether the RDA Toolkit itself will be
able to offer a means of tracking change requests and
proposals. That was certainly the intention of the Committee of
Principals and the Co-Publishers; once the RDA Toolkit has been
released, we expect that this will again become a development issue.
On the other hand, as noted above, the JSC will continue to post
proposals, whether this is done on the JSC website or as part of the
RDA Toolkit itself. We are committed to making the maintenance of
RDA a public process.
John Attig
ALA Rep to the JSC
