The recent presentation given by Judith Kuhagen (Library of Congress) entitled "RDA Essentials" sponsored by the Connecticut Library Association, recently posted to Autocat, is the best organized I have seen.
Her PowerPoint Slides (with examples) are available at: http://www.ctlibraryassociation.org/techservices.htm The presentation describes well those features of RDA with which most of us are already familiar, but reinforces for me some of the problems I have with RDA. Take for example, no standard for number of creators to be transcribed, or to be given in added entries: "Single statement naming more than one person, family, or corporate body Transcribe as found (no longer the AACR2 "rule of 3") Option: transcribe first name and give bracketed summary about information not transcribed - cataloger's judgment" And even worse, no necessary relation between creators transcribed and traced. It is a common occurrence when a record for one DVD is edited from another record, that noncast creator and actor tracings are mistakenly left in. The same happens with print resources. If the traced creators are not in the description, how do we tell which ones are mistakes? The slide says: "Don't need to transcribe to justify additional access points and vice versa" TILT!! A basic underlying principle of bibliographic description is abandoned here, and I am troubled at the lack of protest. A slide says this: "If date or dates cannot be approximated, don't record date(s) of publication - omit the element; do not give '[date of publication not identified]'" Good. It is silly to have that phrase followed by a copyright or manufacturing year. BUT we have been told differently by others, and this presentation has the following example: "260 $a Chicago : $b ELC Publishers, $c [date of publication not identified], c2010." Silly looking, and nonsense to a patron. All but one of our clients rejects "online resource" as an SMD, on the grounds that it is not specific (being specific would seem to be the first requirement for a specific material designation). They also reject calling electronic resouces "computer", since most of the e-texts they have are now read on hand held devices, not computers. Rather than this given as an example: 300 $a 1 online resource (39 pages) 336 $a text $2 rdacontent 337 $a computer $2 rdamedia 338 $a online resource $2 rdacarrier Our clients would prefer: 300 $a 1 electronic text (39 pages) :$bdigital file 336 $a text $2 rdacontent 337 $a electronic $2 isbdmedia 338 $a online resource $2 rdacarrier Other SMDs for online resources would include "website", "computer game", "database", "computer program", etc. Source of preferred title being the first one received seems ridiculous to me, and the abandoning of all principle. Different libraries will receive different manifestations in different order. There will be no standardization in the choice of preferred title. This "first received" abdication of principle occurs more that once in the slide presentation, including: "Choose the preferred title based on title of the resource first received (not the resource published in the home country)" The following complaint about MARC puzzles me: "Too many RDA elements in same subfield, e.g., ... 260 $a: Place of production, Place of publication, Place of distribution ..." What's wrong with 260$f for place of production? Some complaints about MARC betray a lack of knowledge of MARC, __ __ J. McRee (Mac) Elrod ([email protected]) {__ | / Special Libraries Cataloguing HTTP://www.slc.bc.ca/ ___} |__ \__________________________________________________________
