On 15/06/2011 07:56, Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
<snip>
The report does indeed answer the question if the test records
are a worthwhile improvement over AACR2 records:
"Business case--- [on page 4]
The test revealed that there is little discernible immediate benefit
in implementing RDA alone. The adoption of RDA will not result in
significant cost savings in metadata creation. There will be
inevitable and significant costs in training. Immediate economic
benefit, however, cannot be the sole determining factor in the RDA
business case. It must be determined if there are significant future
enhancements to the metadata environment made possible by RDA and if
those benefits, long term, outweigh implementation costs. The
recommendations are framed to make this determination prior to
implementation."
And this, I think, is maybe the most important section in the report.
RDA *might* provide significant enhancements over AACR2, but the
test records don't show that.
</snip>
Very astute! This is indeed the most important part. It seems as if this
is the first real mention--that I have seen anyway--of a business case
for RDA. And it appears they can't make one. To be honest, this should
have been among the first tasks before undertaking anything real. The
business world understands how this develops: if you devote massive
amounts of work and resources to a project, and it is decided only later
that it's not worth it, it becomes far more difficult to drop the
project because the decision becomes politically charged: it means that
devoting the work and resources were not justified in the first place,
and that is *very difficult* to admit. This is how I read
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/tsd/cataloging/RDA_Executives_statement.pdf [p.
1]: "Work on RDA had been underway for several years, so a decision to
suspend it could not be made lightly." Therefore, if work had not been
going on, it would have been easier to suspend it. That's why you do the
business case as early as possible in a project.
The subtext to this report is also the lack of any alternatives
mentioned, therefore the library community is seen as being left with
the choice of accepting RDA, no matter what the outcomes may be, or
staying still, spinning our wheels in the mud of the past. Are those two
choices really all we have? There absolutely must be another alternative!
--
James Weinheimer weinheimer.ji...@gmail.com
First Thus: http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
Cooperative Cataloging Rules: http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
