Am 25.03.2013 13:30, schrieb Paul Davey:
... I do apologise to be mentioning a MARC subfield, which I don't think purists like, but it's useful shorthand; also not to give the RDA rule number, but I don't have access to the Toolkit, but I'm sure readers will know what I mean)
"... no access to the toolkit"? One cannot help but deplore the fact that we encounter this far too often. Esp. in the present situation of much-needed discussion, it is conterproductive, and a woeful disgrace for us as a profession, that not everyone with an interest in the matter and an understanding of the issues can make informed contributions because of a lack of access. Libraries are there to make recorded knowledge universally accessible and useful. If the new rules are to unfold their usefulness to support this mission, the rule text ought to be universally accessible. How credible is that mission if not even this can be achieved? And under such constraints, how realistic is it to get other communities interested? It is a weak excuse to say that out of economic concerns there is no alternative to a global monopoly on all versions and translations of the text. This would hold for MARC as well and also for BibFrame, which no one ever questioned for being open standards in the sense of freely available text, despite high costs of development and maintenance. Anyone should be welcome to provide added value by constructing all sorts of tools to make the text useful in other ways than other tools do, and they might well be allowed to derive a profit from such activities. But the text as such has to be open, and in this day and age, not just as plain text but open in a structured format that lends itself to formatted arrangements and exploitation by software to enhance its potential usefulness. For instance, out of any editing system for bibliographic data, conext-sensitive links should be enactable to display pertinent rules, free of charge. I confess to have no access to the Toolkit either. But out of principle, not lack of resources. B.Eversberg
