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Coming "Soon": RDA By 2013, when RDA implementation had begun in earnest, I was in another small academic library, leading our collection services (i.e., technical services) unit and supervising one cataloger. [...]I attended the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's (PCC) "Demystifying BIBCO" webinar, their first BIBCO Virtual Forum of the year, on January 16, 2025. Over the course of their presentations and the Q&A session, panelists discussed various aspects of the PCC's Monographic Bibliographic Record Program (BIBCO), including training, paths to participation, and institutional membership; the intersection of BIBCO with catalogers' day-to-day work; and the BIBCO Standard Record and its continuing development under RDA. Overall, I am left feeling more sanguine about the prospect of ultimately performing actual cataloging in compliance with Official RDA, although I am still not enamored with its content, presentation, and cost. 1 additionally note that the current draft of the Official RDA BSR retains for the most part the divisions provided in the BSR for Original RDA, even though they are based on the chapter divisions of Original RDA, since they are useful in sorting and gathering elements in a logical manner that allows catalogers to find the information they want more easily," suggesting that I am not alone in my difficulty with navigating and comprehending Official RDA from the source
RDA is not a manual for metadata creation with detailed guidelines, instructions, and workflows.
NOW you tell me. - Me
It is no exaggeration, or at least I» much of one, to say that I have spent most of my library career in a state of impending RDA: Resource Description and Access More narrowly, for at least the past five years I have felt Official RDA looming in my near future - inducing anxiety and low-grade dread, hanging over my head like the metaphorical Sword of Damocles 3 (Readers, please pardon my title for this piece; I never have been able to resist a good pun. Or a bad one, really.) While deadlines for RDA implementation have been pushed ever further back, I have not yet seen many developments that I thought would ease my personal path into using, or even really understanding, Official RDA. But in this new year, I have actually come to feel a bit better about what lies ahead.
A quick refresher: the seeds of RDA were planted at a conference in Toronto in 1997, three years before I quit my mathematics graduate program and entered library school. I learned about the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (20d edition) in my cataloging class, during the first semester at the Syracuse School of Information, and was trained in AACR2 as a brand-new librarian in 2002.· Another round of revisions to the cataloging code was underway; but the editors halted a third revision of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules before its completion and started work on a new code. After RDA (the first version, now called Original RDA) was released in the summer of 2010, testing and plans for adoption of the new code began - and so did pushback. Some cataloging experts believed RDA was too radical a departure from traditional cataloging practices for inadequate reasons; others believed it did not go far enough in preparing libraries for the Semantic Web; and orthogonal to either of those views, there was displeasure with the new code's organization and writing.
From what little I knew of RDA, though, it seemed all right to me. Having primarily worked in serials for my first several years as a cataloger, I was more concerned with continuing resources-related matters such as the CONSER (Cooperative Online Serials Program) Standard Record, vendorneutral records, and link resolvers in knowledge bases. While RDA was interesting, it was not foremost in my mind, and I had not been working in AACR2 long enough to have developed a real attachment. Then as a solo cataloger in a small academic library, I had enough practical cataloging work (most of it copy, some not; some original cataloging in new-to-me formats like videocassettes and DVDs) filling my days that, while I kept up with some developments in RDA, again it was not a priority, and I did not understand all the fuss.
Coming "Soon": RDA
By 2013, when RDA implementation had begun in earnest, I was in another small academic library, leading our collection services (i.e., technical services) unit and supervising one cataloger. With very little of a hand in cataloging work, I maintained some current events awareness of RDA, but not really enough to form a substantial opinion. (I was not writing for Technicalities at the time either, which also would have strongly motivated me to take some kind of a position!) A few years later, when our cataloger departed for another institution and that salary line was reallocated out of collection services, cataloging work reverted to me and a small team of student workers. We were working in OCLC WorldShare, which my students found to be user-friendly enough that they could handle most copy cataloging and I could handle training them to do it while I happily took up cataloging once again, handling our original work and the most complex copy. As a member of the AMIGOS consortium, my library had access to the RDA Toolkit; just one seat, but that was enough. We were in a hybrid environment, with RDA records out there in the bibliographic universe alongside AACR2 records. The code itself was laid out well enough that I could navigate it with tolerable proficiency when needed. Again, I was able to get by, and RDA did not upset my personal applecart.
Then came Official RDA. No more chapters, no more linearity, and, on top of that, it came with new vocabulary, opaque and dense. (1 discussed this in my May/June 2023 column and will refrain from rehashing it any more than I already have done °) In January 2020, Within a month of starting my current position, I attended an American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter preconference workshop on the "new" (now known as Official) RDA Toolkit. During my campus's COVID lockdown, I attended a series of ALA webinars on Official RDA; last year I attended another such webinar series.
I have continued to have more and more time to pursue this training, as the implementation date for Official RDA has been repeatedly delayed, with no objections from me. So, we have been working up to RDA implementation for a sufficiently long time that I started out as a young cataloger bemused by the old salts saying RDA stood for "Retirement Day Approaches" and now am a mid-career one asking what we are even doing here with Official RDA. But a couple of recent experiences have left me feeling somewhat better about Official RDA, at least as it pertains to my own day-to-day cataloging work.
Application Profiles to the Rescue
First, I read and reviewed the fifth edition of Lois Mai Chan's (and for the fourth and fifth editions, coauthor Athena Salaba's) Cataloging and Classification: An Introduction, quoted above. Chan and Salaba's treatment of RDA in the textbook, including the idea that catalogers should not expect to work in direct consultation with RDA, but rather by using Application Profiles to guide their creation of metadata records, was reassuring. They also presented various terms and concepts that I had encountered previously in webinars and other trainings; but seeing these definitions and diagrams in a contextualized, linear narrative, in a static and persistent text format that I can read and reread, helped clarify them greatly.
I am sure I already had been told that rather than seeking to catalog directly from RDA, the cataloging community at large should expect to wait for Application Profiles to emerge! But at some point, I decided that I myself would do better to wait for Application Profiles and then use them as a foundation for understanding Official RDA. Conflating the RDA creators' message with my own "understand later, give up for now" is exactly the kind of thing I would do.
Second, I attended the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's (PCC) "Demystifying BIBCO" webinar, their first BIBCO Virtual Forum of the year, on January 16, 2025. Over the course of their presentations and the Q&A session, panelists discussed various aspects of the PCC's Monographic Bibliographic Record Program (BIBCO), including training, paths to participation, and institutional membership; the intersection of BIBCO with catalogers' day-to-day work; and the BIBCO Standard Record and its continuing development under RDA. In her introductory presentation, OCLC's Cynthia Whitacre spoke of BIBCO's mission as increasing the timely availability of high-quality bibliographic catalog records, and expressed the PCC's desire to bring more libraries and catalogers into the BIBCO fold. Attendees saw the new BIBCO Standard Record (BSR), based in Official RDA (since it is still in draft form, I have not linked to it here). The BSR, though it does include instructions for a wide variety of resources, by definition is primarily oriented toward print monographs cataloging; however, it is a major step forward for practical work in Official RDA. As the special cataloging communities-maps, music, media, and others-develop "Best Practices" to supplement the BIBCO record, real progress will continue. Incidentally, as I write this in midJanuary, the OLAC/MLA (Music Library Association) Best Practices for Cataloging Digital Media Storage Devices Using RDA and МАКС21 document is in what should be its final review stage and (we hope!) will be published soon. The ALA Map and Geospatial Information Round Table (MAGIRT) also has an eye on updating its "Best Practices" to account for Official RDA; and panelist Alan Ringwood from the Eastman School of Music mentioned that an Application Profile for music is under development.
Overall, I am left feeling more sanguine about the prospect of ultimately performing actual cataloging in compliance with Official RDA, although I am still not enamored with its content, presentation, and cost. 1 additionally note that the current draft of the Official RDA BSR
retains for the most part the divisions provided in the BSR for Original RDA, even though they are based on the chapter divisions of Original RDA, since they are useful in sorting and gathering elements in a logical manner that allows catalogers to find the information they want more easily," suggesting that I am not alone in my difficulty with navigating and comprehending Official RDA from the source $
I guess what sticks with me is that after I gained a certain level of proficiency in cataloging, in my pre-RDA positions, I only consulted AACR2 occasionally as needed; but the fact remained that I, a rank-and-file junior cataloger, could access AACR2 and could read it and (generally) understand it. On one hand, I will be happy to not have to read Official RDA routinely; additionally, it is good that freely-available Application Profiles will open up RDA cataloging to libraries and librarians that would otherwise be prevented by a pay wall from accessing it. On the other hand, the idea that catalogers' work should be governed by a set of rules that require interpretation by an intermediary (for Application Profiles are indeed the product of intermediaries) still feels like gatekeeping.
But as always, I could be wrong.
References and Notes
1. Lois Mai Chan and Athena Salaba, Cataloging and Classification: An Introduction, 5 ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), 326.
2. RDA: Resource Description and Access is part of the RDA Toolkit: Resource Description and Access (Chicago: American Library Association; Ottawa: Canadian Federation of Library Associations; London: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals; Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA; American Library Association, 2010- ), a subscription product.
3. With the adoption of the latest version of RDA, the previous version became Original RDA and the latest version became Official RDA. The Official RDA Toolkit is at https://access.rdatoolkit.org and the Original RDA Toolkit has the URL of https://original rdatoolkit. org (both accessed Jan. 20, 2025). In a classical Greek tale, the king of Syracuse traded places for a day with the courtier Damocles. To illustrate the precarity of a ruler's position on the throne, the king hung a sword over Damocles" head, suspended by a hair. In broader modern interpretations, the "sword of Damocles" can also symbolize anxiety over circumstances beyond one's control.
4. Joint Steering Committee for Revision of AACR, Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 21d ed 2002 rev. (Chicago: ALA; Ottawa: Canadian Library Association; London: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, 2002).
5. Laura Kane McElfresh, "Navigating RDA: Linearity, Triangles, and FRBR," Technicalities 43, no. 3 (May/June 2023): 16-19.
6. Program for Cooperative Cataloging, "BIBCO Standard Record (BSR) Official RDA Metadata Application Profile (Draft)," May 2024, 6. [Link to unpublished draft redacted. ]
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