Diane,

I'm grateful that you are representing us on CC:DA. You
have articulated below many serious concerns with RDA,
ones that I share. I have voiced some of these same concerns
(although not as effectively) in public and private and I believe
it's vital for well-informed, articulate people like you to
continue to speak out. In reality, many of the concerns you
raise should be of equal concern to the people who work
in an exclusively MARC environment. One sentence, in
particular, from your observations needs to be repeated
over and over:

"Clearly, the sharing and integration pieces are still critically 
important, but we may not be able to afford the levels of consistency and 
predictability that we've had in the past."

I would add to that statement one other: not only is it unlikely that we will
be able to continue to afford those levels, they may very well not be 
necessary or serving the purpose that catalogers assume they do. We
have been operating on the basis of untested assumptions for too long,
applying a just-in-case mentality that we can ill afford.

So, thank you, for your clarity of thought and expression.

Carol Hixson
University of Oregon Libraries


At 05:48 AM 2/6/2006, Diane I. Hillmann wrote:
>-->
>Folks:
>
>At the recent American Library Association meeting in San Antonio, I 
>attended meetings concerned with the new Resource Description and Access 
>(RDA) standard being developed as a replacement for the Anglo-American 
>Cataloging Rules. The opinions represented below are mine only, intended 
>for the purposes of inciting discussion about the issues.
>
>Regards,
>Diane
>
>--- begin forwarded text
>
>
>Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 08:45:39 -0500
>To: [log in to unmask]
>From: "Diane I. Hillmann" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Issues in Applying RDA in Non-MARC Metadata Communities
>Cc:
>Bcc:
>X-Attachments:
>Issues in Applying RDA in Non-MARC Metadata Communities
>
>Diane I. Hillmann
>Jan. 31, 2006
>
>Having come rather late to the RDA discussion, I recognize that the points 
>I bring up in this document may not be the comments that CC:DA or JSC 
>expects or desires at this stage, but I hope the concerns expressed may be 
>useful nonetheless.
>
>First, I'd like to describe the issues I see in applying the underlying 
>assumptions made in RDA (most of which emanate from traditional cataloging 
>practices) to the world of Non-MARC Metadata (NMM) Communities.  Clearly, 
>these issues are less apparent to traditional libraries whose preponderant 
>exposure to digital resources are digital versions of published materials, 
>but once outside that familiar boundary the environment is much less 
>comfortable.
>
>I believe the primary issues that concern me lie in the following areas:
>
>Transcription as Identification
>
>In the world of traditional cataloging and static published resources, the 
>notion of consistent transcription as an important method to assure 
>predictable access, from a variety of agencies handling exactly the same 
>resources, made a great deal of sense.
>
>However, digital resources carry no such assumption of stability-change is 
>part of the package.  In that environment, relying on use of consistently 
>transcribed information as the primary method of identifying a resource 
>makes much less sense. Resources in this environment are most often 
>unique, and usually identified by a numeric or alpha-numeric string.  In 
>traditional cataloging, such identifiers are also used, of course: ISSNs 
>and ISBNs are the most obvious examples, but they are generally not the 
>primary identification of the resource.
>
>As we all know, the current methodologies for identifying digital 
>resources uniquely and unambiguously are still in flux and almost no one 
>is satisfied with the current situation.  But whatever the ultimate 
>answer, it will not rely on transcription, nor will decisions about what 
>constitutes a "new" resource likely be susceptible to the rules defined 
>for editions or versions.  It should also be noted that the gold standard 
>of infallible identification in a metadata description is not always 
>necessary for digital information, where the resource itself can often be 
>viewed easily and quickly.
>
>Reliance on Notes
>
>Oftentimes, the RDA (like traditional cataloging) herds catalogers to make 
>decisions about what is "primary" or "secondary" and relegates the latter 
>to the notes area.  This is a significant problem for many NMM 
>communities, who may either have no place to put this kind of descriptive 
>"notes" or who rely on repetition of elements (with or without a notion of 
>order) to capture information of the same kind within a single 
>description, thus focusing more on access than descriptive integrity.
>
>In most delivery systems for metadata (including OPACS, it must be noted), 
>only the information in a small number of specified fields is actually 
>displayed to the user (and we know few users actually look at full 
>records). Additionally, because notes can contain so many different 
>categories of information, they may not even be indexed (when they are, 
>only as keywords).  For systems using NMM, notes information is even less 
>likely to be displayed, and may indeed be entirely ignored, since its 
>"human-friendly" character makes it useless for machine processing and 
>marginal for access.
>
>Reproductions
>
>I brought up the issue of reproductions on the RDA-L list and was dismayed 
>to see how many catalogers were still trying to make the case for 
>describing an original and a reproduction on the same record. If FRBR is 
>truly underlying RDA, I believe this bullet must be bitten firmly and 
>these practices explicitly marginalized within the context of the rules. 
>In an environment where metadata of different formats created using 
>different rules (or no rules) must be shareable, these residual practices 
>keep us all from benefiting from our common enterprise.
>
>Yes, it is certainly true that most vendor systems do not display multiply 
>versioned resources acceptably, but we undercut the usefulness of our data 
>by manipulating it to overcome system inadequacies; rather, we should 
>address those problems with our vendors.
>
>Source of Information
>
>Specification of sources of information from which to record information 
>grew logically from the reliance on transcription, the goal being 
>consistency.  Vital to this approach is the idea that resources have 
>commonly identified and named parts that are similar within a specific 
>category of materials, something that is not generally the case in the 
>digital world.
>
>Similarly, notions of whether information comes from the item itself or is 
>supplied from somewhere else are often less important in NMM communities, 
>even those who still deal primarily with physical, published items. In 
>ONIX for example, information about the author (from the book jacket, 
>reviews, or other marketing sources) is specifically tagged based on the 
>function of the information, and it's often not explicitly descriptive in 
>nature.
>
>Future Considerations
>As I mentioned in my comments at the Monday CC:DA meeting at ALA, we may 
>increasingly be thinking less about the cataloging record as the lowest 
>unit of description and more as the "statement" as the optimal unit.  In 
>that context, "Who says?" or  "When said?" or "In what language?" is 
>likely to be more important information to know in order to manage the 
>information than where in a resource the information was found, and the 
>current RDA doesn't support these notions at all. I suspect we'll begin to 
>see this change in thinking more as we discuss common authority files, 
>where explicit specification of language and form of heading are critical 
>to making appropriate choices for usage in different catalogs, in the 
>context where the concept of an individual "statement" has already taken root.
>
>Some of these attributes are easier to manage outside of MARC (XML, for 
>instance, supports language specification at various levels), but it's 
>really important that we start thinking along those lines sooner, rather 
>than later.
>
>The ideal of the current RDA still seems to be the anonymous cataloger 
>acting objectively using a commonly understood set of rules, providing 
>consistent records suitable for sharing.  Clearly, the sharing and 
>integration pieces are still critically important, but we may not be able 
>to afford the levels of consistency and predictability that we've had in 
>the past. Other mechanisms may be available to improve access in ways we 
>don't understand fully at the moment, but we should probably at least 
>explore some of the possibilities at this juncture.
>
>I'm not entirely sure how to where to go from here, but it might be useful 
>to examine some strategies whereby the most basic level of RDA instruction 
>might be more generally useful outside the traditional library 
>environment, given the dissonances noted above.
>--
>*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
>Diane I. Hillmann
>Research Librarian
>Cornell University Library
>Email: [log in to unmask]
>Voice: (607) 387-9207
>*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
>
>--- end forwarded text
>