I have not seen this posted to this forum (yet?):

http://www.rda-rsc.org/sites/all/files/RDA%20conformance%20proposal.pdf

I'd be very curious to hear feedback from colleagues in the UK and Europe.

As I posted to the RDA listserv this morning:

I have a theory, as yet unformulated in print, that RDA, in the absence of
the skeleton of MARC, is basically Dublin Core reheated and with a dose of
bombast: a relatively vague, do-what-thou-wilt “standard,” light on rules,
heavy on barely comprehensible jargon, and apt to be implementable in any
number of ways that are interoperable in only the broadest (and probably
least functionally useful) sense.

The recently issued “RDA Conformance” discussion paper confirms my theory.

I only made it a few paragraphs in before I encountered this:

"A value of an RDA metadata statement that uses a relationship element is
part of the description of the entity in focus, not the related entity. For
example, “This manifestation has related agent of manifestation ‘that agent’”
is a metadata statement about ‘this manifestation’, and does not describe
‘that agent’. Conversely, the inverse statement “That agent has related
manifestation of agent ‘this manifestation’” is about ‘that agent’."

After deciphering the rest of the text, I hope to issue a fuller response, in
the interest of providing both a discussion/critique ("RDA Conformance"
purports to be a discussion paper) and a translation into comprehensible
English. In the meantime, I'd be very curious to hear what others make of
this discussion paper: whom it serves and how.

Jeff Edmunds

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