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Dear Diane I have been impressed by your last message. I am replying just to say that I have found and still find the work of the DCMI/RDA Task Group excellent, no matter how incomplete or based on volunteering efforts you may consider it. The work the task group did was what literally motivated me to go back researching and thinking cataloguing stuff after some years and I am really grateful for all the documentation you produced. Do not underestimate the type of change that is going on in cataloguing standards. It is a really huge paradigm shift. I hope not to demotivate, upset or even cause more worrying to anybody if I say that the type of vocabularies' control we had (or perceived we had in place while it was actually a work in progress) in the past is gone. We are heading towards more diversified commercial uses of catalogs in digital environments. What it is important from my point of view is that the quality of cataloguing work still remain up to high level standards in the future and not being vandalised without any sensible business case. That seems to me requiring vocabularies, registries mapping and crosswalks among metadata but above all clear it requires design of fundamental simple structures with a purpose, an organisational context and a sustainable way to manage them in the long term. Discussions going on here (RDA-L more than DC-RDA list) are very important as without "peopleware" nothing is possible in this sector. Discussions about RDA/MARC and RDA versus other standards confirm to me that implementing new standards require first of all a vision of the final product we want to offer, to be broken down at a level of granularity strictly necessary not to compromise further developments. Obviously the knowledge of the rules and their history is important and if you know how the soviet union considered territorial authorities in their cataloguing rules or the secrets of MARC code 100 $q you may be more creative and smart. But is also true that unless we look at the rules from the perspective of a newly designed product or service expertise can be really useless. So, let's bygone be bygone :) Brunella Longo http://www.brunellalongo.info - http://bit.ly/brublog On 16 Feb 2011, at 22:32, Diane I. Hillmann wrote: Realized belatedly that this conversation might better be happening on other lists. Diane -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [Re: ] RDA and MARC Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:26:18 -0500 From: Diane I. Hillmann <[log in to unmask]> To: MARC <[log in to unmask]> CC: Bernhard Eversberg <[log in to unmask]> Bernhard, A little history here. When the DCMI/RDA Task Group was formed in May of 2007, it was with the idea that the work could be supported financially by other entities, not the RDA co-publishers (who did, in fact, support that London meeting where everything started). In fact we did have some early funding from the British Library and Siderean Software, which helped get us started but in reality did not go far enough. You may recall that in 2008 the financial meltdown hit everyone, and those of us engaged in doing the work, primarily four people: Gordon Dunsire (the co-chair with me of the TG), Karen Coyle, Jon Phipps and I (with some early help from Alistair Miles) decided that we'd rather spend our time doing the work ourselves than continuing to try and raise funding in that climate. Frankly, the work involved is not something that can be done without a fair amount of background and experience in some fairly esoteric areas. (Read our article in DLib Magazine for more evidence of what was involved: http://dlib.org/dlib/january10/hillmann/01hillmann.html). This 'volunteer' aspect of the building of the vocabularies has been firmly determined by us to end when the work is 'done' (completed to the extent that RDA is), reviewed by whoever the JSC determines should do the reviewing (still an open question, I'm afraid), and 'published' (e.g., the status in the registry changed from 'new-proposed' to 'published'). That said, there is a proposal on the table with ALA Publishing that they contract with us for the maintenance of the vocabularies and any work needed to integrate the vocabularies with the Toolkit and enable further translations of the vocabularies in the Open Metadata Registry (such as has already started with the DNB). None of the integration steps would affect the open nature of the vocabularies at all, just make for a more rational maintenance regime and limit any synchronization issues. I'm just as frustrated as you are (maybe more, given the state of limbo in which the vocabularies seem to be at the moment), but all I can say is that the four of us are pushing as hard as we can, and maybe y'all could spend more of your energies pushing at the entities who seem to be happy with the status quo instead of at us. We are not, as some would have it, a group of consultants trying to make money on this effort. If we were, we'd have to honestly say we have failed miserably. I'd like to think that we've done something substantial and important with this opportunity, and in the process demonstrated that it's not just the big guys with the money who can make change happen. Diane Hillmann Co-chair, DCMI/RDA TG On 2/16/11 4:07 AM, Bernhard Eversberg wrote: 15.02.2011 21:02, Mitch Turitz: Karen,