I had an opportunity to
attend a presentation on Resource Description and Access (RDA) organized by the
Zimbabwe University Libraries Consortium (ZULC) recently. The presenters;
Charlie Molepo and Mandisa Lakheni, were from Universal knowledge Software
(UKS) an innovative company providing sophisticated library and archival
products. At this presentation I got an opportunity to meet Charlie, whom I had
met at the 48th ZimLA Conference in Victoria Falls were he presented
on the various libraries and archival software and training services they offer.
Besides, he had an exquisite exhibition and distributed very attractive mugs. (I will always remember him for these ones.)
Anyway, RDA according
to the Joint Steering Committee for the Development of RDA was developed to
replace the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd Edition Revised, which were
first published in 1978. The OCLC website reported that The Library of Congress
announced full implementation of RDA in March 31, 2013. Initially, RDA was
envisioned as a third edition of the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, and was
accordingly called AACR3, but in an effort to emphasize the break from the past
it was renamed to RDA, according to Coyle and
Hillmann (2007). Miksa (2009) maintains
that “The principal goal of the new rules is to facilitate resource
discovery through library catalogs in a more consistent and powerful way than
is currently possible with AACR2.” According to Coyle
and Hillmann (2007), RDA is being presented by the JSC as a change in
practice that will position libraries for the electronic age.
Oliver (2007) cited in Miksa (2009) points out that “RDA is a content
standard, not a display standard and not a metadata schema. RDA is a set of
guidelines that indicates how to describe a resource, focusing on the pieces of
information (or attributes) that a user is most likely to need to know. It also
encourages the description of relationships between related resources and
between resources and persons or bodies that contributed to creation of that
resource.” An important component of RDA discussed as the conceptual model is FRBR
(Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) and FRAD (Functional
Requirements for Authority Data). To get a good understanding of FRBR and FRAD
reading an article by Mark K. Ehlert titled RDA: Building Blocks would help.
The presentation by
Charlie Molepo and Mandisa Lakheni was insightful in that it discussed the
reasons to replace AACR2 which I found convincing. Among the reasons given by
Charlie Molepo and Mandisa Lakheni are that the internet caused an exponential growth in resource format, we are no
longer using card catalogues, we have more information carriers than before,
technology is growing every day and the biggest of all, AACR2 was developed in
the era of the card catalogue. In this regard, Coyle
and Hillmann (2007) stated that “The early cataloging rules, dating
back to the catalog of the British Museum in 1841, evolved primarily to handle
textual, published resources.” It therefore means that as information sources
change formats mainly caused by the digital environment and the internet.
Charlie Molepo and
Mandisa Lakheni further discussed how RDA works in a real setting. They
mentioned that RDA simplifies the process of transcription by taking what you
see on the resource, and eliminating many of the AACR2 rules that instruct
cataloguers to alter the data that they are transcribing to abbreviations.
Basically, UKS presenters observed that the new elements being added to RDA
solve problems with demonstrated in AACR2. Whilst explaining the simplicity of
RDA over AACR2 Mandisa highlighted that cataloguers are expected to write every
detail in full, in contrast to the use of abbreviations in AACR2; for instance Second
edition and not 2nd ed.. The basic rule, as I understood it in RDA
is writing everything in full. On the other hand the main difference I noticed
is that RDA is designed for the web environment whilst AACR2 does not match the
web environment.
A few disadvantages of
RDA were highlighted by Mandisa which included the initial implementation is
costly due to subscription and training; the RDA toolkit needs to be made
available on all computers and all cataloguing records need to be converted
from AACR2 to RDA, however this is not mandatory; library staff require
training to acquire skills on how to use RDA and institutions must pay a
subscription rate to use the RDA Toolkit online. There is a contention that RDA
may also inherit short falls of AACR2 were it has its roots. Coyle and Hillmann (2007) stated that , “The
challenges of this rapidly changing environment may be more than the developers
of RDA can accommodate, given the firmness of their ties to AACR.”
Basically this is it. I
could have gone on and on writing about RDA stuff I learnt but you can find out
more on the Internet. A simple Google search for ‘Resource Description and
Access’ can yield good hits which are all good reads. And visit the OCLC web site
for training materials.
Reference
Coyle, K., and Hillmann, D. (2007). Resource
Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century. D-Lib
Magazine, 13(1/2). Retrieved December 10, 2014, from
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/coyle/01coyle.html
Miksa, S. D. (2009). Resource Description and Access (RDA)
and New Research Potentials. Bulletin of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology, 35(5). Retrieved December 10, 2014,
from https://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Jun-09/JunJul09_Miksa.pdf
Molepo, C., and Lakheni, M. (2014). RDA Information Session
held in Harare. Harare, Zimbabwe.
