Resource Description and Access: Difference between revisions

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In the United States, the cataloguing community expressed reservations about the new standard in regard to both the [[business case]] for RDA in a depressed economy and the value of the standard's stated goals.<ref name=LCbibfuture>{{cite web|last=Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control|title=Testing Resource Description and Access (RDA)|website=[[Library of Congress]]|url=https://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/rda/|access-date=31 January 2011}}</ref> [[Michael Gorman (librarian)|Michael Gorman]], one of the authors of AACR2, was particularly vocal in expression of his opposition to the new guidelines, claiming that RDA was poorly written and organized, and that the plan for RDA unnecessarily abandoned established cataloging practices.<ref name=Gorman>{{cite web |last=Gorman |first=Michael |title=RDA: The coming cataloguing debacle |url=http://www.slc.bc.ca/rda1007.pdf |access-date=31 January 2011}}</ref> Others felt that RDA was too rooted in past practices and therefore was not a vision for the future.<ref>[http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/coyle/01coyle.html Coyle, Karen and Diane Hillmann. Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging rules for the 20th century. D-Lib Magazine, Jan./Feb. 2007, v. 13, no. 1/2.]</ref> In response to these concerns, the three [[United States]] national libraries (Library of Congress, [[United States National Library of Medicine|National Library of Medicine]], and the [[United States National Agricultural Library|National Agricultural Library]]) organized a nationwide test of the new standard.

On 13 June 2011, the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, and the National Library of Medicine released the results of their testing.<ref name=june2011report>{{cite web|title=Report and Recommendations of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee on the implementation of RDA—Resource Description & Access|website=[[Library of Congress]]|url=https://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/rda/|access-date=15 June 2011}}</ref> The test found that RDA to some degree met most of the goals that the JSC (Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA) put forth for the new code and failed to meet a few of those goals. The Coordinating Committee admitted that they "wrestled with articulating a business case for implementing RDA", nevertheless the report recommended that RDA be adopted by the three national libraries, contingent on several improvements being made.<ref name=june2011report /> The earliest possible date for implementation was given as January 2013, as the consensus emerging from the analysis of the test data showed that while there were discernible benefits to implementing RDA, these benefits would not be realized without further changes to current cataloging practices, including developing a successor to the [[MARC standards|MARC]] format.<ref name=june2011report /><ref>Library of Congress. [https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/news/framework-103111.html "A Bibliographic Framework for the Digital Age"]. 31 October 2011. Retrieved 26 October 2015.</ref><ref>Jan Smits, Susan M. Moore, Paige G. Andrew (2017). Fixed fields coded data for geo-related information in the MARC 21 structure: a discussion on the possible expansion of coded data elements to improve machine manipulation and user discovery. In: ''Journal of map & geography libraries : advances in geospatial information, collections & archives'', (ISSN 1542-0353), 13(2017)2, p. 261-273.</ref>

Several other institutions were involved in the RDA test. Many of these institutions documented their findings in a special issue of ''[[Cataloging & Classification Quarterly]]''.<ref>{{cite journal|editor1-last=Hall-Ellis|editor1-first=Sylvia D.|editor2-last=Ellett|editor2-first=Robert O.|title=Special Issue: RDA Testing: Lessons Learned and Challenges Revealed|journal=Cataloging & Classification Quarterly|date=2011|volume=49|issue=7–8}}</ref>