RDA should be called RAD

On my last day at ALA '11 I attended a session with no knowledge of the topic. I sat down at a table and was immediately greeted with, "How do you know RDA?" To which I replied, "I don't. But I keep seeing the acronym and thought I should probably learn something."

The session was titled Education and Training for Using RDA and moderated by Kathryn La Barre and Marjorie Bloss. There were many other acronyms tossed about (FRBR, FRAD, PCC, RDA) and I waited and took notes until I heard one I recognized: MARC. Ah, this has to do with cataloging.

As it turns out, the American Library Assoc. (ALA), Australian Committee on Cataloguing, British Library, Canadian Committee on Cataloguing, Chartereed Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) (UK based), and the Library of Congress (LOC) all got together (from 2003 to the present) to develop a new cataloging standard called Resource Description and Access (RDA) to replace the Anglo American Cataloging Rules (AACR2). This I learned from reading Introducing RDA: a Guide to the Basics by Chris Oliver.

Essentially what is going down is the community recognized that the way AACR2 was structured made it hard to describe new types of resources such as online multimedia (apparently AACR2 is structured around the container that an information resource is housed in such as a book or a music CD) and that it was created for the print environment, not for the digital environment. So AACR2 doesn't easily allow for descriptions of new types of resources nor does its structure emphasize relationships between objects or between objects' creators so that data can be used outside of the environment in which it is created, which is what a networked environment excels at.

Back to the session: I came away with the idea that RDA is a MEGA-schema. It lists all the elements to describe an information object and tells you how to fill the data values, from something as "minor" as don't include the article "The" for title information to which controlled vocabularies to consult for specific elements to detailing the relationships between items that share the same name and concept (a work), but not the same expression of the content (book, translation of book to another language, audiobook, adapted movie, etc). This is nothing new for experienced catalogers- the old rules AACR2 did just that. There is a core element set which defines the minimum information to describe an object and the rules leave it up to the individual library to decide how to display the information in the catalog.

I think the radical change is that so many people have invested so much time learning the MARC format, which is a metadata schema that is not easy to learn and they are waiting to see when the big institutions will begin using RDA before they charge forward. Vendors will need to change their databases, people will need to be trained in the new structure. It is a costly business to change standards.

As the point of the session was how institutions (whether academic teaching students or actual service libraries with catalogers) were were handling training, a representative of the Library of Congress shared that their training materials could be found on the Library of Congress Documentation for the RDA (Resource Description and Access) Test and among other LOC educational podcasts on iTunesU is a set of five talks on RDA which introduce the listener to the history and context of RDA's development, the principles it is based on and the implications of its implementation. (You may need iTunes installed to access, but it's free to download.)

There was also a representative of Minitex who said that he broke down RDA training for copy catalogers by media. Those trainings are only in person, but  if you make the trip, I'm sure they'd be able to include you. (Minitex also has a load of interesting trainings that are self paced or webinar based besides the RDA trainings.)

Two things I'm excited about:

1. Not having to be an expert on MARC. I did not take a cataloging course because it was so book focused and focused on MARC. I don't like MARC's lack of granularity (the more granular an item, the easier it is to create filters and to reuse data elements) and I don't like MARC's weird rules about where to put things based on where other things were put. Me, I'm a describe the resources using a form and let the computer put the items into the proper fields. And I wanted to learn about describing all sorts of things, such as digital objects, multimedia objects, etc.
2. Freeing the data. If the Library of Congress is paid for by the American people, then the data in the databases should be easily accessed, easily harvested and easily re-purposed. Either by other libraries or by people creating a database of their personal library. Also, by describing an information object by its relationships, we are creating ways to link that object to other, related objects outside of the library. In this way a person's exploration is unbounded so that they link into the library's description of an object then could link out to a museum's related items.