Paul,
Thanks for sharing your analogy about RDA and its sister wagons. What I
worry about is creating a wagon that will be so general that it will
not work well for anyone. It won't climb mountains in 4WD; it won't
speed along the freeway; it won't haul the kids or the lumber.
In the CC:DA discussions that I heard in San Antonio, there was
circling around transcription of what was in the resource and moving to
notes information taken from outside the resource. This may make sense
for library resources but doesn't necessarily for other classes of
materials.
I would prefer that we build good universal highways (and train tracks
and flight paths, etc.) that can handle the wagons from various
manufacturers (aka metadata communities and discipline-specific
information sources).
As long as the information inside the resource is privileged, RDA will
not be an effective guide for cataloging visual resources. I don't want
RDA to be so generalized that it ceases to be effective for description
of and access to library resources, whether tangible or virtual. What I
heard in San Antonio made me wonder if we were building guidelines that
would be less effective for library materials but still not "right" for
non-library materials.
AACR has served as one of the models in the development of Cataloguing
Cultural Objects. The influence is however on building wagons that can
interoperate, not on building wagons that can handle disparate
materials equally well.
I'm not sure how far we can stretch this analogy but I do hope our trip
down the interoperative highway will be productive.
Sherman Clarke
NYU Libraries
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