Jeff

http://www.bnf.fr/documents/digital_roadmap.pdf

Page 41: The outcome of this work is a new cataloguing code (RDA FR), which
aims to adapt the international RDA (Resource Description and Access) code
to French cataloguing practices, thus allowing gradual adoption Training and
awareness raising actions among professionals such as library system vendors
will be carried out, in order to support change over an estimated period of
10 years.

Cheers

Gordon

-----Original Message-----
From: Bibliographic Framework Transition Initiative Forum
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jeff Edmunds
Sent: 02 February 2017 15:31
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [BIBFRAME] Failure

All,

First, thanks to everyone--especially Karen, Jvrg, Amanda, and Amber-- for
schooling me so thoroughly about current BIBFRAME thinking and initiatives.
My deliberately provocative initial email has elicited the thoughtful
responses I had hoped for.

While I cant respond point-by-point to everyone, I wanted to follow-up
briefly, beginning at the end, so to speak, with the message sent by
Sharon this morning, in which she says:

The whole point of RDA and BIBFRAME is moving to Linked Data community for
better information retrieval and connectivity on the Internet.

This, I think, we can all agree on.

What troubles me (and this will be a major thrust of my presentation) is the
vast disconnect I see between two fundamentally different kinds of
discovery, or, if you prefer, use cases for the retrieval and use of
information.

As someone who has worked in an academic research library as (mostly) a
cataloger for 27+ years, I realize that, with the dawning of the Internet
age, our collections have become, over time, simultaneously more
discoverable and less accessible. There has been an enormous shift from
print to electronic, and whereas anyone can walk in off the street,
discover, and access our print content (though not everyone can check it
out), our electronic content, for which we spend millions of dollars every
year (not to mention the costs of maintaining it) is accessible ONLY to
patrons affiliated with our university (with a few minor exceptions). As our
collections have moved online, we have unwittingly contributed to the
de-democratization of information.

Lets imagine a time in the (near?) future in which BIBFRAME and Linked Data
principles have been fully embraced and implemented by the library community
(as well as others); systems have been built and tweaked to accommodate the
new data models and linkages. 

Will the content discoverable in the new ecosystem be accessible to users?
Or will they be continually crashing into firewalls?

Finally, I would like to mention what I think is perhaps the most extensive
and thorough implementation of linked data in the libraries/archives
context: data.bnf.fr, created by the Bibliothhque nationale de France. I
mention it for a couple of reasons: 1) it leverages existing UNIMARC data
(FRBRized using software written specifically for that purpose) and 2) the
BnF--and French libraries in general--have not adopted RDA. 

Why have they not adopted RDA? Quoting http://www.transition-
bibliographique.fr/enjeux/position-francaise-rda/:

labandon pur et simple des normes actuelles de catalogage frangaises pour
ce nouveau code de catalogage international savirerait co{teux,
contre-productif, voire constituerait une rigression."

[purely and simply abandoning current French cataloging standards for this
new international cataloging code would be costly, counter- productive, and
would even constitute a regression.]

Further on, they note:

Adopter RDA en litat constituerait donc une rigression par rapport ` ce
qui fait la force des grands catalogues frangais, ` savoir pricisiment la
gestion de ces liens."

[Adopting RDA as-is would therefore constitute a regression with respect to
the strong point of the large French catalogs, to witthe management of
these links.]

The links in question are the ARKs connecting their bibliographic records
with their authority records. They have effectively been using a form of
linked data for 40 years.

[Two brief asides: for a skeptical view of RDA, see Karen Coyle and Diane
Hillmans opinion in D-Lib Magazine from a decade ago (!): 
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/coyle/01coyle.html?
ref=SaglikAlani.Com; also, Amber, to respond to your question about failure
of many libraries to adopt RDAthere was a recent straw poll on AUTOCAT,
with the results clearly showing that many smaller libraries had neither the
time, the resources, nor the will to move from AACR2 to RDA.]

BUT, and this is a major point (now quoting Gildas Illien, formerly at the
BnF and now at the Musium national d'Histoire naturelle):

Data.bnf.fr does not mean to replace the existing catalogs and other silos
it exploits, but to provide some glue between them.

In other words, at least in the case of data.bnf.fr, neither the non- RDA,
UNIMARC-based catalog (http://catalogue.bnf.fr/index.do) nor the BnFs silo
for digitized collections (http://gallica.bnf.fr/) goes away as a result of
the implementation of Linked Data.

This concerns me because cataloging/metadata departments, at least in US
academic libraries, are losing resources to other initiatives, even as they
are being asked to create and maintain metadata not only for catalogs,
discovery layers, digital repositories, and institutional repositories, but
now, also, for Linked Data projects.

Whence some of my skepticism of RDA, BIBFRAME, and Linked Data more broadly.
Too many generals, too few foot soldiers. 

Thanks again,

Jeff