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I think Kevin Randall is quite correct in his response to Wojciech Siemaszkiewicz, but I think that to a lot of catalogers--and perhaps even moreso to librarians who aren't catalogers--Kevin's response doesn't speak to the totality of the situation. For the record, there is still a chance that RDA will _not_ be adopted, the tenor of the discussion on this list, the RDA list, and Autocat notwithstanding. Kind of reminds me of the early '60s movie in which a group of conspirators decide that the code phrase for their operation going forward will be "Mets win doubleheader." At the time that would have seemed an impossibility, but in the event, the Mets did win a doubleheader on the designated day. As Chuck Berry might (and did) put it, "Goes to show you never can tell."




Mike Tribby
Senior Cataloger
Quality Books Inc.
The Best of America's Independent Presses

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-----Original Message-----
From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kevin M. Randall
Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 12:10 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Using existing NARs

Wojciech Siemaszkiewicz wrote:

> If this is a foregone conclusion, why bother with a test?

For exactly the reasons I cited:  "The value in the RDA test will be in finding out how well the guidelines work, how well the new records play with others, what options are better than others, and just overall what would be the best way to implement RDA."

Having a testing methodology, and a discrete set of records (created by people trained to participate in the test) to analyze, will likely tell us a
*lot* more than just having an unknown number of catalogers dive into using RDA right away.  ("Unknown" being probably any random number between 3 and
30,000...)  There is a lot we don't know about actually preparing for and using RDA and its resulting records, and finding out those things will help greatly toward some sort of coordinated implementation down the line.

Kevin M. Randall
Principal Serials Cataloger
Bibliographic Services Dept.
Northwestern University Library
1970 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL  60208-2300
email: [log in to unmask]
phone: (847) 491-2939
fax:   (847) 491-4345

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