TLA Preconference - RDA

In a word: Disappointing. Very long on theory (most of the morning), rehashing much of what I already got from my last RDA workshop. I found myself nodding off intermittently. I found the breaks in between sessions more informative, listening to colleagues chew over FRBR/RDA, many with their own private "WTF?" moments amongst themselves and their intimate colleagues. I made mental notes of who around me seemed to be having issues and philosophical objections similar to my own thoughts.

The morning session seemed devoted to a type of RDA cheerleading and futurist hype and enthusiasm. All well and good but I wanted to see the Demo and examples set for the afternoon, as well as the implementation guidelines. I walked down the street for lunch to the Home Plate Bar & Grill, right next to Minute Maid Park and grabbed a burger, fries, and a fountain drink. I skimmed my copy of Slow Reading by John Miedema while I waited for my food, and during the slower parts of the presentation, too, to be honest.

The Demo turned out to be merely more power point slides, this time of screen shots of what the working RDA Online product is supposed to look like; The actual database is still behind schedule, still not online yet.

The Examples were okay, but riddled with annoying typos and errors...some due to rule changes enacted after the packets were put together, but some just...ugh. Ms. Tillett apologized for the "minor typos", but I could only do a "facepalm" after awhile, since there are no "minor typos" in cataloging, only cataloging errors. As examples showing the difference between RDA and AACR2r2, they were inconsistent.

Some of the changes I have no objection to, like ditching the "rule of three" and listing ALL authors credited on a multi-author work. I can even (maybe) live with adjusting title punctuation to match exactly what appears on the item in lieu of time-honored AACR "Sentence punctuation" style. I'm less thrilled with ditching abbreviations. On the surface, to an English-only audience, this sounds like a great idea at first, but when you think about it in an international context, do we really want to deal with full phrasing in so many foreign languages, or a unified system of abbreviations that is truly international, especially the latin ones. I think this will make more of a mess of things than we currently deal with.

As one colleague summarized near the end of the day, this has always been about display issues from vendors and how much (or how little) of the encoded MARC data they use and how they choose to display it, regardless if the MARC data was input using AACR2r2 or RDA. I still remain unconvinced of the need for such a radical revision of the cataloging code if we're primarily talking about a display issue in OPACs that already don't take full advantage of what MARC can do now, informed by AACR2r2. But LC seems determined to push ahead come hell or high water and will implement regardless, which is a truly frightening prospect on some levels. OCLC is also on board, which will drag the rest of us along, ready or not. Ms. Tillett did confirm that "Work" level records would be treated as their own new kind of Authority record, managed by LC in cooperation with OCLC. Which I kind of suspected would have to be the case.

The discussion kind of bogged down in the afternoon. I still fail to see why authority controlled Uniform Titles as currently exist in AACR2r2 don't already meet the FRBR goals that everyone is so passionate about, which leads one to question the need for the theoretically problematic "work" level records proposed by a more strict interpretation of FRBR and realized by RDA. There was a lot of nice talk about resource sharing and cooperative cataloging and "future search tools" but not much substance at this stage. I'm glad LC is at least going to be testing this stuff before releasing it more generally. I have my doubts as to how thorough the testing will be, who can comment on the results, and if their comments will be given any weight, or if RDA will be implemented regardless of the results because it's "too big to fail", i.e. too much time and money and effort has been poured into this enterprise and there's too much psychology of prior investment to really let it go, as the Working Group Report as much as recommended some time ago (specifically it was counseled to "suspend work on RDA"), but which LC brusquely brushes aside as an unthinkable option.

I got the sense, too, that what's really driving this decision is the perception that this can make current copy-cataloging practices even more efficient and cost-saving by going with RDA by linking and by eliminating as much redundancy from the system as possible. Never mind that redundant systems are not always a bad thing--ask USAF pilots who fly the A-10 about that.

I'm writing this post only a few hours after the meeting broke up, while it is fresh on my mind. My opinions at this point are highly subjective, I'm just getting ideas down in pixel form while they're still percolating in my head. I may revise my positions later.

The afternoon Q&A after the "examples" session ran so long that we didn't have time at all to touch on RDA implementation recommendations whatsoever. That was really disappointing, though I do think the Q&A was valuable and important. I'm a little sour at their calling the "Demo" a Demo. It's not a demo unless it's online and live. What we got, in effect, is an artist rendering of a demo, not the demo itself.

I don't know that I'm any closer to writing a professional article, either in Cataloging and Classification Quarterly or some other related professional periodical; I still am acutely aware that I'm a lightweight when it comes to cataloging theory and practice. But I'm afraid I left today's session with yet more questions than answers about RDA. RDA = Resource Description and Access. Also known to some as "Retirement Day Approaches" or to us young'uns as "Real Disaster Ahead". It may be that it's pointless to quibble about the philosophical shortcomings of FRBR, as Ms. Tillett asserted that other nations had been successfully using the model for years (though I would have appreciated viewing some concrete examples of this). But with RDA, I still have a lot of misgivings and remain skeptical. I'd like to withhold final judgment until the RDA preliminary alpha and beta testing are complete and the results published and critiqued.

RDA's vagueness still leaves me ill at ease and in some ways seems almost to run against the logic of FRBR. In some ways, after it was explained to us, it seemed--at least to me--that SOME existing AACR2r2 practices come closer to the FRBR ideals than RDA does. I remain perplexed, sad to say.

It was worth attending this pre-conference, by all means, but I was disappointed by the actual delivery. Like I said, too much time spent on theory and rah-rah, not enough time on the demo, on concrete examples, and on implementation recommendations and planning. It's all so @#@$%! speculative still.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Interestingly, Aggie Librarian got to sit next to an actual Texas A&M main campus cataloger who was very nice and amiable. Quite pretty, too. I learned that TAMUG personnel are a back in Galveston and no longer in B/CS. So it seems they got back to Pelican Island on schedule. Well, good for them. I also heard that budgets are tightening at TAMU (as expected) and that most catalogers these days are focusing on archival materials, which is more or less the same story for me up in Denton, since, as with my TAMU colleagues, it's the main source of original cataloging that we have on hand to deal with. Unlike them, I still pitch in to do plenty my own copy-cataloging and re-cataloging, too. But thank goodness for unique archival materials to keep our skills sharp.