RDA implementation decison

First leaked on Twitter, Today's announcement marks a watershed moment for catalogers. The long-awaited decision finally came down as to whether or not the Library of Congress, National Library of Medicine, and National Agricultural Library would choose to implement the new cataloging code, RDA: Resource Description and Access.

It seems they do intent to implement RDA in 2013 with changes. Significant changes. The statement referenced the Report and Recommendations of the U.S. RDA Test Coordinating Committee, a report which does not hold back on criticism of RDA and the RDA Toolkit and is spot-on in targeting where RDA does not lived up to its own stated goals.

For those of us who watched and participated in the development of RDA there's a certain feeling of vindication. Some of these issues were brought up during the development of the code. It's nice to see them backed up by evidence-based testing.

The report suggests (requires?) that a lot of work needs to be done to bring RDA up to snuff prior to implementation. It provides ambitious timelines for rewriting, reworking, etc.

Comments

[Tim]

As a student new to cataloging, I wholeheartedly agree with their assessment that RDA is NOT written in plain english. It is so unbelievably confusing! I swear it was written by lawyers :)

[Brenda]

So what do we do in the meantime? I just saw my first RDA record today, downloaded it from OCLC, imported it into my system,needed a decision. I don't like RDA either. But looks like we've got a mess on our hands when these records are coming to us from OCLC.

[Christine Schwartz]

@Tim Thanks for the comment. I agree with you about the writing style of RDA. The news coming out of the recent ALA Annual Conference is promising. The announcement was that there will be some rewriting of RDA to simplify and clarify without changing actual instructions.

@Brenda Thanks for your question. Again the RDA news from the ALA Annual Conference is that the Library of Congress will start partial RDA cataloging in November for approximately 5% of their output (this from the RDA Toolkit blog). I'm no longer doing MARC cataloging, but if I was still Head of Cataloging, I'd set a local policy for dealing with RDA records during this interim period. And I'd lean toward accepting them as is even if that meant some inadequate OPAC displays. Eventually, the ILS vendors will adjust their software to accommodate the changes in MARC due to RDA. So, I'd careful analyze each RDA change and set a local policy as to how to handle each one with a preference to accept RDA records without altering them.