After recently stumbling across Johannesen’s criticism of MARCXML, another interesting blog entry regarding cataloguing crossed my RSS reader this morning.
This post on Inquiring Librarian talks about the possibility of RDA turning into yet another missed opportunity to sanely digitize cataloguing data:
“RDA is supposed to be “made for the digital world.” This is something I can completely get behind. But the drafts I’ve read (and I admit I gave up on them at some point, so maybe this has changed) don’t seem to me that they’re actually accomplishing that. It’s the right goal, but the products I’ve seen don’t meet it. And then it occurred to me: by “for the digital world” I think what the RDA folks actually mean is “catalog digital stuff” rather than “create data that can be used by machines as well as people.” I’m interested in the latter, so that’s what I was assuming they were interested in. But I’m now wondering if that assumption was false.“
If true, this is just sad. This isn’t just missing the boat; this is missing the boat by a decade (or longer).
