Matthew Beacom, Yale University Library. “After AAACR2 [Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules]: Content standards for resource description and access.” He’s all about cataloguing cultural objects.
AACR == great example of international agreement regarding digital standards. What surprises MB is that the agreement has survived for this long, and has been amended/improved too.
AACR (created in 1978) IS THE LAW. But it was created by its own community of practice, and is in continuous development. (As all rulesets should be. -vz)
What is a content standard? MB and his community use it thus: it’s a bit lik the rules of the road for driving. Highways, town roads, cars, companies that make all those things exist, but if you didn’t know which side of the road to drive on, but we wouldn’t have the [social structure of] the transportation system. Same with information standards.
Why a new standard? Short answer: the digital revolution. Before, users had to position themselves in a physical environment to use resources; and they had an institutional environment that helped them to use those resources. (You don’t walk into a library and expect to purchase a book on your way out, clearance sales notwithstanding.) Nowadays we bring resources to ourselves much more than before.
RDA (Resource Description and Access) is the new standard in development.
RDA will be: a new standard designed for the digital (as opposed to card-catalog) environment, developed as a web-based product, suitable for describing digital and analog artifacts. It’ll also be a multinational content standard, developed for use in English language environments (but can also be used by other-language communities). It’ll be independent of the format used to communicate information.
Distinctions between libraries, archives, museums etc. are breaking down, and their interrelationships are changing in nature as well. They’re not going to turn into one another, but the clarity of distinctions has changed, and the potential for collaboration has increased.
It’ll support FRBR [Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records] user tasks (!!! – yay!), such as find, identify, select, obtain. It’ll enable users of library catalogs, etc. to find and use resources appropriate to their information needs.
Who develops and supports RDA? A buncha acronyms; see RDA link above and also this list. People from Australia, Canada, the US and England make up the Joint Steering Committee.
AACR2 has two parts: description and access. RDA (draft arrangement) is description, relationships, and access point control. As part of revision, description and relationships are now grouped into Part A, and access point control is Part B. (vz: I’m not sure what access point control is.)
Timeline: looking at first release of RDA in mid-2008, but there might be a delay of 6 months to a year. Meanwhile there’s a lot of work as pieces of RDA get drafted and commented on.
Continuity vs. change: “Why didn’t you just throw out AACR2 and start over?” Well, they wanted to maintain some continuity, and keep the best of what they had. Also: compatibility with existing records is essential! And also, maintaining international agreements is important.
Stressed: RDA will be a content standard, not a display standard. It will contain new and refined data elements (with respect to AACR2) but retain relationships between elements.
Revenue for AACR2 goes into a fund that goes back into making it better, and then what’s not used goes to copyright owners. This is a self-supporting operation.
Access point control is defining which bits of information in a record can be used to access the record, and what agreed-upon form each of these might take. For example, author/creator is pretty much always considered an access point; rules may exist on which form of an author’s name can be used to look it up if there are pennames, changed names, titles such as “Sir” or “Doctor” and so on. Having a controlled selection of access points in stable forms can make access to each item or item record much more meaningful and in some cases simple.