> They had just updated us about how RDA would be available online for a
> fee. I said something along the lines of: "If you want a standard to
> be widely adopted, shouldn't you make the instructions for those
> standards freely available to be reused in any fashion anybody might
> want?"
<rant>All the blathering you'll hear out of ALA bodies about making
things freely available only applies to information created by others.
For their own stuff (which is mostly created at public expense),
they're always happy to make a buck.
Reading AACR2 is not a good way to understand what makes things work
together. Just borrow a paper copy from a cataloger and try to read
two chapters without literally falling asleep. The LCRI's which
interpret what those arcane rules mean are equally useful and
interesting -- i.e. they're damn near useless and serve little purpose
other than to satisfy the obsessive compulsives while making
cataloging an unsustainably slow and expensive process.</rant>
I used that text practically every day for 7 years as an original
cataloger. Despite the fact I've continued to work closely with
catalogers, I can't imagine why I'll ever need to open that book
again. There's little useful in it that can't be derived from
inspection of a decent number of records. However, if you really want
to get the idea of AACR2, you might consider borrowing the concise
version.
kyle
Received on Tue Apr 08 2008 - 15:54:59 EDT