Not to try to defend ALA and its partners in this regard, but "free
standards" are the exception, not the rule.
NISO, the standards organization most relevant to libraries, does in fact
make its standards free for downloading--but that hasn't always been the
case. That was a policy decision. It's fairly unusual.
Most standards organizations charge for standards, sometimes rather a lot.
For example, ISO 9001 runs about $100; IEEE standards can run into the $200
range; and so on.
I won't even mention licensed standards, such as those applicable to CDs and
DVDs...
-walt crawford-
On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Kyle Banerjee <kyle.banerjee_at_gmail.com>
wrote:
> > 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 - 16:13:08 EDT