Yeah, part of the issue is that there really isn't any place to go to
see written out how things really work. The Library of Congress Rule
Interpretations (LCRI) are an important supplement---but even with AACR2
and LCRIs both, there's a lot of stuff that's done by convention and de
facto standard practice that isn't written _anywhere_. [ Oh, and for a
third written supplment, OCLC's standards for record sharing. But even
with all three of those, there's lots of stuff that isn't written
anywhere, it's just _done_. It's no surprise that it's not always done
consistently.]
Jonathan
Kyle Banerjee 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
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Wed Apr 09 2008 - 09:24:54 EDT