It’s been a little while now since the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control issued its Final Report (PDF) (Jan 10/08), but a couple of weeks ago the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, and the National Agricultural Library issued their “Joint Statement” (PDF) (May 1/08 ) in response. This statement was in fact in advance of a “full response” from the LC itself, and was apparently prompted by the need to quell some anxiety/confusion that has arisen around one part of one section of one recommendation — 4.2.2: “Temporarily suspend work on RDA [Resource Description and Access]“, a result of ongoing uncertainty around the implementation of FRBR among possibly other things. In Deanna Marcum’s (the receiver of the Final Report) own words, one of the reasons for this “counterintuitive” early response was “because so many librarians are asking about the national libraries’ plans to implement the proposed code [i.e., RDA]“, and the joint response clearly indicated that these institutions jointly turned down the recommendation to suspend work, however temporarily.

Now, IANAC, but I thought this rather hurried rejection of that admittedly controversial recommendation was a matter of some concern, for reasons like the following:

• It’s not just FRBR that’s still unclear — it’s the whole strategy of attempting once again to impose an international, top-down “control” on data that can be described as “bibliographic” only in the most tenuous sense; the uncertainties surrounding FRBR and its implementation is but the tip of that iceberg.
• The retooling of various versions of the ILS in order to implement RDA looks to be a slow and costly process for vendors and libraries alike — and this, among other sources of significant investment, will further the problem of institutional inertia that has impeded libraries’ ability to respond with agility to environmental change; we’ll end up, once again, with just a more expensive version of the catalogue as the hammer that tries to turn every problem into a nail.
• Bizarrely, I find myself close to agreeing with Michael Gorman, though in a sense that’s quite different from his usual blinkered view of things — he thinks that a simple(r) revision of AACR2 would have sufficed to handle library information resources; I think that’s likely true if you precede the phrase “information resources” with the word “traditional”. That is, if we separated out the items of the library’s physical collection we’d find that our usual approaches to managing them continue to work fine (more or less) — and then we could concentrate on much more flexible, “loosely-coupled” approaches to managing all the other resources/services that the nodal library must mediate.

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Roy Tennant is referring here to the WoGroFuBiCo Final Report above, but I think the words pertain to the entire RDA effort:

So here’s the thing: you may or may not have noticed it, but we just went from a world where we were the gatekeepers to information to one in which we are hanging on for dear life. We can either wise up or get out of the game. I prefer to wise up.

PS (Update): For a close and extensive critique of RDA — from the standpoint of someone grounded in present realities, however volatile, as opposed to mired in the past — it’s hard to do better than Karen Coyle’s paper in D-Lib (Jan-Feb 2007), “Resource Description and Access (RDA): Cataloging Rules for the 20th Century” (emphasis added).