So, no sooner do I cite a Karen Coyle paper relegating RDA to the 20th century, then I run across a Karen Coyle post that updates it significantly: “Astonishing Announcement: RDA goes 2.0“. This stems from a meeting at the British Library Apr 30-May 1/07, in which it was agreed to attempt to merge RDA and Dublin Core approaches to machine-readable descriptive elements, throwing in FRBR/FRAD and RDF for good measure. Which is maybe a little obscure, especially at this point, but Karen includes a helpful interview with one of the meeting participants:
KC: What does it mean that there will be a “formal RDA Element vocabulary?”
D: It will look something like the Dublin Core registered terms. They will be both human readable (as displayed in a browser) and machine readable (in a format like RDF). Try clicking on this link [was broken, but I believe this is what was meant], and you can see on the right the different machine-readable formats.
KC: What happens now to the “tome” that has been developed through the RDA process?
D: The “instructions” as we see them in the RDA documentation, will not be affected. The element vocabulary, the formal vocabulary, will be separated out, and the documentation will point to the formal vocabulary terms. Many users of the documentation will not see the formal element vocabulary and may not know that it exists. The vocabulary, however, will be behind the online tools that are being created. This will make it easier to create a system that allows people to click on a term and get a definition or to see the related hierarchy.
She summarizes her impressions this way: “Imagine a library that is seamlessly integrated with the semantic web…. we seem to be on our way.”
Well, my ignorance of this up til now certainly illustrates the point that I’m not a cataloguer, as in my disclaimer in the previous post. But I’m still concerned — the problem of trying to apply a top-down authority approach (“control”) to highly variable, highly mutable, often evanescent digital data isn’t really addressed by this, nor are the criticisms of attempting to cram print and digital together in a single compendious set of protocols, nor the worry that the very effort to implement such a set will only add to the institutional inertia carrying libraries further down a blind alley.
Still, I can certainly agree that even the attempt to make the massive RDA protocols programmatically accessible is a Good Thing.
By the way, re: responses to that Final Report of the WoGroFuBiCo, here’s the British Library’s. (A key point: they agree with the Joint Response of the Library of Congress et al. — and disagree, therefore, with the Final Report — that work on RDA should continue.)
