RDA Training - Session 2

Today was the second RDA training session I'm sitting in on. One more left after this; technically it's after the summer term is over, but I'll be spending about another week at the Knight Library afterward and will be able to sit in on the final session.

Today we got a quick tour of the RDA toolkit, which I'll have to take a look at on my own time. It looked like a good way to browse the RDA instructions and also see some actual workflows to see the instructions in an order that might be more instructive of how to actually use them to catalog an item.

Other than that, there were some descriptive elements that were looked at. The extent descriptions (300 field) were discussed. It seemed odd to me that the RDA committee chose to make the official terms very general - such as "audio disc" rather than "audio CD" and "phonograph". The latter seem much more useful to a patron using the catalog. While I can understand that it's nice to have a standard that won't need to be changed as new technology becomes available (for example, an earlier standard would have needed to be updated to incorporate Blu-Ray discs), it seems like it will need to be clear to the patron whether the audio disc is a CD or vinyl record - and why not make it more obvious in the record rather than needing to interpret additional information such as physical size or some other note.

We also looked at series numbering. Despite the greater adherence to the principle of transcription (mentioned in a previous post), RDA does tell catalogers to change spelled out words to arabic numbers - both cardinal numbers and ordinal numbers depending on how it's spelled on the item.

As I see all the places that RDA is trying to work with MARC, and especially when I see where RDA records will still include specific punctuation (a . at the end of a line, a : or ; separating specific elements in a MARC field) I vaguely disappointed in the way the standard has come out. While it would be a lot of work to deal with a larger split, doing things like including punctuation in the fields just seems to be pointless in an age where the records are handled nearly solely by computer. The computer can insert (or remove) whatever punctuation is necessary for display and printing; far better in my mind to leave out all non-transcribed punctuation.