RSC Document
March 2020
Community vocabularies in RDA Toolkit
Submitted by Gordon Dunsire, RSC Technical Team Liaison Officer
Paper for discussion at April 2020 Asynchronous RSC Meeting
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agenda ALA2012 ALA2013 ALA2014 ALA2015 ALA2016 ALA proposal Annual 2012 Annual 2013 Annual 2014 Annual 2015 Behrens Bourassa British Library Canadian Committee on Cataloguing Chair's report corporate bodies Dunsire Glennan Iseminger JSC JSC rep Lapka Library of Congress McGrath Midwinter 2012 Midwinter 2013 Midwinter 2014 Midwinter 2016 minutes music Music Working Group (JSC) Myers NARDAC OLAC PCC RDA Rendall Reser response Robare Rolla RSC Shrader SnyderLinks
I agree with the movement of several tools, such as the books of the Bible, to the area of local community tools, which addresses the question of Anglo-Saxon biases. I agree as well with the reformulation of the headings for Latin and other scripts, correcting the amalgamation of language, script and alphabet, and clarifying the headings by correct use of each of those words.
Regarding the abbreviations, it’s certainly possible I’ve missed something but I am unable to find any instructions in the Beta version to actually *use* abbreviations for anything at all. We’ve been talking about eliminating the abbreviations for years now. How about, instead of tidying up and moving the abbreviations list somewhere else, we bite the bullet and just get rid of them once and for all? We’re going to undergo plenty of upheaval implementing Beta anyway, why not just add this one more (very useful) bit of change?
Could clarification be added to the text about the interaction of these community vocabularies, different RDA constituent communities (linguistic, national, or other) and how these community vocabularies will display? For example, will all these community vocabularies be visible to all users, or are we anticipating only displaying those vocabularies that a user wishes to see based on their user community, Toolkit user profile, metadata application profile (e.g. PCC vs. RBMS), etc.?
I agree with Bob. Abbreviations are a holdover from the days when when we had limited numbers of bytes in a field. It is time to bite the bullet.
Regarding the books of the Bible list, at least the English list, I fail to see its use any more. Every single book in that list has been established in the NACO authority file, the vocabulary encoding scheme of record for the English-speaking world, and so I’m not sure why we need the list in RDA. Is anybody actually going to refer to it? Or is it just wasted space? (A similar thing could be said of the medium of performance list, since the PCC world, anyway, uses LCMPT).
Comments from AALL:
Comment 1. I am very much in favor of implementing a community area in the RDA Toolkit, and the associated mitigation of Anglo-American bias in the cataloging instructions.
Comment 2. One larger-context comment: At ALAMW in Philly, we heard that there was [an] effort by LC to close down Romanization tables. But there was also a specific effort to showcase what is required in machines to render order in search queries that need something like anchored results. Plus, we need Romanization for cutters. My main point is that I want to make sure a noble RDA effort to go international does not forsake the aspects of the machine that require certain aspects to be rigidly ordered. I will assume the list function on the website is simply that, a list function of various potential local vocabularies. If that is the case, then the change should work perfectly fine.
I am in favor of moving collective titles and gender to be local vocabularies instead of part of core RDA; this would be a great step in removing bias, making the toolkit more customizable, and (since these are commonly used terms) normalize use of local/community vocabularies.
I agree with Bob Maxwell on books of the Bible — it could be a community vocabulary, but seems more appropriate to refer to the authority file (where the established forms of other specific works are).