[Koha-devel] RDA and Koha - where we are and HOW do we get ready

[dschust1 at tx.rr.com]

The final report for RDA will be out in the spring and RDA records are already being created and loaded into OCLC that Koha libraries are trying to use.  Library of Congress will most likely adopt and start cataloging next year in RDA format - my personal suspicion.

FRBR has been out for 10 years and WE(librarians) have not made much of a concerted effort to make that work I believe because we(librarians) didn’t know what RDA was going to do.

This might be a project that we all(librarians and programmers) need to figure out what needs to be done - create a committee and spec out the work and we all pay to have the work done.  What I hear from vendors is Until LIBRARIANS can tell the vendor what the LIBRARIANS/USERS WANT/NEED vendors don't know where to begin.
 
There is a LOT of coding that needs to be done not only for bibliographic items but for Authorities to work right not to mention the RDA changes to Authorities.  I've seen lots of discussion around Authority work and I would hate to see a library do authority programming NOT based on RDA specs at this point.

Joy M. Banks Catalog Librarian came up with these starting points for Koha and RDA
- The system needs to be able to uniformly display both the GMDs that are in current AACR2 records and the new 3xx fields that RDA would implement to replace GMDs (this is a big one since I don’t know about anyone else, but we have no intention of going back to update all of our AACR2 records to RDA)
- The system needs to take into account a new FRBR model that will both serve the needs of patrons who wish to find every manifestation of a particular work and also those who wish to see specific manifestations
- The system needs to be able to perform global updating for authorities so that changes made to authority records will be automatically applied to the bibliographic records to which they are attached
- Any development with authorities and display also needs to take into account what will soon be a proliferation of $e’s in 1xx and 7xx fields (this one is fuzzier for me… I’m not quite sure if I’ve captured this change). These subfields should only affect the bibliographic records, not the authorized forms of the headings.

She also suggested this:
Mac Elrod has developed a kind of cheat sheet (http://slc.bc.ca/cheats/aacr22rda.htm) that highlights some of the major RDA changes. It’s from September, but at least it’s something that we can consider.

So where do we start and begin working on this?  I believe Ian touched the tip of the iceberg during KohaCon10 in this regard.

I'd love to start the dialog and see where it NEEDS to go.

David Schuster
Plano ISD