Confusion about RDA & FRBR
Monday, October 1, 2007
Dear Donna,
These are good questions. I will try to clarify things a little mainly
about your first question: "Isn't RDA a replacement for AACR2 which is
chiefly a guideline or standard for bibliographic description?"
As it name suggests, when completed RDA inrtends to be a standard for
both description and access. So far I believe it has dealt only with
description. "Access" will, I hope, specify standardization of forms of names of
entities (persons, families, geographic and coporate bodies and titles) so that
access will bring together all instances of any entity though its name may vary
on different items, e.g., Mark Twain and Sam Clemens. It may even provide
for access to all instances of an entity whose name appears in different
writing systems on different items, e.g., Mark Twain in Cyrillic, Chinese, Arabic
and other scripts--this would be a boon to those familiar and seeking items in
other scripts who are more familiar with other scripts than to their
cataloger supplied romanized approximations. Or RDA may succumb to the lure of being
"Anglo-American" and perpetuate the preference for only having romanized
access points.
In its desire to appeal beyond the library audience RDA may attempt to
straddle the important (IMO)distinction between "bibiographic" and
"cataloging". While the terms overlap a catalog aims to lead to an item which exists
(physically or electronically) in a collection but a bibliography only asserts
that an item exists (or once did) somewhere. In addition a catalog is
dynamic--it aims to reflect the changes (additions and deletions) to a collection
while most bibliographies are static once they are issued.
I believe FRBR includes subject access which AACR doesn't and RDA
probably will not. Or both only incidentaly when the entities for which the rules
for access (persons, geographic and corporate bodies and titles) are defined
also apply when the same entity is the subject of a work--the subject
heading for the biography of a person is the usually the same as the access point
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